Well, this is just a little bit scary:
WASHINGTON -- The last 25 years have seen a 1,300 percent increase in the number of paramilitary raids on American homes. The vast majority of these are to serve routine drug warrants, including for offenses as trivial as marijuana possession, according to a just-released study by the Cato Institute.
"These raids, 40,000 per year by one estimate, are needlessly subjecting nonviolent drug offenders, bystanders, and wrongly targeted civilians to the terror of having their homes invaded while they're sleeping," writes Cato policy analyst Radley Balko, "usually by teams of heavily-armed paramilitary units dressed not as peace officers, but as soldiers."
40,000 a year? No kidding it's overkill. The report has an appendix of 150 examples of documented botched raids. And there's this:
Balko has found more than three dozen examples of completely innocent people killed in mistaken raids, 20 cases of nonviolent offenders who've been killed, and more than a dozen cases of police officers killed by suspects or mistakenly targeted civilians who thought the police were criminal intruders.
Yeah, those Second Amendment nuts, they're paranoid, all right.
