I collect NFA firearms. I have had many transfer and registration forms signed by the sheriff, and I always assumed there was some record of those forms kept by the sheriff's office. With those, they could potentially determine that I was "heavily armed" with "military-style weapons," thus necessitating a SWAT team dynamic entry at 2:00 AM. When the door's bashed in and flash bangs are going off, nothing good would come of that.
I can only thank God that didn't happen.
But the fact that they can get a signed search warrant, with no more investigative effort done than to take the word of some out of state bounty hunters, not even taking the time to cross-reference my address with the latest phone book or property tax records, should frighten anyone.
There are some suspicious inconsistencies in Barry Cooper’s story. He says that the Odessa “narcotics unit” arrived to find his attorney waiting in the house. However, the YouTube video shows the house being searched by three uniformed street cops armed with pistols (hardly a narcotics unit or SWAT team). The house is also obviously unoccupied at the time of the search (maybe the attorney showed up later?). These little lies could just be intended to make the story more dramatic, but they make me question Cooper’s credibility. According to the city website, Odessa has just 170 cops, and I find it difficult to believe that they would spend each night imaging their entire town via FLIR so that they could raid this house “less than 24 hours” after “the trap was set.”
Of course, if any Odessa officer lied in their search warrant affidavit, they should be prosecuted. But what if a neighbor saw out-of-state vehicles in the driveway, surveillance equipment and grow lights being installed, and aluminum foil being layered over the windows and decided to call it in? Just because the KopBusters crew faked their drug house doesn’t mean the search warrant was obtained illegally. I don’t want to be suckered into becoming part of the war on the war on crime before more of the facts come out.