I don’t see the two sides as equal in this situation. The military is supposed to be defending the people. Soldiers and police are allowed to do things no one else is allowed to do – carry assault weapons around and not face the same consequences if they draw or use them. The penalty for hurting or killing a police officer is often much higher than it would be for a regular civilian, When society gives people guns and the right to use them and sends them marching into civilian areas, they have a different level of responsibility. They don’t just have the moral right, at least not in my book, to go into attack mode and stalk and kill people just because they thought they were defending themselves.

These soldiers went in to a rural civilian area, and whether you like it or not, people in such areas, from Alaska to Montana to Texas, carry guns to scare off or kill bears, wolves or other animals that threaten their animals or property. Those threats are part of life for them; heavily armed marines prowling about their farmland is not. In fact, as I understand it, policing drug trafficking is not supposed to be the military’s job in the first place, partly to avoid cases like this one.

But this is a consequence of living in a highly militarized land. I’m willing to bet that a good number of the civilian and non-combatant deaths in places like Colombia, or the Palestinian territories, are the result of soldiers mistakenly thinking their lives were in danger and shooting. Maybe in some cases their lives really were in danger? Does that make it all right? Did those soldiers have the “right” to this as individuals, or must they be held accountable as agents of the state firing on their own people?

Either way, I think we can all agree that the militarization of Texas is a bad thing for all the people of Texas. Experience in countries like Colombia and Mexico shows that such strategies rarely make more than a dent in drug traffic, but are quite successful in creating climates of fear, violence and corruption.