Over the past year or so, police brutality has been a controversial topic that has taken over our country’s social media. After the shooting in Ferguson, Missouri, our nation went up in flames over the topic of police brutality towards someone who has been labeled by the media as an innocent person. The movement of Black Lives Matter started because the black community wanted their voices to be heard after each young black person was shot and killed by people being referring to as “untrained white cops.”
As someone who has never been oppressed, suffered from any form of racism or been what is considered a minority, I will admit that I do not know how it feels to be on the opposing end of this argument. What I do know, though, is what it feels like to be an American citizen in today’s society while all of this is taking place.
The media has been known to take bits and pieces of information from a situation and only show what they feel will produce the most money for them. That is what they do; it is their job. It is the reason we never hear about happy events on the news; that would not give news companies the profit they are looking for. It would be of no help to them. This is why when you turn on the news, you are only hearing about the innocent people who are being shot by “untrained white cops.”
Recently, a black man named Alton Sterling was shot outside of a Baton Rouge in Louisiana while selling CDs. The media has portrayed this man to be an innocent man who was only trying to sell his product to the people outside of this establishment. In this case, just offering this information would portray the police officers to be full-fledged murderers, but what they were not informing most people of is that this man held a homeless man at gunpoint for asking him for spare change. The homeless man was the person who originally made the phone call to the police. This man has been brought up on many charges in the past, which is by no means a reason to kill someone. Just because he had a record does not mean that it was necessary to kill him, but the fact that he held someone at gunpoint was a reason to take action.
Does America have a problem with gun control? Recently I would be very hesitant to answer that question with “no.” It has been far too easy recently for people to obtain guns without the proper background checks and proper reason. It has become far too easy to purchase guns at a younger age than necessary, and we can obviously see that it is doing more harm than good. The problem here though is that we as citizens are quick to blame the police for these deaths and immediately blame the guns for all of the problems when in reality if we were not there to witness the situation, we cannot make such a quick judgment. There is always going to be information that we do not receive because of the media blocking some of the things that would cause them to not make as much money. We need to start being willing to listen to all sides before jumping to a conclusion and blaming police officers for something that may have been as simple as protecting someone else’s or their life. America has a problem, but we as a whole can fix the problem one small, peaceful step at a time.
