The city of Oakland, California is hoping to use armed robots to kill suspects in the near
future. All right. This story is just another story about the weaponization of local police,
isn't it? We've done this story so many times. You know, Barney Fife gets in a new tank. Barney Fife
gets a rocket launcher in some, you know, podunk town in the middle of Mississippi
or Florida or Alabama. So, so this is kind of one of those deals, isn't it? They, they have
this thing that is designed for a certain use, but now they wanna arm. It this robot
they want to arm and put actual active, dangerous. I, I know it's, it, it's not funny, but it is kind
of funny because you really do have these cops. They get all these toys, these weapons of war from
the, you know, military program that sends the surplus out to police officers and say, okay, well
we got this little, it's described as basically a Roomba with tank treads on it. And it's supposed
to be used to go in and disarm bombs. Right, right.
But the cops in Oakland say, okay, but what if, what if we put a shotgun on it? This is
real. Like, what if we just put a shotgun on it and I've got the remote control. I can go
in here like I'm playing a game and just shoot the bad guys with my Roomba robot.
Yeah. And I can make the decision to do that. I ought to have the autonomy to make the decision,
are they a threat? Because we're using active weapons, active ammunition right now. Now, so,
so where this started was this started with what they call a pan disruption cam, it's a, it's a
robot that's designed to do things like, you know, shoot heavy amount of water to disarm or various
things they can use to disarm somebody who might be holed up in a house, for example. But now it
came up at one of the council meetings, somebody raised, hey, can't we just arm it with shotgun
shells and just take 'em out? I don't think it's gonna go anywhere, at least, at least for a little
while. But I would hate to think that some cat out there saying, I don't think we can do anything
about getting them outta that corner in the house. Let's go ahead and blow 'em away. Right?
Well, and, and it, and it shows how stupid this overall program is. I, I forget the names,
is it the 538 program, something like that. Yeah. Five. Yeah. It is, where the
military sells their. Yeah. And, and the reason
we even have that program is because these military contractors like Lockheed Martin.
Yeah. They wanna sell the new stuff.
The new stuff. Right. So they've convinced the government, hey,
give the, give last year's stuff to these cops. If you'll look at it, it was, when it first
started, it was actually the manufacturers, the designers of these weapons that were giving them
to 'em. And then it said, well, why don't you military give 'em your old stuff so you can buy
some new stuff from us? Yeah.
It's all about the weapons industry, getting their ugly hands on more money.