Wednesday, December 17, 2014

Sometimes the barrel of a gun is just the barrel of a gun

There's been a trend over the years that hasn't been proper;y identified. People calling it out as being a race issue are muddying the waters & undermining real solutions.
The big news was out of Ferguson, MO where a cop killed a guy who was acting in a belligerent manner. A cop in Cleveland killed a 12 year old without really assessing the situation. In Beavercreek, OH cops killed a guy in a Wal Mart who was fidgeting with a pellet gun while BSing with his girlfriend on the phone in the pet food aisle. In Atlanta a campus cop killed a student for basically walking around stoned. A few years ago a Cincinnati man was shot while being questioned by police when he threw a knife to the side.
Some of the police were white, some black. Some of the killed were white, some black.
People who know how to stir the race pot are fixating on white police killing black suspects while ignoring the unnecessary killings of white suspects, especially when killed by black cops. While some of the folks were resisting arrest, others were not. Some of the cases involved completely unreliable 911 calls & the police failing to properly assess the situation when they arrived on the scene. Cherry picking along racial lines & lumping the killings together misses the true police failings.
The problem is not racism. If the white police of America were really conspiring to wipe out black America, they would be done by now.
The problem is trigger happy cops who feel they can kill with impunity because they have a badge.
and, pr their indictments, that's pretty much the case.
The latest instance of the shoot first, ask questions later was the slaughter of a mountain lion in Paris, KY.
So, you see, it's not just relegated to killing people - it's pretty much anything that moves.
Fixating on the phony genocide issue does no good. Lumping real criminal activity with non criminal activity does no good. The armed vs unarmed crap makes no sense. The problem is issuing lethal weapons to twitchy people, not issuing non lethal alternative weapons to these people & not training these guys to be patient and to properly assess situation on scene.
And we need to focus on that and not on incidental coincidences.

1 comment:

5chw4r7z said...

They are killing Americans! that's what I've been trying to get across. If we need protection from people who are supposed to be protecting us something is fundamentally wrong.