There's so much to say, or maybe nothing more at all, about the horrifying, depressing events of the past week. It feels like the country is falling apart and that there's no solution. Each side blames the other, of course. To me the comments of Barack Obama have been a lot less divisive and hate-inducing than those who've called him a terrorist-lover, an America-hater, or those represented by this asshole. Our president's first words about Dallas were perfect, in fact; and so were his most recent. The right, of course, heard them as horrifying.
But that's not my point. My point is a small but more than half-serious one: the cop-killer in Dallas had, like so many "patriots" of the right, stockpiled a huge cache of weapons and ammo at his home. Those "patriots" do so, they tell us and themselves, to protect themselves and the rest of us against a tyrannical government. So, on that basis, shouldn't the cop-killer be a hero to them? Didn't he see himself as doing just that? And, in some ways, might his view of a tyrannical government be more justified than those of the "patriots," who consider it tyranny when they have to follow laws they don't like? Civil rights laws, for example?
For that matter, Philando Castile, the man killed by a cop at a traffic stop, was legally carrying the gun which, evidently, he didn't use but which was, presumably, the reason he was killed. Another citizen, armed as the NRA would have it, dead because of it.
I assume none of those America-loving, tyranny-preventing patriotic ammosexuals will see either situation that way. Their answers to why not might be instructive.
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