{"id":14136,"date":"2012-02-16T18:23:59","date_gmt":"2012-02-17T02:23:59","guid":{"rendered":"http:\/\/www.antiwar.com\/blog\/?p=14136"},"modified":"2012-02-16T18:23:59","modified_gmt":"2012-02-17T02:23:59","slug":"small-town-militarization-keene-nh-gets-a-freaking-tank","status":"publish","type":"post","link":"https:\/\/www.antiwar.com\/blog\/2012\/02\/16\/small-town-militarization-keene-nh-gets-a-freaking-tank\/","title":{"rendered":"Small Town Militarization: Keene, NH Gets a Freaking Tank"},"content":{"rendered":"

Readers may already be familiar with the tiny town of Keene, NH despite its population of some 20,000 people in rural New Hampshire. The town has been a major site for the Free State Project and radio advertisements mentioning Keene are heard regularly when listening to Antiwar Radio<\/a> on LRN<\/a>.<\/p>\n

You may or may not be familiar with Lenco Industries, a Pittsfield, MA-based<\/a> company that manufactures heavily armored vehicles for government agencies. But even if you are familiar with both, you might not have imagined that the twain should ever meet.<\/p>\n

But the Department of Homeland Security is seeing to it that they have, throwing $285,933 in grant money at the Keene city government to buy what their mayor referred to as “our own tank<\/a>.” <\/p>\n

Not exactly a tank, the Lenco Bearcat is a Armored Personnel Carrier<\/a> marketed to city SWAT teams, and which comes complete with gun ports, battering ram and “tear gas deployment nozzle” with an eye toward “riot control.” <\/p>\n

While the coolness factor seems to have been enough to sell the city government on the scheme, no one seems to have asked whether or not a small town with virtually no violent crime needs an APC. Normally, that’s where the story ends, with us shaking our heads. But Keene’s unique nature has spawned considerable backlash<\/a> from the town’s libertarian movement<\/a>. <\/p>\n

Lenco, for their part, seems to have gotten a rude introduction to the whole “limited government” thing, and is scrambling to answer a question they never planned to be asked: why on earth would we want police to have this monstrosity? <\/p>\n

The answer for them is “we don’t know what the terrorists are thinking<\/a>,” saying it is better for the Keene, NH council to have a freaking tank and not need it than need it and not have it. <\/p>\n

And if that doesn’t convince anyone, which lets face it, it won’t, Lenco has a personal attack for you. “I can’t help but think that the people who are trying to stop this just don’t think police officers’ lives are worth saving.” <\/p>\n","protected":false},"excerpt":{"rendered":"

Readers may already be familiar with the tiny town of Keene, NH despite its population of some 20,000 people in rural New Hampshire. The town has been a major site for the Free State Project and radio advertisements mentioning Keene are heard regularly when listening to Antiwar Radio on LRN. You may or may not […]<\/p>\n","protected":false},"author":32,"featured_media":0,"comment_status":"open","ping_status":"open","sticky":false,"template":"","format":"standard","meta":{"_seopress_robots_primary_cat":"","_seopress_titles_title":"","_seopress_titles_desc":"","_seopress_robots_index":"","_et_pb_use_builder":"","_et_pb_old_content":"","_et_gb_content_width":"","_jetpack_memberships_contains_paid_content":false,"footnotes":""},"categories":[3],"tags":[],"coauthors":[],"class_list":["post-14136","post","type-post","status-publish","format-standard","hentry","category-news"],"jetpack_featured_media_url":"","jetpack_sharing_enabled":true,"meta_box":{"disable_donate_message":"","custom_donate_message":"","subtitle":""},"_links":{"self":[{"href":"https:\/\/www.antiwar.com\/blog\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/posts\/14136","targetHints":{"allow":["GET"]}}],"collection":[{"href":"https:\/\/www.antiwar.com\/blog\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/posts"}],"about":[{"href":"https:\/\/www.antiwar.com\/blog\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/types\/post"}],"author":[{"embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/www.antiwar.com\/blog\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/users\/32"}],"replies":[{"embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/www.antiwar.com\/blog\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/comments?post=14136"}],"version-history":[{"count":1,"href":"https:\/\/www.antiwar.com\/blog\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/posts\/14136\/revisions"}],"predecessor-version":[{"id":14137,"href":"https:\/\/www.antiwar.com\/blog\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/posts\/14136\/revisions\/14137"}],"wp:attachment":[{"href":"https:\/\/www.antiwar.com\/blog\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/media?parent=14136"}],"wp:term":[{"taxonomy":"category","embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/www.antiwar.com\/blog\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/categories?post=14136"},{"taxonomy":"post_tag","embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/www.antiwar.com\/blog\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/tags?post=14136"},{"taxonomy":"author","embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/www.antiwar.com\/blog\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/coauthors?post=14136"}],"curies":[{"name":"wp","href":"https:\/\/api.w.org\/{rel}","templated":true}]}}