Now that things have started to settle down, let's give this a once-over based on updated information.
New Realities:
The shooter:
Infuriatingly for the media and the other leftist Usual Suspects, the shooter wasn't a white angry male, nor armed with the dreaded AR-15 series. Boo frickin' hoo. He was a black angry male. (And you'll see neither his name nor face mentioned herein, nor ever.) He was a one-man assault force. He pinned down 20-50x as many officers for hours, had them convinced they were dealing with a team of guys, and chasing their tails and imaginary suspects. He killed, so far, 5x his weight in police officers, and held off an entire urban SWAT team, to the point that TPTB elected to blow him up rather than risk more officers. And his weapon was nothing more ferocious than a humble semi-auto
A couple years back, I met Chris Hernandez (bloglist, right) in person, and one of my humble non-LEO observations on active shooter protocols was that eventually, bad guys, singly or in groups, were going to be expecting the whole "swarm 'em immediately" tactic, and eat the PD's lunch. Chris, both a military veteran of multiple recent deployments, and a serving police officer "somewhere in Texas" with tactical response experience, wasn't so sure that would happen, or make much difference.
Today I won that hunch, and it's going to cost DPD several funerals, and years of soul-searching. Every SWAT team in the country just got pwned Thursday night, and like Columbine, this incident is going to dictate a re-evaluation of everyone's future doctrine and tactics. And if you think the ISIS-holes aren't lapping this incident up, and filling notebooks with their own analysis, I've got a bridge to sell you, for cheap.
The only thing the left and DHS' crystal-ball gazers can salvage out of this is the knowledge that if you paint someone into a corner, even a humble military reservist with one whole SWAsia deployment under his belt, a rifle, and the will, can indeed be a formidable potential terrorist threat, and proved in the event to be more than a match for the forces of law and order for as many hours as one stays alive and on the loose.
Had he been possessed of better tactical planning (apparently pulling this whole incident out of his @$$ on the fly) and escaped, however briefly, he'd have been leading the entire state of Texas on the biggest ghost hunt in history, exactly as Dorner did in CA, and without helpfully painting them a trail right back to himself in advance.
This is also bad news for Team Oppression, when they contemplate that there are 300 million guns in circulation nationwide at last rough SWAG, and some number of millions of veterans in the country, many with multiple combat tours, minimal tactical training, or both, and a significant number pissed off to the gills about the last 8-40 years' worth of Leftism on a rampage, and any number of other causes.
That fact alone both undoes any hope of "gun control", and should have fecal matter running down the legs of everyone with a badge and the desire to go all King George/"just following orders" for the next 50 years, at least. For them, shit just got real.
The cops:
Just as in the celebrated North Hollywood Bank Shootout, the cops in Dallas, to their eternal credit, ran towards the gunfire, like they do, and interposed themselves between an active shooter and innocent victims, despite in most instances being outgunned with just their sidearms vs. a rudimentary long weapon. Bravery 10, tactical acumen 2, if you're keeping score, also just like North Hollywood. And with similar body counts in both instances. The officer who blundered up on the shooter, then was single-handedly outflanked, surrounded, and then executed by multiple rounds to the back and body after he fell was the clearest example that being braver than you are smart is a short-term recipe for dying gloriously, but quickly, and permanently. Life is not a FPS game with "respawn".
Their SWAT team, despite being held at a standoff, at least had the wit on the fly to change the rules of engagement, drop Marquis of Queensbury Rules, and elect to blow this adversary up with a bomb robot ("C4-PO" per Arf.com. Hillarious!-A.), correctly determining that deadly force=deadly force, and that after 12 of their guys and two civilians were already down, attempting an arrest was futile, and that there's more than one way to skin that cat. It turns out that most problems in life can, indeed, be solved by a suitable application of high explosives. Kudos.
My condolences for the PD's losses, and a hearty thumbs up for taking out their opponent any way they could get the job done, and with no additional casualties. Just like with Flight 93, you get about an hour in America to turn the tables on folks; after that, the means may change, but the outcome isn't in doubt once you, the bad guy(s), have been fixed, outnumbered, and surrounded.
On the other side of the equation, this guy had a grievance. One that law enforcement in general has ignored, and would have continued to, right up until Thursday evening. After squirting the effluvia of a macho burrito on the whole Black Lives Matter bs'ers myself, the reality is that there's a serious, long-unappreciated, and finally acknowledged truth afoot in the black community: the average black person justifiably is afraid of being executed by Any Police Officer for any interaction whatsoever, and for cause.
