In a country of 300 million, somebody is bound to get shot. This week the media's attention has focused on three black men who were among the many.
In the first case, two men were burglars who got busted by a belligerent and nosy neighbor. This guy named Joe Horn in Texas essentially called 911 and informed them that a burglary was happening next door. He then proceded to get his shotgun, leave his house and chase down the burglars with deadly force despite being warned not to.
The call started off calmly enough.
"(There are) burglars breaking into a house next door," the caller is heard on the 911 tape telling a police dispatcher.
Pasadena resident reportedly shoots suspected thieves."I've got a shotgun do you want me to stop 'em?" The dispatcher was quick to respond.
"Nope don't do that. Ain't no property worth shooting somebody over OK?," the Pasadena dispatcher said as he called out officers to the scene.
What Joe Horn did was entirely predictable. In his heightened state of panic, he shot the two men dead without any regard to the appropriate rules of engagement. This is exactly the kind of result I predicted would happen in the case of the Philadelphia Black Militia. Fortunately, it hasn't happened in Philly, yet. It's always a bad idea to send civilians to do a cop's job whether you are in Texas, Philadelphia or Iraq. Every civilized country has police. We know how to do this. Joe Horn was a fool for taking the law into his own hands and he's going to live with regret for killing those men for the rest of his life. He's a somewhat sympathetic fool, but a dangerous fool nonetheless.
Police tend to be on the scene for the aftermath. It's easy to say 'too little too late' when it comes to second guessing the cops. It's easy to connect the dots and say something ugly going on should have been prevented. That was the case for the star football player who was shot and killed last week. It seems everyone everywhere is mourning his death and thinking, that could have been me. I bet they're also thinking, why there wasn't somebody there with a shotgun at the ready. I know I did. But Joe Horn reminds us of the ever-present downside.
There is a narrow window of time between the beginning of a potentially deadly crime and the time that cops can arrive on scene. Call it the Red Zone. Civilians get caught in the Red Zone all the time. What can we do? What should we do? There's no telling or predicting when or where you might be stuck in this zone. It happened to me. I know my instincts are to defend my neighbors and myself. But I've thought long and hard about whether it's my job to use deadly force. It's not an easy question, because the responsibility is, by definition, the biggest responsibility anyone can face - life or death. In my maturity, I've come to accept more of that responsibility. I wrote:
I have come to accept something about my civil duty and responsibility to the public to my fellow countrymen. In dropping the persona of my bohemian self, in becoming a husband and father, in becoming a middle aged man, I had to acknowledge my own power to be an example, more than I ever thought I'd have to be. Way deep down inside I knew the truth of the phrase 'civilization is where you put it', but I always thought when it came down to it, it would fall to the professionals and experts. I should have known better. It takes all of us, not just rhetorically, but really.
I couldn't say I wanted to be a police officer. I wanted to be a 'bhuddist cop'. I didn't want to disturb my inner peace through the action of bringing peace into the world. I was a bumpersticker pacifist. And because of that I inverted that latent desire in people I didn't respect from courage to cowardice.
Yes I want to own a gun, not to be any old pistol-packing vigilante. But I start to wonder about the men who do, just as I wonder about the men who drive Porsches in my neighborhood, and the men whose sons I admire in the local Scout troop. What is my relationship to my neighbor, and how have I let them down by not knowing them better? What are the slim tendrils of curiosity that I can work into bonds of mutual interdependence? Today I know something I didn't know in 2000 or in 1992.
I'm responsible for war and peace in my community, and I have no right to cry over a loss that I never invested in.
So I'm saying that I understand, I think, what the better part of Joe Horn was thinking. I understand what many people are saying when they call for us to take more responsibility for the safety of our communities. Our sense of violation is physical and visceral. We want to act, and stop that bad thing from happening. It's such a basic human attribute that it's universal. But we tend to forget that this is the same feeling that cops and soldiers have, and why they do what they do every day. We tend to forget that because we get involved in political micromanagement. We look at bureaucracies and start up with the statistical morality game. How many men could have been saved if only...[insert politically motivated, yet heartfelt institutional reform here].
There is a subtle kind of victimology going on here. We complain that the System ain't good enough - that it doesn't protect us from murdering crooks, gun-happy vigilantes, corrupt cops, stupid judges or overzealous prosecutors. It's very hard to get that System to give us true satisfaction, because that only comes from revenge. What we have is a Justice System, not a Revenge System. Lucky for us.
So all we can do is take out verbal revenge and try to get our satisfaction. Here is as good a place as any.
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