A Virginia police SWAT team
raided a poker game and made off with thousands of dollars. That’s different
from street gangs how?
February 3, 2015 By Daniel
Payne
To the casual observer it
appears that Virginia is run by violent psychopaths. That’s the takeaway from
the recent report of an anti-poker SWAT team raid in Fairfax County, in which
eight assault rifle-sporting police officers moved against ten card-playing
civilians. The police possibly seized more than $200,000 from the game, of
which 40 percent they eventually kept.
There was no indication that
any of the players was armed. As a matter of fact, it appears that a gambler is
more likely to be shot without provocation by the Fairfax Police than the other
way around. The heavy firepower at the Fairfax raid was apparently motivated by
the fact that “at times, illegal weapons are present” at such poker games, and
that “Asian gangs” have allegedly targeted such events in the past. This is,
then, a novel approach to law enforcement: as a matter of policy, Fairfax
police now attempt to rob and steal from people before street gangs get around
to doing it.
It is a mystery why we put up
with this obscene police behavior. Gambling itself is not illegal in Virginia;
it is simply controlled by the state. So the Fairfax police department did not
bust these hapless poker players with guns drawn for doing something truly
immoral and fully outlawed, merely for doing something in a way not approved by
the state legislature. Were gambling actually forbidden in Virginia, then a
crackdown could at least be understood, if not condoned in so paramilitary a
fashion. Yet Virginia’s stance on the matter is not to treat gambling as malum
in se, but rather as an instrumentum regni: our government prefers to funnel
gambling money into its own coffers for its own ends, outlaw the same thing
when it’s done outside of the state’s jurisdiction, and then steal the money of
the poor fellows who happen to get caught.
Local Police Are Not Supposed
to Be Thugs
This is, in other words, a
matter of state-sanctioned greed and opportunism. Gambling is an immensely
profitable business. Like alcohol, a portion of which industry the government
in Virginia also controls with a similar level of violence and incompetence,
gambling is enough of a cash cow that the Commonwealth is reluctant to let
anyone else handle it. This is not because state-controlled lotteries are any
more virtuous or less risky. Indeed, Virginia officials know gambling can be
both addicting and destructive, which is why the state prints gambling
self-help phone numbers on all of its tickets.
Governments control gambling
not to legitimize and sanitize the practice, but to extract as much money from
the citizenry as they possibly can. In the state’s eyes, the fault of the poker
players in Fairfax lay not in betting money on a card game, but in not pouring
money into the state’s bank account while they were doing so.
More than anything, events like
these are a helpful reminder as to why many of us support smaller and
explicitly limited government. Given the choice between more freedoms and
liberties, or empowering a bunch of armor-clad incompetent murderers, it is a
wonder anyone would ever pick the latter. A free people does not deserve to be
governed by thugs and gun-toting lunatics. The Fairfax police department should
be ashamed of itself—and the citizens of Fairfax, and of Virginia generally,
should move quickly to change the sad state of affairs in which a harmless card
game is met with a militarized police response.
Daniel Payne is a senior
contributor at The Federalist. He blogs at Trial of the Century. You can follow
Daniel on Twitter.
