What you are effectively saying is that the liberties of a free citizenry are completely incompatible with an urban existence. I won't argue with you on that one, but that goes back to whether a constitutional argument has any place in the discussion about the Gates incident at all.
I know the vision of the Montana lifestyle is idyllic, but Montana does have police officers in it’s cities.
As for crime in the rural setting, it isn’t non-existent. I grew up on a farm in the 50s. Just down the road from us a man went postal and killed his family and then turned the gun on himself. His closest neighbor was miles away. He lived at least five miles from the closest town. There are property disputes and other things that crop up. You just don’t see the numbers because there aren’t the numbers. The rural population is sparse.
That being said, I think this nation could benefit significantly from disbursing the population away from the current population centers. It would spur self reliance. It would stop the problem of small town depopulation. It could spur a much better lifestyle for many people from the inner cities.
I know the loony left wilderness freaks would go postal, but so what.
It’s certainly an idea worth developing.
I wouldn’t go so far as to say that my comments imply that the liberties of a free citizenry are completely incompatible with an urban existence. Don’t people who live in urban areas deserve to be free from the effects of crime? I would state that my comments advance the theory that ‘criminals’ should not be allowed to do whatever they please. I still believe there is a real benefit to reducing the concentration of people in such small areas.
As for a constitutional argument, there is one to be made, but I’m not convinced the argument to allow citizens to berate an officer trying to do his job, is ever going to be a successful one.
The problem is, the public doesn’t always understand the reasons why officers employ certain tactics. When this officer asked Gates to exit his home, it was for his own safety. It also provided Gates with a degree of safety in that anything that transpired would be visible to the public.
Gates got so angry that ‘he’ was being challenged, that he went postal. I still think we could learn a lot from the police recording from the officer’s open mic.