;)
December 22nd, 2014
On Saturday, a man named Ismaaiyl Brinsley woke up in Baltimore and shot his girlfriend in the stomach. He then drove to New York City and killed two police officers, Wenjian Liu and Rafael Ramos, before taking his own life. The officers were the 44th and 45th law enforcement officers to fall to gunfire in 2014.
The crime in New York stands out in many ways. In a pre-meditated, senseless, and cowardly fashion, Brinsley snuck up on a marked police vehicle and shot the officers as they sat in the front seat. Brinsley's social media messages indicate that he intended to kill LEOs for the sheer sake of it.
Because of Brinsley's sickening and depraved actions, two families lost husbands and one lost a father. Ramos had two sons, one just thirteen-years-old. Liu was a newlywed. The vicious and pointless nature of the crime will haunt the families and friends of these men for the rest of their lives. However, Ramos and Liu are not the first United States LEOs to lose their lives to "revenge-style" killings, even this year.
This past June, in Las Vegas, two police officers were shot in an equally cowardly and pointless attack. Officers Igor Soldo and Alyn Beck were murdered by white supremacists Jerad and Amanda Miller, while eating pizza on their lunch break. The killers left a swastika and Gadsen flag on Beck's body. The Millers also killed Joseph Wilcox, a civilian who attempted to stop them. Similar to Brinsley, these killers had boasted in advance of their intention to kill police officers because they believed they were "oppressors," and followed through. Jerad Miller was killed by police and Amanda Miller shot herself before she could be apprehended.
Like every mass shooting in America, there are two main lines of thinking. One is that mass shooters like Brinsley or the Millers are psychopaths, or mentally ill, if you prefer. No broader conclusions can be drawn from their actions and, at best, we can hope to watch out for people who may suddenly open fire on others, and then themselves, in this manner. In this mindset, mass shootings are a sort of natural disaster that can't be predicted or reliably prevented.
The other line of thinking is that Millers or Brinsleys "represent" whatever ideas they claim to have about what they are doing, and everyone else with any similar thoughts. In this case, Brinsley's extreme anti-police postings - death threats in fact - mean to some that he represents anyone who has been critical of the Brown, Garner, or Tamir Rice deaths that have been so much in the news. Likewise, in some minds, the Millers were representative of the Cliven Bundy Ranch protesters and anti-tax or anti-government regulation thinking out west.
Too often, the view a person has of the "meaning" of a mass shooting depends on what they already thought before it happened. We're so deeply buried in our politics that a mass murder of human beings becomes nothing more than a bloody Rorschach test for whether a person watches right-wing or left-wing TV news. New facts and situations confirm what we already think, so nothing is solved, nothing is learned, and nothing improves.
On April 4, 1968, Martin Luther King was assassinated. News traveled so slowly then that a group of people who had assembled to hear Robert Kennedy speak actually got the news from him, instead of off their phones and tablets. Kennedy knew something of violence, having lost his elder brother to an assassin's bullet, and he would soon die himself at the lands of another "lone gunman." Here is what he said, in part:
What we need in the United States is not division; what we need in the United States is not hatred; what we need in the United States is not violence and lawlessness, but is love, and wisdom, and compassion toward one another, and a feeling of justice toward those who still suffer within our country, whether they be white or whether they be black.
So I ask you tonight to return home, to say a prayer for the family of Martin Luther King -- yeah, it's true -- but more importantly to say a prayer for our own country, which all of us love -- a prayer for understanding and that compassion of which I spoke.
We can do well in this country. We will have difficult times. We've had difficult times in the past, but we -- and we will have difficult times in the future. It is not the end of violence; it is not the end of lawlessness; and it's not the end of disorder.
But the vast majority of white people and the vast majority of black people in this country want to live together, want to improve the quality of our life, and want justice for all human beings that abide in our land.
You can score the killing if you want, by color, by uniform, by point of view, even. You can explain how each one shows how right you are about everything you've already said, or thought, or heard. We are as good at that as anything we do. But there is another way to spend our energy. We can say a prayer for our country; and, in 2015, we can try to live more peacefully, more justly, and with more compassion for "all human beings that abide in our land."
