Beware Lunatic Fringe Sorts Who Blithely Talk About Murder

Unsurprisingly, they are progressive sorts.  Bearing Arms points to this disturbing argument from a progressive sort about why the government should be "mowing down" people who by their own admission are not serious criminals:

Namely, at what point does the federal government literally go to war with its own citizens? Because we're not talking about bank robbers here, we're talking about (mostly) non-criminal cranks -- scofflaws and political malcontents. So what line has to be crossed in the good old U.S. of A. before we start mowing them down to make our point? Because you can't talk about the Bundy ranch without talking about Ruby Ridge, and Waco.

So here's the political corner into which we've painted ourselves.

Do we have the ATF and BLM agents roll up in armored tanks? Do we use drone strikes? I can see the administration's reluctance to have that confrontation -- after all, it's not as if gun control advocates were flooding the White House switchboard, screaming to 'take them out!' And then we do have the militia types all over the country, just waiting for an excuse to start their own local uprising. [emphasis added]

There are some pretty extreme people out there whose actions are certainly provocative.  But I expect the government to be a bit better behaved than that.  The government has effectively a legal monopoly on initiating violence, and if they can't behave better than a small group of "political malcontents," we might be better with responsible adults in charge.  But notice the progressive willingness to "start mowing them down to make our point"?  This is the same thinking that gave us Mao's Red Guards, the Cheka, the SS, and any number of other progressive thugs who just couldn't wait to get their hands bloody.  Although I suspect that Susie Madrak, the progressive quoted above, would not want to dirty her own hands--she will rely on hired hands to do the dirty work.

People like Susie Madrak are a strong argument for a heavily armed population.