08:33 – Another young black man viciously murdered by a cop, this one in an incident only two miles down the road from Ferguson. Antonio Martin was minding his own business when the cop approached him. Martin did what anyone would do in that situation, pulled out his pistol and pointed it at the cop. For no reason, the cop started shooting, killing Martin. I can certainly understand why so many people are upset by these unprovoked shootings of young black men by cops. Interestingly, none of the news reports I’ve seen report the race of the cop, which I find curious.
14:22 – Okay, I’ve read several other news reports about the shooting late last night. It seems that “protesters” were throwing bricks at the police officers, who showed incredible restraint while under attack with lethal force. It seems to me that the appropriate action for the police would have been to order the crowd to disperse immediately or face lethal force. After allowing 15 seconds for anyone who intended to disperse to run like hell, I’d have had the cops open fire on the crowd with riot shotguns loaded with #00 buckshot, continuing to fire and reload as necessary until everyone in the crowd was down. Cops are no less entitled to self-defense than anyone else, and shooting at a crowd who was throwing bricks is self-defense by any reasonable definition. And one of the many advantages of buckshot is that it’s ballistically untraceable. There’d be no point to investigating, so they could simply have brought in front-end loaders to clean up the street and transfer the bodies to garbage trucks, which could then deposit them at the dump, where they belong. Or am I being insensitive?