On July 7, starting at approximately 8:45 p.m. CT, Dallas, Texas suffered from a terrible tragedy. On this day, a Black Lives Matter protest took place in the downtown area of Dallas over the deaths of Philando Castile and Alton Sterling at the hands of police in Minnesota and Louisiana, respectively. It was near the end of this protest that shots began to ring out through the streets and police officers accompanying the protest began to fall. Today, Friday, as I write what is still a developing story, NBC news reports that four police officers and one DART officer lie dead, twelve officers shot in total, and at least two civilians shot. The identities of the four known suspects have not yet been released.
I am not here to report the news. I am not a reporter. I am here to give you my perspective on why this tragedy has happened and why I believe it will only get worse from here. You see, as much as politicians and gun-control activists are even now trying to pin this on an issue of guns being out on the streets, it was not the guns that decided to kill these innocent officers. It was the people, people so full of hatred that they decided to take “justice” into their own hands.
Right now, because we have not been given the identities or motives of these men (except for the one assailant who was killed who said he “wanted to kill white people, especially white officers”), we can only speculate, but based on that statement alone, which was made during police attempts at negotiation with the assailant, it is likely that these attackers are a part of the Black Lives Matter movement. If this does turn out to be true, then this is only the beginning of people from BLM taking matters into their own hands and killing police officers because of the uniform they wear.
My question to the members of the Black Lives Matter movement: is this the justice you all crave, the justice you constantly scream about when you’re protesting in the streets or on the freeways, or when an officer you’re after is acquitted from his charges because it turned out he was in the right? If it is not, where are your leaders who should be condemning this attack which happened during a Black Lives Matter protest? Even if it turns out that the attackers were not affiliated with BLM, you should still be outraged that this has happened, that officers who had nothing to with the incidents in Minnesota and Louisiana had to lose their life because of the hatred many in the BLM movement holds for law enforcement. Yet, so far, you all remain strangely silent.
It will only become worse from here on out. Now, police everywhere in this country will go about their jobs knowing they have a huge target on their backs. They could be shot at any time by people like those who killed five officers in Dallas. Their occupation puts them in more danger than ever before, and that, in turn, will make them more ready to pull the trigger if they feel it needs to be done. This is something we must all understand. When it comes down to those ten to fifteen seconds of developing danger, where an officer must choose whether or not to use deadly force, if the danger keeps escalating in their minds, they will always, always, choose to defend themselves, valuing their life over yours—and rightly so.
What does this mean?
Well, incidents where law enforcement is forced to use deadly force can become more common. The chance such an incident enrages the BLM movement increases, thus sparking more protests and more hatred and more people who are willing to escalate matters even further and kill some officers in what they see as justified revenge which forces the police to become even more paranoid. And the cycle will continue on and on and on with no end in sight.
So what is there to do?
We must unite. We must remember that we are all Americans. We must stop with this hatred that comes from division. We must stop identifying everyone and putting everyone into different categories. We must understand the difficulty of the profession that is law enforcement. We must understand that, though there is the fraction of a percent of police officers who are corrupt and racist and evil, the vast majority of them do not want to see you harmed and are there for your protection. We must stop pointing fingers. We must stop taking advantage of tragedies to push forward our own agendas. We must unite.
But until steps are taken to do so, until people realize their fear and hatred and whatever actions those feelings lead to are not the answer, nothing will change. We will have to continue mourning the fallen, the slain, the innocent and we will continue to suffer because of the actions of a few.
And nothing will change.
