I was watching Nick Junior with my kids in my parents' living room when I saw a police officer walking across the yard. I went out the backdoor, and realized that three more were already roaming around my parents' ten acres of property. I walked up to the police officer that had just arrived.

"Can I help you?" I asked him.

Seeing me in the yard at a distance, the other three deputy sheriffs converged. They explained that they had had a report of shooting and were checking it out. I was more than a little annoyed by this, since my family has owned the property since the 1940's and we target shoot there all the time.

One cop asked for my ID. I informed firmly that Georgia state law did not require me to possess ID on private property, nor to provide it upon request. He, of course, threatened to arrest me for obstructing a police officer. Never mind that my refusal was legal, or that my actions did not constitute obstruction under Georgia law. The situation was quite clear. If I insisted on my rights, I would take a ride to jail. The charge of obstruction wouldn't stick, and, in fact, it was likely that I would be released later with no charges filed at all. That is assuming that the four deputies didn't decide to ‘embellish' the charges with a little creative story-telling. Regardless of how the arrest turned out, I knew that I would definitely miss my Mom's birthday party that evening. Since her party was the whole reason I was up visiting from Florida, I handed over my ID.

My elderly dad drove up on his tractor. At that point, we took turns informing the assembled cops that target shooting on our wooded property was legal. One of the cops begged to differ and threatened to arrest me for discharging a firearm in a residential area. That idea fell apart, when we made it clear that the only residences on the property all belonged to my dad, were populated by my relatives, and that the property itself was zoned agricultural.

The cops began peppering me with questions. They wanted to know what weapon I had been shooting, what my backstop was, how many rounds I had fired, etc. I deflected most of the questions, unwilling to give more information than necessary to people obviously looking to put me in jail. Finally, they gave up trying to figure out a way to arrest me, and left after issuing a series of stern warnings. The fact that my father and I were not awed by their official personages must have seriously grated on their nerves.

Only later did I realize how close I had come to a truly dangerous situation. Had the police arrived fifteen minutes earlier, they would have found me facing away from their avenue of approach while firing a Saiga hunting rifle at a target pinned to an Oak tree. The spot from where I was shooting was 300 yards from the nearest road and in a thick stand of woods. I had hearing protection in my ears that rendered me effectively deaf.

What would have happened had the police arrived at our property, heard shooting, and gone to investigate? After all, when they arrived they had had no compunction about wandering all over our wooded property, so why would they have hesitated if they had actually heard gunshots?

If the cops had walked up behind me from the road while I was shooting, I would never have seen them. I would have been blissfully firing away in the other direction. Would the cops have yelled orders at me to cease firing and put the rifle down? I wouldn't have responded to these instructions, because I wouldn't have heard them. Would they have drawn their own guns while staring at my back? After all, when faced with the awesome threat of an overweight, 40-something dad target shooting on his family's property, you can't be too careful.

Eventually, I would have expended my rounds and turned around to walk back to my dad's home. Can you imagine if I had simply turned around and come face to face with those cops while holding my rifle in a natural carry position?

That is the point where I imagine myself dying.

When the full impact of my possible brush with death hit me, I even imagined how the press report of the incident would read.

A police spokesman today commented on the incident in which four deputy sheriffs killed a Florida man who was shooting on his parents' property. According to the spokesman, the man was illegally firing an assault rifle in a residential area when he was confronted by police. The man refused repeated requests to lay down his rifle, and then turned in an aggressive manner to confront the deputies. The spokesman expressed regret at the man's death, but re-iterated that the deputies had followed all protocols and had already been cleared by an internal investigation. The dead man leaves behind a wife and two children, ages 8 and 5.

Upon reading a story of that type, most people would assume I had it coming. After all, I had been breaking the law and had acted aggressively towards the police! The poor cops, fearing for their lives, had no choice but to kill me. It was clearly self-defense.

As an aside, this simple illustration should make anyone reading this article wary of ever accepting the police account of a shooting at face value.

Of course, it might not have been like that. They might have hit me with a taser from behind. I get to live in that scenario, assuming the taser didn't give me a heart attack . But I would probably have done some kind of jail time, as the police would have needed a justification for assaulting me.

