My thoughts about riot

In response to my co-bloggers request for an opinion, here's mine.

"Riot" is a crime, defined at common law, derived from Anglo-Saxon jurisprudence. It was so well known as a crime, that it had no subsidiary definition, that is, it wasn't defined as "acting without restraint, in a tumultuous, crazed manner calculated to incite anxiety in those who observe the behavior," or something. No. The crime, a felony, was "riot," the conduct self-defined.
Do I condone riot? No--although having participated in a few gatherings that might be so defined, I gotta say, it can be fun as hell. But is it criminal conduct? Sure. Felonious? Probably, in most cases, not. But nothing I say about riot, even throwing stones or bricks or epithets or slurs, transmutes the crime into one that allows summary execution.

Here's the point--and I made this point in a post a few days ago. We've sent soldiers to Iraq and are now asking them to be cops. Like Generals Zinni and Clark have said, they're not cops. They see rocks hurled at them from a crowd, they fire at the crowd. That's their job. They're warriors.

That's what recently happened, and happens all the time in Iraq. Our soldiers, in the role of cops, are firing live ammunition into gatherings of civilians--maybe even into rioting gatherings. But that's not allowed, not in our culture. That's called summary execution. That's Kent State, Soweto, the Boston Massacre.

So I don't condone rioting. But I don't condone killing rioters. That's summary execution for a noncapital crime. That, dammen und herren, is a war crime.