And after last week, the fear of being gunned down for nothing now applies to Team Blue.
It was a long time in coming, and it took getting a dozen of their peeps gunned down in cold blood to get their attention. A preliminary listen to responses in the aftermath of the shootout shows it may finally have begun to swing the pendulum the other way.
An over-militarized, authoritarian, "respect mah authoritay" gene has run rampant in law enforcement in this country since the 1960s. And it isn't "a few bad apples", nor is it every swinging Richard on every force. The truth lies between those extremes, but the official institutionalized Team Blue attitude leads to the conclusion that qui tacet consentire videtur has been policy from coast to coast, with thousands of officers deciding they are cops first, and citizens second, and covering for, or even defending, in word and deed indefensible and egregious over-reaches by their brethren - to the point that nothing but paying in blood gets their attention. As Officer John McClane once said famously. "Welcome to the party, asshole!"
When an entire occupational field - law enforcement - has reached, exactly like Islam, the point that only either being killed wholesale, or learning to call out and deliver the heads on platters of your own murderous offenders from within your midst will suffice to expunge your guilt in the public's eyes, as it has with American law enforcement for decades, you've fucked the pooch so hard the ASPCA should have had you arrested long ago. And we've now reached the threshold that people are going to start treating them, wholesale, randomly, exactly like jihadis, when they get the chance.
If that doesn't institute a sea change in Team Blue, leading to a deep and profound reversal of course, and a return to Peel's Principles rather than Machiavellian politics as usual, the body count from here on out is entirely justifiable, and I'll be rooting more for the shooters than the law enforcers, despite the near-term consequences to civilization, and so will millions of ordinary Americans.
If you wear a badge, LEARN. THAT. LESSON.
Think it over long and hard, and make some serious changes, right damn snappy.
Else, go to war with the American people and Constitution, and ask history how that's going to end for you over time.
Fix the problem, or settle your affairs.
The Black Community
During, by all accounts, an entirely peaceful protest otherwise, the march in Dallas accomplished precisely nothing of note. Right up until one lone gunman, a couple of blocks from Dealey Plaza, where JFK was un-elected with some finality, highjacked their march, and made a point that hundreds of protests, both non-violent and violent, hadn't made since at least Rodney King's time.
The bitter pill for everyone to swallow is that damnable as the highjacking of the event was, it probably accomplished more in 30 minutes than peaceful protests had in 40 years. Everyone is simply going to have to digest that, and deal with it. I neither call for nor applaud this, but I acknowledge its reality.
The black community, and individual members, are finally getting heard on their justified concerns. And, hopefully, they'll start to pay attention themselves to the reasons why no one's been listening until now. The list of reasons no one cared has been 1% their skin color being different, and 99% the myriad ways they sabotaged and continue to, their own agenda.
The way not to squander this abrupt crack in the door, and gaining the attention of both The Man, and the rest of America, is to fix the things they can:
Stop sticking up for the guilty-as-hell Dindu Nuffins, who get shot while fucking up by the numbers.
If Black Lives Matter to you for real, rather than for rent, stop ignoring that 98% of black crime and deaths are perpetrated on your community by your community, and not by The Man. (Unless, by The Man, you mean the calculated indifference of Rahm Emmanuel, the black mayors of DC and Detroit, and President For Life HopeyDopey the First, hisownself.)
While no one is advocating for police mistreatment, even Chris Rock has pointed out that you're a lot less likely to get shot, or get a PR-24 Shampoo, if, when interacting with law enforcement officials, you don't act like an oppressed, entitled jackass of biblical proportions, and probably thence deserve everything that happens afterwards.
The Civil War ended in 1865. Slavery ended with the 13th, 14th, and 15th amendments in the 1860s-1870s. Civil Rights was instituted in the mid-1960s. So unless you wore slave chains, and picked cotton yourselves, STFU about your imaginary (for the last 50 years, minimum) allegations of widespread institutionalized racism. Do that, and we'll gladly hear you out about actual injustice perpetrated last year or 15 seconds ago. Swear to God, hand to my heart. The rest of us neither want nor tolerate that shit either.
Act like fellow citizens, instead of aggrieved, entitled @$$clowns, and you'll be treated like the former and not the latter. Just like everyone else in this country, including every wave of immigrants going back multiple centuries, is.
So either get in, or get out. You want to start yapping about how your great-great-grandparents got brought here instead of coming freely to Ellis Island, there's a solution to your whine, and it's no farther away than the ticket desk of Air Africa. You don't like it here, and can't parse out how to behave day in and day out forever, GTFO, and go live in Liberia. I hear the Ebola there is lovely this time of year.
