As with the majority of all citizens, few beginning police candidates are aware of the true history of this country or the principles which led to its flourishing. Older cops who might refuse to confiscate a weapon, to conduct a warrantless search, or who might conveniently decline to notice an infraction of a bad law are replaced by those inculcated with a lifetime of government-school propaganda. Brainwashed or merely ignorant, the result is the same. The evidence of such attitude shifts are not difficult to find. Consider the police and INS agents who snatched Elian Gonzalez from his family in the dark hours of the morning while waving automatic weapons about and threatening to shoot innocent bystanders.
Cops have families and bills to pay.
A mortgage on an old ranch house. A job they could lose, jail time they could serve by taking a stand, by rejecting a command from a superior. Already in Connecticut, police have confiscated weapons from gun owners on the unsubstantiated word of a snitch. Maybe he merely had a grudge to settle and involved the police as his unwitting agents. The Constitution has not curtailed these disgraceful actions.