There’s an uproar in Pima County Arizona over the SWAT killing of a USMC vet who may or may not have been involved in marijuana dealing. Jose Guereno Ortiz, a copper miner who served a couple tours in Iraq, was riddled with 22 bullets (out of 71 fired) seconds after SWAT officers battered down his door. According to the police, he confronted officers with a gun after the heavily armed SWAT team broke into his house.

An ordinary morning was unfolding in the middle-class Tucson neighborhood – until an armored vehicle pulled into the family’s driveway and men wearing heavy body armor and helmets climbed out, weapons ready.

They were a sheriff’s department SWAT team who had come to execute a search warrant. But Vanessa Guerena insisted she had no idea, when she heard a “boom” and saw a dark-suited man pass by a window, that it was police outside her home. She shook her husband awake and told him someone was firing a gun outside.

A U.S. Marine veteran of the Iraq war, he was only trying to defend his family, she said, when he grabbed his own gun – an AR-15 assault rifle.

What happened next was captured on video after a member of the SWAT team activated a helmet-mounted camera.

The officers – four of whom carried .40-caliber handguns while another had an AR-15 – moved to the door, briefly sounding a siren, then shouting “Police!” in English and Spanish. With a thrust of a battering ram, they broke the door open. Eight seconds passed before they opened fire into the house.

And 10 seconds later, Guerena lay dying in a hallway 20-feet from the front door. The SWAT team fired 71 rounds, riddling his body 22 times, while his wife and child cowered in a closet…

SWAT tactics have become increasingly common since the 1980s, when they were used in minority “ghettoes” to deal with populations that were resistant to ordinary policing. They were a feature of the “War on Drugs,” and accompanied the rise of the American police state that saw extremely high rates of incarceration and heavy handed tactics become a feature of American law enforcement.

By the 1990s, SWAT tactics began to be used in the context of domestic disputes, and then in school incidents. Some of the enthusiasm for SWAT operations has been scaled back in cities, but SWAT teams continue to be a common feature of policing.

In another era, such routine state incursions into citizens’ homes would have been unthinkable, but something has changed a great deal in the American character. Years of vilification of the American male, ideologically-driven campaigns to equalize people, and the idea that family business is also state business have opened the door to the strongarm tactics that resulted in Jose Ortiz being shot to death in front of his four-year-old child.

Whether Ortiz was a marijuana dealer or not is not really the point here. Even if he were, why couldn’t the police have arrested him at work and simultaneously served a search warrant on his house? That may have been difficult for his wife and child, too, but it wouldn’t have involved traumatizing the boy for life. Serving a warrant with a battering ram and heavily armed SWAT team shows the judicial process to be a farce, and a very dangerous one at that.

We ought to ask those who support unlimited state intrusion into people’s private lives whether they think these kinds of incidents are acceptable “collateral damage.” Do feminists, for example, believe that police should be allowed to invade Americans’ private homes as though they were raiding insurgents in Afghanistan to investigate a domestic disturbance? Do anti-drug crusaders think suspicion of marijuana smuggling justifies it? What is worth suspending our constitutional rights to security in our persons and property?