When faced with an attacker or an emergency, the official viewpoint commonly asserts that you should call 911. Defending yourself or taking independent action in an emergency has been known to get people arrested. These kinds of things are supposed to be left to experts and persons in authority.

17-year-old Adrainne Ledesma of Lincoln Park, Michigan found her father, recovering from recent brain surgery, collapsed and having a seizure on the kitchen floor. She dialed 911.

Emotionally wrought, and clearly not the best brought up young lady, she grew frustrated when 911 failed to answer, and when her second call was finally, after an interval, picked up, exclaimed, “What the f**?”

The 911 dispatcher, one Sergeant Robert McFarland, was far more concerned with making sure the caller spoke to him politely than inquiring into the reason for her call. When the young lady yelled for a f****** ambulance, McFarland simply hung up on her.

Three more calls took a similar form, and when young Adrianne finally gave up and ran in person to a nearby police station seeking assistance, she found that McFarland had already alerted them, and she was arrested for “disorderly conduct.”

7 Action News 4:10 video

As we rely more on more upon centralized systems for our fundamental needs, we are going to find that the operation of remote and impersonal systems has a tendency to prioritize the convenience, and even the amour propre, of ordinary, and sometimes pompous and self-infatuated, human beings more concerned with their own perquisites and authority than with our problems.

JEFFERSON CITY - Gov. Matt Blunt today issued the following statement on news reports that have exposed plans by U.S. Senator Barack Obama to use Missouri law enforcement to threaten and intimidate his critics.

“St. Louis County Circuit Attorney Bob McCulloch, St. Louis City Circuit Attorney Jennifer Joyce, Jefferson County Sheriff Glenn Boyer, and Obama and the leader of his Missouri campaign Senator Claire McCaskill have attached the stench of police state tactics to the Obama-Biden campaign.

“What Senator Obama and his helpers are doing is scandalous beyond words, the party that claims to be the party of Thomas Jefferson is abusing the justice system and offices of public trust to silence political criticism with threats of prosecution and criminal punishment.

“This abuse of the law for intimidation insults the most sacred principles and ideals of Jefferson. I can think of nothing more offensive to Jefferson’s thinking than using the power of the state to deprive Americans of their civil rights. The only conceivable purpose of Messrs. McCulloch, Obama and the others is to frighten people away from expressing themselves, to chill free and open debate, to suppress support and donations to conservative organizations targeted by this anti-civil rights, to strangle criticism of Mr. Obama, to suppress ads about his support of higher taxes, and to choke out criticism on television, radio, the Internet, blogs, e-mail and daily conversation about the election.

“Barack Obama needs to grow up. Leftist blogs and others in the press constantly say false things about me and my family. Usually, we ignore false and scurrilous accusations because the purveyors have no credibility. When necessary, we refute them. Enlisting Missouri law enforcement to intimidate people and kill free debate is reminiscent of the Sedition Acts – not a free society.”

Hat tip to Daniel Lowenstein.

Jerome Tuccile reports how the arcane complexities of state firearm regulations can be selectively enforced by local officials to punish a critic.

Prolific writer Peter Manso, author of, among other books, biographies of Norman Mailer and Marlon Brando, has been indicted on a dozen firearms charges by a Massachusetts grand jury and faces years in prison.

Did he brandish a gun in public? Threaten a neighbor with a drive-by shooting?

No, the guns were all stored, quite securely, in his locked and alarmed home. In fact, police discovered the weapons only when they responded to a burglar alarm while the writer was away. Either the guns were in plain view—evidence that Manso expected no legal trouble for their possession—or else, as Manso’s attorney alleges, “Truro police searched Manso’s house illegally while responding to the alarm.” ...

The main problem seems to be that Manso’s Firearms Identification Card expired after the passage of new legislation in 1998—previously, FIDs lasted a lifetime; now they expire every six years. The new law has caused endless problems in the Bay State, since authorities have not been very effective about informing gun owners of the change. ...

Manso claims that he’s been maliciously targeted by the police because of his controversial work on a new book that casts a skeptical look at the work of local authorities in investigating the murder of a writer named Christa Worthington.

Boston Globe