“As you may know, on May 5, 2011, a young 26 year old Marine veteran who had survived two tours in Iraq, and father of two, Jose Guereña, was killed in a SWAT raid in Tucson, Arizona (see below news articles for details). At approximately 9:30 am, two hours after he hit the rack after working a twelve hour graveyard shift at an Arizona mine, his wife woke him by yelling that there were men with guns outside (she had seen a man outside the window pointing a gun at her). He told her to take their four year old son and hide in a closet, grabbed his AR-15, and stepped out into the hallway of his home just as his front door was battered in.

He died with his safety still on. He didn’t fire a shot. The Pima County, Arizona (Sheriff Dupnik’s department), SWAT Team fired 71 rounds at him, hitting him with approximately 60 rounds. He had no criminal record. The only justification given by the Sheriff’s spokesman for using SWAT to serve the warrant was that it was a search warrant in a narcotics conspiracy investigation (with three other homes searched in the same neighborhood), and that this is their policy when the home-owner may be armed

This policy of using SWAT to serve mere search warrants on people with no violent criminal history will lead to more deaths of veterans and other trained American gun owners because a trained man will react precisely the same way this young Marine did.

We must take a stand on this use of SWAT against gun owners and veterans who have no violent crime history, and that stand needs to be a firm one.”