Josh Marshall gets it exactly right on the latest poll that shows that 79 percent of Americans disagree with drone strikes on suspected terrorists within the United States.
In other words, we now know that an overwhelming majority of Americans oppose a preposterous idea that no one had ever considered doing. Set aside any constitutional or moral questions about counter-terrorism or the rights of US citizens, the whole point of using drones is to mount attacks in areas where you have no pervasive and secure control over the ground — something that the US has everywhere inside the United States. [...]
A real question is whether police and SWAT teams should use militarized tactics in raids within the US. That’s a real question. Whether we think drone attacks inside the US are alright or not is a silly one.
The whole thing confirms my belief that in most cases the ‘drone issue’ is a distraction from actual civil liberties or war powers questions.
At no point did the administration assert that they have the legal authority or the intention of using drones to target citizens within the United States outside of extreme cases such as another 9/11 or another Pearl Harbor, but because of the hyperbolic and irresponsible rhetoric of certain individuals on the Left, people were lead to believe that they had.
Which brings me to my next point
Local authorities use increasingly militarized tactics because the suspects they may be asked to apprehend or subdue are using increasingly militarized hardware. We can’t expect police departments to not prepare themselves accordingly while more than 300 million guns are in circulation in the country. Because they never know when their next call may involve a crazed gun fetishist who is armed with an arsenal or who seeks refuge in a homemade doomsday bunker
While Fox News is telling viewers that Americans need to arm themselves to thwart operatives from Iran and Syria (really), voices on the Left are feeding the same narrative by telling viewers that they need to watch out for Big Government Drones over their heads.
The scaremongering that leads to a proliferation of weapons and an arms-race between paranoid gun nuts and law enforcement agencies is bipartisan.