Democrats Again Try To Stop The Transfer Of Weapons Of War To Local Police Officers

Democrats have introduced an amendment to the annual military proposal bill that would limit the transfer of weapons of war to local police departments. The 1033 Program allows for the transfer of surplus military gear to police departments, but this has only resulted in the militarization of police, allowing them to become more violent and dangerous. Ring of Fire's Farron Cousins explains what's happening and why Democrats deserve a lot of credit for continuing to push for limits to the 1033 Program.

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*This transcript was generated by a third-party transcription software company, so please excuse any typos.

A pair of Democrats in the House of Representatives have introduced an amendment to the 2022 national defense authorization act budget that is essentially aiming to cut down, I guess you'd call it, on the 1033 program. And if you're not familiar with it, the 1033 program is the program in the United States that allows for surplus or outdated military equipment to make its way from the Pentagon to local police departments across the country. This program has been in place for many, many years. It was actually scaled back during the Obama years after the Ferguson protests. And then of course, Trump came along, rescinded all the Obama restrictions, put the thing back on steroids and next thing you knew, we had rocket launchers in the hands of idiot, Gomer Pyle type police officers. And this new amendment does the following.

This is according to the Hill. The amendment would prohibit the Pentagon from sending police departments controlled firearms, ammunition, bayonets, grenade launchers, grenades, including stun and flash bang grenades, explosives, certain controlled vehicles, including mine resistant vehicles, armored or weaponized drones, combat configured or combat coded aircraft, silencers and long range acoustic devices. Yes, these are literally all weapons of war. Okay. This is what we use when we're overseas fighting the bad guys, right. Even though it's getting harder to define exactly what a bad guy is, but that's a conversation for another day. There is no reason for Andy Griffith out here to need a friggin grenade launcher. There's no reason for him to need a combat ready drone. This is pure insanity here in the United States and the reason programs like this even exist is because of the defense contractor industry.

If they can convince the Pentagon that, oh, hey, I see you got this model of drone. Well, you know, that's about two years old. We got a new one that's got, you know, a cool pinstripe down the side and you probably want the newer version, right? It's like every year when the phone companies come out with a new phone, you know, oh, there's a couple slight tweaks. There's real no difference between them. But you got to have the newest and latest model. And that's what the defense industry sells to the Pentagon. So the Pentagon says, okay, but we spent billions on this crap here, where do we put it? And that's where the 1033 program came from because then the Pentagon gets to say, okay, well we can give this to local police departments and then we don't have it anymore. And so therefore that justifies us spending another couple billion dollars on the latest cool toys to go over there, wherever there may be, and kill people.

That's the point of the program. And because of our military industrial complex here in the United States and the money obviously flowing from the defense industry to politicians, the cycle just continues. So police departments get weapons that they're not trained how to use and that's probably the most important part. They don't know how to use these things. They're not trained in it. They just get them and people die. Sometimes the police officers die, again, because they don't know how to properly use them.