More on Shooting the Rioters

In the previous post I called for the police to shoot rioters who use firebombs against the police, or who set fire to occupied buildings. John Hawkins at Right Wing News agrees, although he goes much further.

Many people think of defense of a nation as the very first job of government, but there’s actually an even more basic task that the government has to fulfill: Maintaining order.

In extraordinary situations, when you have widespread breakdowns of public order and shops are being looted, cars are being burned, rocks and bottles are being thrown at police, and civilians are being murdered in the street, if the government can’t quickly re-establish order using normal means, it’s completely justified in using lethal violence to do it

I think lethal police response should be more selective, but I agree with his view of the responsibility of government. And he makes a key point.

you may say this is unfair to thugs in the street, but we should be much more worried about the lives of innocent people who are being assaulted and property owners whose livelihoods are being unfairly destroyed.

Exactly. This attitude tends to separate the right and the left, and is one of the many reasons I will always be on the right. When I look at a riot, my sympathy is with the people being assaulted, the owners of the cars being destroyed, the families left homeless when their buildings burn, the shopkeepers who are robbed, and all the other victims. The last thing I worry about are the feelings and rights of the scum doing the rioting.