Learn those lessons, take them to heart.
The Government PTB:
Are you kidding me? Those @$$clowns never learn anything from anything, and never have, so I'm not even going to waste the electrons to discuss the myriad ways they'll fuck this up, from HopeyDopey on down to the lowliest TSA minion, nor note the hundreds of thousands of ways they'll work, by indifference to actual malign design, to make things worse, starting with "never let a crisis go to waste."
If fucking up by the numbers were an Olympic event, the government would long ago have won the Lifetime Achievement Award in perpetuity.
The real aftermath can work out for good, if the people most directly affected choose to learn from the whole thing. It could actually serve to start turning the ship around on some decades-long major problems that have been driving this country to the brink, going back to the occasion of the last noteworthy shooting in downtown Dallas.
But if people behave stupidly, as they have universally until this point, the entire sorry spectacle will serve solely as a how-to manual for what the next 100 incidents will look like, and serve simply as a Harbinger of Ultimate Doom for the republic, as we collectively lurch and stumble towards our ultimate destruction.
Looking at the parties we need intelligence and wisdom from, I'm far from sanguine about the eventual outcome, but the opportunity for positive change is not imaginary.
And if it fails to materialize, wherever and whoever you are, you don't have enough ammunition. Pray for the best, but prepare for the worst.
UPDATE from 2018: DPD SWAT no-billed for blowing away cop killer with C4.
18 comments:
The only problem with the cops-are-killing-black-folk-for-no-reason meme is that whites are statistically 51% of those cops shooting deaths and blacks are 26%. This is in spite of the fact that the black crime rate(s) are an order of magnitude larger then their population would suggest.
When you're talking about Cop vs. Anyone deaths, there are neither black officers nor white officers (nor brown, yellow, or any other skin color), they are all de facto blue officers.
The black community has traditionally ignored officers' skin color, incorrectly demonizing all of them as white "Uncle Tom"s, but the reality of the monotone problem is precisely their self-identified blueness problem, not their natural-born pigmentation.
Ignoring this reality is a shared problem for both blacks and other people of color, and for the police and state, which has increasingly dropped that last "and", to become the current burgeoning police state.
You got one thing factually wrong. There have been "300 million guns" run thru the NICS system since 1998. There have been NORTH of one billion firearms manufactured, imported, and sold in the US since 1930. NO ONE has the slightest idea how many of them still work or how many firearms are in "civilian" hands. But that number is almost certainly north of 500 million. Add to that the illegal manufacture of full auto weapons, IED's and the huge numbers of "stashed" full auto parts kits, ALL IN UNKNOWN HANDS. Makes for a situation far more volatile than the NICS numbers would indicate. America is the most armed country in human history. Because of the deliberate actions of the federal government it is also a powder keg. And the "A" hole in Texas just lit the fuse. The cops WILL overreact nation wide and make things worse. There WILL be another mass killing of cops. The congress WILL try and confiscate guns. Obama WILL do something stupid. The Militias WILL fight back. What we saw was the start of a race/civil war. AND I don't believe anybody on ANY side wants to stop it.---Ray
Dear Ray:
I got nothing "factually wrong".
Clearly you have no concept about the mathematical value of a well-identified SWAG.
The "one billion" number you named is pure fantasy as well. Bear in mind that some goodly number of the weapons manufactured since we entered the era of cased ammunition and smokeless powder now reside, functional or rusting, on any one of four other continents. And untold numbers from elsewhere are certainly here; if we can't keep >20M illegal aliens, nor tons of illicit drugs from overseas out of the country, any number of guns weighing 1-10 pounds is hardly a great leap to presume. Thus every "number of guns presently in circulation in the US" is pure conjecture.
As to the rest, time will tell.
Trying to confiscate guns would lead, in about 4 seconds, to 5 cops dead being a slow hour in any city in the nation, for some years to come, if it were ever attempted. The populace would run out of people to shoot by noon Tuesday in any week such was seriously attempted. And that reality is known all the way to the Oval Office, or any number of pure a-holes would have already tried it long ago.
And unless you've seen one that has thus far eluded documentation, there are no militias.
There are a few hundred thousand to perhaps a million or two armchair commandos at the moment, but outside of explicitly criminal organizations, I haven't seen any evidence of any group larger than a rump squad that could seize and defend so much as a keg of beer, given two weeks' prep and planning time headstart. That hasn't changed appreciably since 1900.
