It is naïve to imagine that a militarized police will confine itself to surgical strikes in crime-ridden areas. The “battlefield” created by a culture of comprehensive anxiety will tend toward the same ubiquity at home as it has abroad in the so-called war on terror. If it’s not a drug raid gone wrong, it’s an act of swatting—triggered, perhaps, by angry losers seeking entertaining revenge against online opponents who beat them at—yep—war games.

If it’s not that, it’s credit card fraud.

This is only the beginning of the twisted logic of military policing. In a further bitter irony, the rise of the warrior cop feeds every paranoid inclination of our armed citizen-survivalists, which encourages, of course, yet more militarization.

Yet one does not have to don a tinfoil hat to connect the Founders’ warnings about standing armies to the threat posed by militarized police forces today.