I suppose it is also possible that the police, upon seeing that I was legally target practicing in a wooded area on private property, could have not sought any kind of confrontation at all. Or even better, the police might have decided not to just wander around our property, but instead might have chosen to stop at any of the three occupied residences along their way to inquire what was happening in the woods. If they had done so, then my sister, my parents, my kids, or my niece could have brought them up to speed.

The rosier scenarios are possible, but I don't consider them very likely. I've told this story to quite a few other middle-class white people, and their opinions concur with my own. Holding a semi-auto rifle and accidentally coming face-to-face with four deputy sheriffs is unlikely to end well. What I was doing was perfectly legal. I was on private property with an expectation of privacy. No matter. On hearing this story, people just naturally assume I would have ended up dead.

The police are dangerous.

Once upon a time, this was a fringe opinion. Now, this idea is as main stream as Apple Pie and baseball. Thanks to everything from SWAT raids on the wrong addresses to the ongoing criminalization of everyday actions, many middle class white people think you can unexpectedly run into a life and death confrontation with police at almost any time and almost anywhere.

This attitude shift, away from cops as heroes to cops as potential villains, has been a long time in the making for my generation. Middle class adults in their 30's and early 40's (like me) grew up with a rigidly enforced drinking age. We had cops showing up to check IDs at our college parties. We watched adults who were peacefully enjoying a legal beverage get violently arrested and hauled off to jail. It was obvious that cops weren't there to protect us, so much as to fine us and arrest us. We started out our adult lives with a wall of suspicion concerning the cops. For a lot of us, this wall has only gotten higher over time.

As we got older, we suffered through the change from peace officer to militarized enforcer . During our 20's and 30's, police officers got tanks, machine guns, riot gear, and a mandate to make money for cash-strapped localities. We got speeding tickets we thought were bogus, but which we were powerless to fight. Our businesses got invaded by cops looking to enforce minor regulatory infractions. We got audited by the IRS. We got shoved around at airports. We had all kinds of unpleasant run-ins with cops, and some of us ended up bearing legal and physical scars as a result. We bought guns after 2008, because we knew that the cops would follow any order to stop firearms sales - 2^nd Amendment be damned. While many of us had rediscovered the Constitution as we aged, we were well-aware that the police had not.

All these experiences have left their marks on a large segment of my generation of adults. A few weeks back, I was at a dinner party for a co-worker about to go on maternity leave. The topic of a streaker at an Obama rally came up, and one of the Gen Xers in attendance observed that it was amazing the secret service didn't shoot or taser him. A Baby-Boomer colleague joked that our pregnant co-worker could get away with something like that, because there was no way the police or secret service would assault a pregnant woman.

One of the Gen Xer ladies in our group, the wife of a local pastor, scoffed, "They gang tackle anybody. Being pregnant won't save you." The vast majority of the software professionals gathered around the table concurred. Our Baby-Boomer colleague just stared at us in disbelief. Most of the Gen Xers present just accepted as a fact that police will take down anybody - young, old, invalid, or pregnant. The Baby Boomers are passing gently into that good night, and the Gen Xers are coming into their own as the dominant force among white, middle class professionals.

Expect some differences.

Experience has taught many of us Gen Xers to be highly cynical about the police.  So far, this cynicism is not having a political impact. The Republicans and the Democrats are still running campaigns trying to out-do each other as tough-on-crime and pro-police. The political class hasn't figure out that for many adults my age, crime isn't the issue. We have concealed weapons and large dogs to protect ourselves from criminals. Rather, the issue is how easy it is to get arrested, beaten, and killed by aggressive police who have no regard for the Constitution. This is especially true for small business owners, who live in fear of police raids to enforce minor regulatory infractions.

Millions of middle class people are worried about the encroaching police state. They feel vulnerable before bullying, aggressive authority. They want their rights back. They want to be left alone to enjoy nice, quiet lives.

The cops don't get this. The politicians don't get this either. Which is why the current middle class rage against being shoved around hasn't had any political impact as of yet. At some point, some politician or movement will tap into this angst and make serious hay with it. It's only a question of when - not if.

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 [Contemplating Death by Cop]

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