Bear in mind Dallas represents the chaos and disorder of one individual, with a single rifle, and a purpose. There isn't a police chief or sheriff from coast to coast who hasn't figured that out, long since.
Well said, Sir.
Reblogged this on my page.
http://pluckingtheyew.blogspot.com/2016/07/a-good-piece-from-raconteur-report.html
Love this analysis!
The rifle first reported as an sks is in fact a Saiga AK-74 equipped with optics.
Noted. What a shock: neither cops nor press know jack about firearms.
Amid all the discussion of "gun violence" and what to do about it, including (but not limited to) Dallas, Orlando, Ft Hood, Columbine, and lesser individual incidents like Chicago and Detroit, is one issue no one seems to consider:
If, via unicorn farts or whatever, we could make firearms unavailable, the body counts of incidents would RISE. Why? Because even our military, when they wish to kill people in job-lots, doesn't do so with bullets but with explosives/chemicals/incendiaries. From hand-grenades to napalm to nukes (which I'll loosely define as explosives). So if you can't get an AR-45 or AK-15, you'll load up some glass bottles with gasoline siphoned from local parked cars (Happy Land Social Club), or mix up some ANFO (Oklahoma City), or smuggle in some Semtex (any number of incidents on at least three other continents), and 5 to 49 fatalities will seem like one of your aforementioned slow days.
Just take Orlando as an example, of 350 people in the night club he made casualties of a third of them, and killed half of that. A few gallons of gasoline applied to the right areas could have made the fatality rate approach 100% (again, Happy Land). Or combine some explosives with some hardware store screws/nuts/nails.
But if I say such things I'm "using the victims for political purposes".
Mark D.
Well said,an outstanding assessment of the current sorry assed state of affairs here in FUSA.
The guesstimates as to the actual number of firearms in FUSA are largely irrelevant because of the myriad ways of manufacturing simple but effective "improvised" firearms out of everything from black steel pipe to 3D printed firearms.
Since the great recession began in '07, untold numbers of milling machines,lathes,industrial quality drill presses,heat treat ovens,surface grinders,and a plethora of machinist's/tool and die maker's hand and measuring tools have hit the market.
There's tons of guys in NE Ohio who have what amounts to fully equipped machine shops in their basement/garage/shop/pole barn.
I'm sure there's similarly equipped guys in pretty much the entire midwest and the rust belt states.
Between all the small to midsized shops that went under since'07, and all the shops that upgraded to CNC machines to remain competitive-FUSA has enough machine tools in private hands to out-manufacture most countries.
You're right about any .gov attempt to confiscate firearms-not gonna happen.
Look at the non-compliance rates in NY and Conn.
I think all of us need a whole hell of a lot more ammo-.gov and the fed,state and local LEO's ain't gonna learn a damn thing from Dallas-they're gonna start crackin' heads at "protests",launching tear gas,bean bag rounds,using fire hoses,maybe even cattle prods,etc,etc. to disperse crowds of protesters.
You know many of the protesters are going to get stupid-just like they have the past few days-and the cops are gonna start gearing up to bust heads in full riot gear.
I'm sure we're going to see a prime example of what the rest of this summer has in store for FUSA next week in Cleveland.
Going to be an interesting summer-that's for sure.
I live 18 miles from downtown Cleveland-more beans,rice,bullets and band aids being purchased this week.
Black community does not have a legit grievance. Look up the actual stats yourself.
Bullshit. This isn't a statistics failure. It's a policing failure.
1) Perception is reality.
2) How many videos do you have to see of cops shooting people in the back before you think there's a problem?
We passed those thresholds long since.
“attempting an arrest was futile”? Any backwater LE officers could have used tear gas and buckshot to take the bastard out of play. He could then be tried and if found guilty I would throw the switch. Using excessive force is the problem, not the solution. Police gave the suspect the ultimatum “surrender or be killed.” This is exactly what the military does with drones. Lost to those with a military mentality is that the rules of engagement is different on American SOIL! The Police acted with total disregard of Constitutional protections guaranteed by the 4th, 5th and 6th Amendments.
Even more outrageous, blowing him up was just too stupid to be stupid. That bastard was a VALUABLE ASSET for interrogation! Why would authorities not want him to talk?
When Americans condone government murdering citizens by drones/robots without trial they become vigilantes and useful idiots to their tyrants.
D. Dina
Right D.D., because tear gas works so well outdoors in an open-air parking garage, and buckshot, apart from requiring someone firing same to venture well inside the lethal casualty range of a semi-auto AKM to attempt its delivery, at a severe tactical disadvantage the entire time, is always so much less lethal than high explosives.
