I was of the opinion that the government ought to ban guns altogether... until I had a kid.
All of this swat stuff with the police has its origin with the War on Drugs that Reagan started (in a non-political way). With Ronald in power military spending exploded and a great deal of the crap they were buying was going to waste. And a greater % of the stuff that was going unused was for population control. In comes Ronnie and devises a war against the social epidemic of the time: drugs.
Once he declared the war he made it possible for the military to pass all this SWAT and military equipment on to police departments. The main problem is that the police were using it for non drug-related cases. In essence, you have police teams doing to the population what was supposed to be done onto a foreign military or, at best, drug dealers.
People have no idea how much real power was taken away from them with the War on Drugs and the Patriot Act. The cops can pretty much walk into your house, beat the shit out of you and take your house if they find enough drugs in there. And there's nothing you can do because their burden of proof bar has been lowered so much that all they need is mere suspicion on their part and the judge looks the other way. Same with unreasonable searches: They can stop you at a light, ask you to let them search your car (again, based on mere suspicion) and if you decline, detain you, take you to the local jail and have you wait for weeks.
If they take the guns away from people that's it, we're over as a country.
