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IPFS News Link • Martial Law

What Is the Threshold for Martial Law?

• http://blog.independent.org, By Anthony Gregory
 One brother is dead and the other on the lam. And so the police have locked down Boston, Cambridge, Belmont, and Watertown. There are tanks and heavily armed officers all over the streets. They go door to door, without warrants, searching for the suspect.

The crime of April 15 was unspeakable. The bombers murdered three people, including an eight-year-old boy, and injured two hundred more, many of them maimed and missing limbs. An atrocity like this, of course, represents everything civilization must oppose.

I cannot help but wonder what the standard is that triggers the martial-law response we’re seeing in New England. If these bombers had murdered three but not caused as many injuries—if the sheer terror of their crime had not reached this magnitude—would Boston look like a totalitarian state right now? What if the police needed to find a serial killer? Or what if a city was home to lots of violent crime in general?

1 Comments in Response to

Comment by Dennis Treybil
Entered on:

 As I read the Constitution, I think if a riot has occurred or is on-going, that is the threshold for Martial Law.  Or if an actual invasion from without is on-going, that is another.  If Martial Law is not invoked in areas during such events, government has abdicated its Constitutional obligations.

If thuh guvahmint tries to get out in front of such events, it runs the risk of turning a perfectly normal situation into a disaster.

Think of various "medical alerts".  The whole world is placed in a state of alarm because of a "pandemic" in which 6 deaths have occurred.  This is craziness.

Likewise, an isolated event such as the Boston Marathon bombing is used as an excuse to do unnecessary and ineffective things that chafe the peoples' native sense of justice.

First do no harm.

RE-acting to an over-the-threshold event allows the government to respond with some hope of not making things worse. 

Being PRO-active  (acting in the name of prevention) before a widely-recognized threshold is broken makes the government look bad.  And maybe it just looks bad.  And maybe it really really is bad.

DC Treybil

 



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