Andre's Executive Order

For progressives, open carry activism is disgusting; It's everything we don't like about gun ownership. This movement takes the right to bear arms and walks around shoving it people's faces, scaring them half to death, and setting police nerves on edge as regular citizens brandish everything from pistols to semi-automatic rifles in combat styles. With thirty states allowing open carry without a license, these activists often garner very little confidence in the judgment or control that supporters of gun rights insist is the standard among legal gun owners and seem to be nothing short of a powder keg just waiting for the right match to go off. Maybe these guys are well disciplined and full trained with their firearms able to discern friend from foe quickly in the advent of a violent altercation and respond with necessary, accurate force to end the situation quickly and decisively saving lives. ...or maybe they think guns are really cool, play a lot of Call of Duty, lo...

Ferguson, MO Generally speaking, we don't like to think of the police as the bad guy. These are the people who keep the peace. They patrol our neighborhoods, and come from our communities. We have friends or relatives on the force and the tradition is a proud one in America as being part of the great enterprise that is our democracy. Lurking behind these ideals is another more practical reason; These are the people responsible for our safety from crime, anarchy, and the loss of our property and even our lives. If we can't trust them, the world becomes a very scary place. But to presume them to be infallible executors of our safety is to become willfully blind to the corruption, poor judgment, and willful abuse that tend to lurk like a misty smoke around the accumulation of power over other people. The police have a lot of that power, and because of that they are a group from which we should be willing to demand a much higher level of accountability and be much more wi...

Americans hate shades of grey. On August 9th, Michael Brown, a black teenager in Ferguson, Missouri was shot and killed by police outside a convenience store. By now, if you're the kind of person who reads blogs like mine, you already know this and know what happened afterwards: we have riots. We have looting. We have protests. We have an ongoing and growing police presence involving everything from snipers to tanks to tear gas. We have a community enraged and law enforcement put in a horrible place of being asked to use violence to contain their neighbors. The American public has done what it does best; jumped to conclusions. The tweets and posts about it have been jarring to read. Some folks jump to the defense of the police depending on what isn't or can't be known as the buffer between the facts and the response. Others rush to Michael's defense without the slightest knowledge of what may have transpired. They are ready to see the police officers terminated or b...