Brooklyn cops mess up pot lab operation bust, lose suspect to suicide.

OK, as I understand this one: the cops suspected that there was a marijuana grow lab in a Brooklyn maraschino cherry company, but couldn’t get proof.  So they used an EPA complaint to get into the place, and then did the Hey! Do I smell POT? maneuver.  After a few hours of this, the owner of the place politely excused himself, went into his private bathroom, and shot himself in the head.

Man, there’s something in there for everybody to get angry about, huh? The pro-pot people are going to be upset about the fact that the grow lab had to be illegal in the first place. The libertarians and small-government folks can focus on the use of a convenient piece of government paper to get the cops somewhere they can go do what they REALLY wanted to do.  And here’s a point for the people who aren’t fretting over the first two: why the heck didn’t the cops secure the area and/or the owner properly? Once it was clear that the man was going to be arrested, the police should have made sure that he didn’t have, you know, access to a firearm and an opportunity to use it. Because ‘suicide in a bathroom’ isn’t the most horrible ending to that particular story.  It’s not even close.

Not the NYPD’s finest moment, that.

Hey, here’s what’s going to be the false equivalence argument on the Brooklyn cop shooting.

Before we go any further: @lee_ritz isn’t the one making the false equivalence: she’s merely the one pointing it out.

I’m already seeing people – who, hopefully, are internally a little sick to their stomachs for having to make this argument – try the time-honored tradition of appealing to the very better nature of the Right that the Left routinely denies, every single day. Those people can do us all a favor, actually: they can frankly shut up and instead try to think about why they’ve placed themselves in this awful head-space right now. That’d be marvelous, thanks.

Moe Lane