David McElroy

We live in a crazy and scary world when you have to be worried about a salt with a deadly weapon almost everywhere you go.

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With apologies to the men who drafted and adopted the U.S. Constitution, I have to point out something that’s not especially popular: There’s no such person or entity as “We the People.”

I frequently see political groups — from every orientation — claim to be “We the People.” Democrats used it to attack the Bush administration. Republicans use it now to attack the Obama administration. (The Tea Party groups seem to especially love the phrase.) Libertarians and various fringe groups do it at times, too.

In all cases, these groups are trying to claim that their views are the legitimate will of “the people.” The problem is that “the people” don’t speak with one voice. For instance, activists demanding gay marriage in the name of “We the People” have a very different thing to say than a religious group demanding recognition of the traditional definition of marriage, even though they also claim to speak for “We the People.”

There isn’t one big collective voice of “the people” speaking. There wasn’t one when the Constitution was adopted. There’s no such thing as a collective will — and there’s no moral way to impose One True Way on everybody in the name of “We the People.”

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It was a pretty typical Saturday afternoon in Aurora, Colo. People were bustling around town going about their business. For about 40 unlucky people, though, the next two hours were going to be anything but typical.

Someone robbed a Wells Fargo bank in Aurora. Police say they received word that the suspect was almost certainly in a car at a particular intersection. They didn’t have a description of the suspect. They didn’t know if it was a man or woman or what race the suspect was. They knew nothing, but they said afterwards that it was a “virtual certainty” that the suspect was somewhere at that intersection.

What the Aurora police did next makes it clear that they’ve never heard of the Fourth Amendment and have no respect for innocent people.

Police quickly blocked the intersection from all sides. I’ve heard differing reports on the number of cars in the intersection, but it was in the neighborhood of 20 to 25 vehicles. Even though police had no reasonable suspicion of any particular person or vehicle, they handcuffed every single adult in every single one of those cars. It was about 40 people. You can see from the picture above that they went in with guns ready to blow the heads off of these innocent people. Doesn’t that kid look like a bank robber?

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