Octopodial Chrome

The American Medical Association—known previously for such absurd positions as opposing gun rights—now wishes to outlaw home births because they are riskier than hospital births. That may or may not be true; I’ll accept that it probably is. But that’s immaterial: free citizens in a free society have the fundamental right to weigh the evidence and make their own choices.

I’m perhaps a bit biased: my youngest brother was delivered by midwives at home and my mother looks back on the experience fondly. Later those same midwives were driven out of business by the local physicians.

If parents wish to have their children at home, that is their business, not mine, not the medical profession’s and definitely not the State’s.

It appears that there is a novel drug-shipping method: ship the drugs to an innocent party, then have them retrieved by the deliveryman. Knowing this was going on, when a package containing 30 pounds of marijuana was addressed to the wife of the mayor of Berwyn Heights, Maryland, the county police did the only logical thing: he got a no-knock warrant, invaded the mayor’s home with a SWAT team, killed the mayor’s two black labs then bound & interrogated the mayor and his mother-in-law for hours. Because just executing a normal warrant would have been crazy: someone like a mayor has nothing to lose and might stage a shoot-out. Or he might flush thirty pounds of dope down the toilet in as many seconds. And of course if they’d executed a normal warrant then the mayor might have tied up his dogs, and what’s point of executing a drug raid if you can’t shoot someone’s pets?

Seriously though—while SWAT teams have a very valuable purpose to serve, this is not one of them. And while it is appropriate in some circumstances to shoot pets (say, if a suspect sets his dogs on one), shooting them as a precautionary measure is hardly called for. And while there are legitimate reasons for no-knock raids, this was not one of them. Besides, if they already know that there’s a false-shipping operation in town, mightn’t they have suspected that might be involved here?