Which rules violated? Rather, how many?

Shooters regularly pass opinions on negligent discharges they hear about in the media. Which of Cooper's Four Rules of firearm safety were violated in such-and-such event? This is no Monday-morning quarterbacking, it's a reminder to gun owners of their responsibilities and the risks they face.

Now that Uncle Radley has drawn widespread attention to the militarization of police, and the excessive use of dynamic entries, by the now-famous video, perhaps it's time for these entries to receive similar scrutiny against a set of rules that allow us to judge (yes, judge: to sit in judgment of, to criticize, to pass opinion on) the actions of police officers.

The acts of police must face scrutiny just as the acts of mayors, presidents, senators, or representatives. They act on our behalf. To those who complain that mere civilians cannot presume to judge the actions of SWAT officers because have not walked in their boots, I call bullshit. If we cannot evaluate the actions of those who claim to serve us, we cannot determine whether they are serving us at all, and we cannot determine whether they are breaking laws themselves. The role of servant and served would be reversed.

To judge their actions, we need a standard. It was Say Uncle or James Rummel (I can't remember) who pointed me to Sir Robert Peel's (or Mayne's) principles of policing.

So, gentle readers: which principles of police conduct were violated in the Columbia raid? For the moment let's convene on Peel's version of the principles.

Note: whether the dad was a dope-dealing scumbag is not relevant. Don't address it. The rules aren't about him.

another use for advanced airships

I didn't bother to follow the link on Instapundit this evening about "cellphones for Cuba." My imagination, though, suggested that sending piles of discarded functioning mobile phones to Cuba to encourage freedom wouldn't help the cause if Raoul kept his thumbs tightly on the mobile phone carriers. Florida is a bit too far to give good bars to those phones.

But if Hermanos al Rescate commissioned an airship with cellular equipment aboard, using tight directional antennae---gain---and kept that ship in the air for days at a time, constantly moving but keeping those beams trained on the island, the phones might work in spite of Raoul's jammers.

But I think another country needs internet bandwidth out to the rest of the world a hell of a lot worse than Cuba.

Iran. The airships could run up and down the Iraqi border, and over the Persian Gulf coasts. Sadly the beams would not reach Tehran.

Seems that we should be dropping HF radios into the country so the horror stories can get out and the dissidents can coordinate.