You're a tactical genius, and should doubtless open your own Internet School Of Shooting Tactics. Regrettably, the Democrat Party already has the mascot you require.
Deadly force is deadly force, and once the authorities are within policy to shoot the sumbitch, as they plainly were here, there's no functional difference between that option and shoving a pound of C-4 up his ass.
The moral of the story is, if one doesn't want a pound of C-4 up their ass, they shouldn't gun down a dozen police officers, or a dozen of anyone else for all the difference the victims makes to the crime. If you fail to heed that much common sense, expect retaliation in kind, up to the limits of their tactical capabilities.
But pray, the next time a hostile gunman elects not to come along quietly, and is similarly armed, perhaps you'd be so kind as to offer your services to the local constabulary to tip-toe up and attempt the jackassical tactics you espouse. The result would be instructional to at least one person here, I assure you.
(cont.)
Had this douchecanoe (henceforth known as Balloon, given that he was similarly blown up) laid down his arms, the force used would be excessive. Against an active shooter and mass murderer refusing any quarter, their charge on behalf of the people is to end the rampage as quickly, cleanly, and bloodlessly afterwards as possible. When you, like Balloon, chose to break the law, you don't get to bitch about the shit sandwich you buy and are force-fed, and your apologists after your demise don't have any legal leg to stand on in argument to the contrary. This requires no greater reasoning capacity than what nature endows a child with by grade school. Anyone who sets out to take on another person or persons in a fight to the death, even if the latter wears a badge and swears an oath, doesn't get to carp about having their offer taken up. There are consequences to jumping off that cliff. Bitch to Isaac Newton if you don't like gravity.
And as there's no reason whatsoever to assume Balloon would have been any more reasonable once magically apprehended alive - despite a pantload of buckshot, and availed of full Constitutional rights to remain silent, refuse to answer any questions, or even be questioned at all without counsel present, after some moron tried the clever tactic of shooting him full of that magical non-fatal buckshot - it is full-out flaming delusional to suggest that there was anything that was going to be interrogated out of him any time this side of hell freezing over.
Murder is the unlawful killing of another human being. There was nothing whatsoever unlawful in the killing of Balloon, to the slightest degree. In fact, it goes beyond merely justifiable, and was actually praiseworthy. If, precisely like Bonnie and Clyde, they'd instead ventilated him with a dozen BAR magazines emptied into him full-auto, it would remain so. There was no police officer within 300 yards of him on the day who lacked any reasonable and justified fear for their lives, and the right of self defense under those circumstances, for law enforcement or anyone else, is absolute and unflinching. Thus any killing of Balloon, by any one of them, or all of them collectively, was entirely within the rules of engagement recognized by common law on this continent since 1603, before that back to Magna Carta, and beyond that to the dawn of recorded history. Suggesting otherwise is sheer and unmitigated lunacy, contrary to every established precept of law since before Moses carried two stone tablets down Mount Sinai, or Hammurabi dictated a single cuneiform clay tablet of his eponynmous code.
Unless you're willing to self-mock by calling every incident of every suspect ever killed by police or citizens while same is actively resisting any arrest or apprehension, and while armed and attempting to kill all those sent to apprehend him "murder", by completely turning the English language on its head, you haven't even the wit to throw around the term as if you knew what it meant, let alone accusing others of condoning it.
Your arguments are therefore 0 for 3.
I suggest getting back under your bridge, lest sunlight hit you and turn you to stone.
Sir, In the interest of affording a wider audience for this excellent and necessary piece, may I, 1)very lightly edit it for the purpose of removing the "bad" language? And 2) there are a couple of sentences in which I would (don't have to, but would like to) throw a period in the middle, for the purpose of lowering the reading level/age to smooth the flow for ease of consumption.
I would of course, link this blog post and site your name as the sole author. This work is important to get into the hands of those young and/or Christian on the verge of waking up. This is a wildly important article. I pray your response in the affirmative.
The redeemed in Christ,
Mr. Fred Tippens
Be my guest, Fred. Disseminate the family-friendly version with my blessing.
Excellent post have forwarded it to my short list of additional readers. Not sure where on what blog I read this comment, but, to paraphrase, " It is about time that in this country that police officers in this country are held to the same standard as a civilian shooter is. They need to be held responsible for every bullet that leaves the muzzle of their gun. I realize that in the stress of the moment mistakes are made, but, under the Constitution of this United States NO PERSON IS SUPPOSED TO BE ABOVE THE LAW. If that standard is NOT UPHELD then all bets are off.
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