It's a dangerously right-wing idea to allow private citizens to carry guns because they are not "qualified professionals" like the police, and you never know what can happen when you let just anyone carry a gun. Yet when regular police are essentially decked out in battle dress uniforms and given assault weapons as standard armaments, this is considered a solution, not a sign of a horrible change in the relationship between the public and the government. When an allegedly conservative Republican like Bush attacks due process rights and other liberties, he's a fascist who is going to destroy our democracy, but when a liberal government all but institutes a literal police state in a major city in order to clamp down on violent neighborhoods, it's just a bad judgment call.
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Mike, I kinda liken this to the relationship of people with Congress. You know, "all Congressmen are dogs, but mine is a good guy".
People tend to give a pass to the folks who share their outlook on life, and hate the ones that don't.
As an example, look at the folks who rah-rah'ed Clinton in Bosnia and Kosovo, only to turn around and vehemently denounce Bush for invading Iraq.
Now one could make an argument as to the difference of scale between fighting the Jugs and fighting Iraqis, but the bottom line is that Democrats dislike Bush's warmongering because it was Bush doing the warmongering.
There is a lot of truth to that, but it is a worse hypocrisy when it is tolerated against our own people. The very fact that the political left isn't calling for Mayor Fenty's head over what is going on in D.C. proves to me that there is a significant element of the "liberal" left that would tolerate siginificant violence against people and property with just the right federal body politic.