If you are a police officer in any city in America, you might as well just shoot yourself right now. Because the way the rules are apparently evolving, you have zero right to defend yourself in any circumstance. Use your weapon to defend yourself against an unarmed guy who is physically assaulting you, you will be called a murderous racist and celebrities will persuade the public to believe the guy put his hands up and said "don't shoot."
You know he didn't, but it doesn't matter.
And if a guy in a convenience store points a gun at you, and you shoot him in self-defense, it won't be long before "crowds had gathered demanding answers."
I guess the crowds want an answer other than the truth, because the obvious answer is, "He aimed a gun at me so I shot him." That is basic police procedure. And you might be interested to know that if you're contemplating suicide, a good way to accomplish it is to point a gun at a police officer. You will soon be dead. And you should be. Don't like the rules? Sorry. Thems are the rules.
But don't try telling that to the crowds in their quest for "answers," nor to the media cheering them on:
Police say that about 11:15 p.m. Central time, a Berkeley police officer conducting a business check encountered two men at a gas station. The St. Louis County Police Department, which has assumed control of the investigation, said early Wednesday that one of the men pointed a handgun at the officer.
“Fearing for his life, the Berkeley officer fired several shots, striking the man, fatally wounding him,” county police said in a news release.
The victim’s mother, Toni Martin, told reporters at the scene that her son had not been carrying a gun and was just walking to visit his girlfriend at the time of the shooting. Police, who have not confirmed the victim’s identity, say they have recovered a weapon from the scene.
Now let's get something straight here. Assuming it happened the way the officer reported it, the guy who died was the perp, not the victim. You do not point a gun at a cop. Got that? You do not. Maybe someone needs to explain that to the crowds, since they don't seem to be aware of it.
What it's come to now is that every incident in which a police officer fires a weapon, especially if the suspect being fired at is black, is going to turn into a media cause celeb in which everyone demands answers even though the answers may be exceedingly obvious. Maybe the media think this is news because of the gathering crowds, but there is no legitimate reason for the crowds to be gathering. The officer appears to have followed procedure to the letter to protect his own life, which he absolutely has the right to do - regardless of the color of his skin or that of the man pointing the gun at him.
But the media love racial conflict more than life itself, and you can bet that they will encourage the crowds to keep "demanding answers" and pushing the notion that an injustice will be done if the officer is not charged with and convicted of a crime.
So here we are. A police officer can't even fire his weapon to defend his own life in situations where a threat is patently obvious. So sayeth the crowds, and so echoeth the brain-dead media.
By the way, I'd like to answer those liberals who insist President Obama has done nothing to encourage the whole hate-cops atmosphere that helped lead to the shooting in Brooklyn and has this latest uprising brewing in St. Louis. The hell he hasn't. Obama just last week appointed a panel to review police procedures. What, you ask, is the problem with that? The problem is that, by appointing a panel for that particular purpose, Obama clearly staked out his position that the behavior of the police is the problem - not the aggressive behavior of the perps who ended up on the wrong side of established police tactics.
That gives a lot of legitimacy race-mongers like Al Sharpton, who encourage crowds to rise up in anger against the cops, and as we saw over the weekend, demand that they be killed.
Which two of them were.
I'm glad this cop wasn't killed. If he hadn't seen the gun and acted quickly, he could have ended up like Officers Ramos and Liu in Brooklyn. And from the behavior of the answer-demanding crowds, that's exactly what they would have preferred to see happen.
This country is so screwed.
