If it isn’t already, don’t be surprised when filming a cop becomes a crime.

I think people believe I’m joking when I suggest that cops should be the only people disallowed from owning firearms. The pretense that cops protect anyone is quickly fading. Cops are not legally obliged to protect anyone. They certainly don’t serve me or anyone else I know. So I can’t help but wonder what exactly they do.

Cops arrive after a crime (sometimes real but more often edictal) and file reports. Sometimes they catch the criminal, sometimes they don’t, sometimes they arrest a series of innocent people and sometimes the DA convicts those innocent people. Whatever the outcome, it seems the entire system is supremely inefficient. A police officer is a nice way of saying an uneducated paper pusher.

As crimes continue to become less a matter of one person harming another’s property, police power continues to increase. Just consider that in many states a man cannot injure, much less kill, a home intruder without the DA promptly filing charges. Not only can a cop shoot a restrained man in the back of the head he can constrain the man in the first place with absolutely no repercussion. The balance of power is clearly in the favor of the cop. Cops are given a privileged legal position, why should a society also give them the practical means to enforce their will over the people they are supposedly protecting?

As St. Augustine observed, a pirate is no less a pirate because he styles himself an emperor. Disarming cops and arming everyone else strikes me as the most sensible solution to what ails the legal system. Consider it a sort of jury nullification.