Boston As Baghdad

American Scofflaw

I kid you not. This is the reasoning used by the FBI. The cops need automatic weapons to respond if the city falls victim to a Mumbai-like terror attack. It’s more likely Boston will get hit by a hurricane, but you don’t see the government building levees and boarding up windows. A terror attack launched against Boston figures pretty low on the probability chart.

“Warren Bamford, the special agent in charge of the FBI in Boston, said Tuesday that he is baffled by opposition to a proposal to give some neighborhood police officers the semiautomatic weapons,” reports the Associated Press. “In May, Boston Mayor Tom Menino criticized a proposal to arm up to 200 officers with M-16s that the police department had ordered from the U.S. military. Menino said only specially trained units should have the guns.”

Menino, after all, has to face the wrath of citizens who will naturally resent the cops walking around as if Boston is Baghdad.

The FBI is merely playing its assigned role. From the Pentagon to the Department of Homeland Security to the FBI, the government is on the fast track to turn the country into a police state from sea to shining sea. A major part of that effort is the militarization of the police, a process already well along.

Let’s hand it to Boston Mayor Tom Menino — he didn’t buy into the FBI’s malarkey about a terrorist event that will probably never happen.