In August 2013 Fairfax County, Virginia police shot John Geer in his doorway, with his hands up, left him to bleed to death where they shot him down for an hour before even trying to render aid, then stonewalled his family for two years, and even now have provided no meaningful information on the incident, even after agreeing to a huge settlement.
Now the police in Alexandria, Virginia have burst in on a man in a military-style raid to deal with a suspected two-bit vagrancy or trespassing charge. And when it turns out that Tom Horton – the victim of the raid – was where he was supposed to be, they glibly and smugly dismissed the error and defended their gross over reaction as perfectly acceptable and, indeed, unremarkable. Nothing to see here, folks.
I am heartily sick of this abuse and I am heartily sick of the hypocrisy on this topic. So many politicians and commentators – and, I suspect, many in Fairfax County – are scandalized by the fact that I might have a rifle with a bayonet lug or some other ostensibly military feature on it in my gun safe, but they sit quiet as a mouse after police burst in on Alex Horton in his own (temporary) residence, guns drawn, in a paramilitary raid; they feel a slow-burning rage at the fact that I can (and do) legally carry a firearm most places I go in Fairfax County, but they say nothing after a police officer guns down poor John Geer at his own home, effectively executing him for the “crime” of throwing a temper tantrum earlier in the day without harming or threatening to harm anyone – and then lies about it, claiming that Geer had made a sudden movement toward his waistband, when all the other witnesses said Geer’s hands were up.
It would only have required one tragic mistake for infantry combat veteran Tom Horton to lose his life in a hideous reenactment of Colonel Troutman’s searing indictment of Sheriff Teasle in First Blood: “Vagrancy wasn’t it? That’s gonna look real good on his grave stone in Arlington …. Killed for vagrancy in Jerkwater, USA” (or, as would have been more accurate in Horton’s case, for suspected vagrancy). Just like it only took one tragic error for John Geer to be executed for disorderly conduct on his own property.
Commentators and politicians railed about U.S. night raids in Afghanistan, an actual war-zone, seeking out actual combatants, but they say nothing about the thousands of paramilitary assaults on our own citizens for the purposes of serving arrest warrants or executing search warrants – and not always search warrants on hardened criminals for weapons and drugs (see the Wisconsin John Doe investigations – now mercifully ended).
My State Senator, Dave Marsden, sponsored an effort to curb the abuse of Civil Asset Forfeiture in the Commonwealth of Virginia in the last legislative session. I was sorry to read in April 15th Daily Press that he had “backed off the effort,” punting it to the State Crime Commission for a study. My question for him, and for every Fairfax County politician, is this: how many innocent poor people are going to have their property seized by the Commonwealth before you do something about it? And – how many Virginians are going to have to endure unnecessary infantry attacks on their homes, before you do something about THAT?
If you’re bothered about the bayonet lug on my AR-15, but you have not addressed THESE problems, your priorities are sorely misplaced.