Tinker Tailor Soldier Cop

"Police departments should not be using weapons built for the military on civilian protesters," said Witold Walczak, legal director of the ACLU of Pennsylvania "As this case shows, the LRAD cannot be controlled to prevent serious harm to innocent bystanders. Collateral harm to innocents may be justifiable in wartime, but not to quell protesters who overturned a couple of trash dumpsters."

-ACLU report quoted by James Wolcott

Reason number one gazillion and one whyIamnotalibertarian: the conviction that you can keep the cops out of the army's arsenal. Oy ya yoy. The relentless division of the world into gaggles of citizen-subjects and the idea that Brutalizing Their Own People is a category that permits you, whomever you are, to go in there and brutalize them instead and for their own good are theneat corollaries.  Remember the old NRA adage: guns don't kill people, people kill people?  It's true!  But it too has an attendant truth, which is that weapons do not cease to be effective when pointed at the wrong people.  If you concede that sound weapons may exist, may be permitted to exist, then sorry, but you must also accept and understand that they may one day be used against you, just as satellites and drones peer through your curtains as readily as they peer through the curtains of Kabul, just as the Total Information Awareness machine minds read your blog as happily as Vladimir Putin's tumblr.  The agents of state power cannot be prevented from availing themselves of the tools of state power through any application of the clever little fictions called laws.  The law itself is an instrument of state power as surely as guns and nuclear bombs.  You will often hear civil libertarian types say that the police should not act like soldiers.  Why not?  They are.