And I agree. There are only criminals regardless of what they did. They don't deserve a title of any kind. There are people who obey the law and people who break them.


More photos of the guns of the LEO in Boston. Finally saw a guy's AR that doesn't look like the others. It's got a Magpul stock and is an SBR. Some 700s, a couple UMPs and an 870

http://www.guns.com/2013/04/17/the-h...ton-25-photos/

Man, I didn't going gallavanting the mountains of Afghanistan, give up a year of my life, a portion of my hearing, a chunk of knee, and see a guy a grew up playing baseball with buy it just to see this in America.

Jesus, I'm sorry, but I will never get use to seeing cops dressed like D-Boys.

Damn it, in a way, when even your local beat cop has a UMP-45, the terrorists have already won.

Bastards.

I don't understand. You don't like the idea of cops being adequately armed or geared up for all possibilities?

No, not saying that at all. But, what I'm saying is that maybe the full on ACUs and Mutli-Cams aren't necessary.

Well prepared and well armned police=fine.
Militarized police=bad.

Yeah, Multi-cam seemed a bit much. Whatever happened to good old fashioned navy blue?

At least the armored Humvees they had didn't have machine guns mounted.

I see no problem with police wearing camouflage, as there are instances where they will be operating in wide open rural areas (in the case of non metro police departments anyway) where it is beneficial not to be seen by the bad guys. A couple of years ago in England there was a big man hunt for a guy who had shot three people including a police officer, and armed officers were called in from a load of different police forces to help with the search, including me. I didn't feel particularly stealthy creeping along in green woodland wearing all black with a black/white chequered band around my baseball cap. I would have given anything to be allowed to wear my old DPMs that day.

To be fair though, I don't know what advantage anyone is getting out of wearing UCP, that seems a bit show-off-ish. Part of it might be the fact that by and large tactical equipment is more readily available in military patterns though. Also about the UMPs, it's not like they carry those around every day is it? This was an exceptional situation that led to them being more heavily armed than they would normally be, which is fair enough.

As for the charges, "one count of using and conspiring to use an improvised explosive device against persons and property within the United States resulting in death and one count of malicious destruction of property by means of an explosive device resulting in death." These are federal charges, so he could be facing the needle.

If I were his lawyer, I'd try to pin most of the blame on the older brother, saying that he was just an accomplice, and try to get the death penalty off the table.

I was really surprised when I heard that the older brother had a wife and kid. Who does this sort of thing with a family to support? That poor kid will have to live with the fact that her father was a terrorist.

Ask the suicide bombers. A lot of them most likely had wives and kids as well.

Just because a criminal had raised a family doesn't excuse or change the effect of what was done, a crime. You know who else had family? The people that died in the explosion, the people who were maimed by the bomb.

So a bunch of sources are now reporting that one of the weapons used was an "M4 carbine", and that the police recovered it from the boat where Dhozkar was holed up. I can almost guarantee that this is a mistake and that he wasn't using a mil-spec weapon, but it is starting to sound as though they had an AR-15 of some type.

It's also been reported that they had a "BB gun" of some kind. I'm guessing that it was probably an airsoft version of some tacticool weapon (like an FN SCAR) that would have been too expensive for them to afford. They probably carried it to give the impression that they were better-armed than they actually were.

But, again, we will have to wait and see.

I don't think he's saying it excuses what was done; only that it makes the guy's motives more esoteric. Seriously, why would you ever think Funkychinaman wanted to excuse these guys?


I dunno, the assortment of camo patterns I am seeing don't really seem appropriate for the terrain. When I lived in NC, our local SERT tactical team wore woodland camo BDUs, but only while serving warrants outside of town (i.e. when busting weed and meth dealers operating in houses deep within the woods). What we have in the case of Boston are guys wearing camo patterns appropriate for woodland terrain even though they are chasing suspects in an urban area. It seems unnecessary, and comes across as an attempt to look more badass than they are.

Not sure it demonstrates that our police forces are becoming "militarized", though. SWAT teams have always shared equipment and weapons with SOF (since that's what most of them were before they re-joined the civilian world). Until SWAT teams start using integrated network ops to gather intel on suspects (infringing on electronic privacy), and then start raiding said suspects' homes with shoot-to-kill orders, I don't see any reason to be concerned about their (slightly gratuitous) use of military camouflage uniforms. "Militarization" is just not a word I use so lightly.