The police are not necessarily our allies in the fight to support Second Amendment rights

Take, for example, San Diego Police Chief William Landsdowne.

Lansdowne suggested the Newtown, Conn., massacre may have undercut the gun lobby’s power and opened the door for new gun control legislation. “We broke the NRA,” Lansdowne boasted in an off camera portion of an interview with San Diego 6 and the Washington Guardian. When asked to expound, he demurred [Yeah, I bet he did, because he was just showing his tail - Paco].

The White House plans to unveil its regulatory plan Wednesday for tightening gun controls, and Lansdowne threw his support behind President Barack Obama.

"I could not be more supportive of the president for taking the position he has," he told KPBS in a separate interview. "I think it's courageous with the politics involved in this process. But I think it's going to eventually make the country safer and certainly safer for my officers that have to respond to these calls [emphasis mine - Paco]."

There is a certain type of policeman - Britain is rife with them, as are many of our own big cities - who is really just a bureaucrat in uniform, more concerned with making his own life easier than in living up to the sometimes difficult, messy challenges of upholding the law in a genuinely free society - after all, a society that is cowed is easier to police, and there is no population more cowed than one that is disarmed. Not all policemen - perhaps only a minority - share Landsdowne's smug, self-serving attitude. But it's a factor that has to be borne in mind in case the left's gun-control mania ever gets real traction.