The Shootings in Dallas

Richard Ebeling emails:

Dear Bob,

I participated in the July 12, 2016 “Libertarian Angle,” webinar sponsored by the Future of Freedom Foundation, with the Foundation’s president, Jacob G. Hornberger, on the topic: “The Shootings in Dallas.”

This week’s focus is on the recent tragic events in Dallas, Texas in which five white police officers were killed and others wounded by a lone black gunman motivated by a desire for retribution for the earlier shootings of two black men by police in two different states.

Our “take” is that government actions have numerous unintended consequences. For decades the federal government has further politicized race relations in America by collectivizing the status of individuals through regulations, controls and redistributions that have classified people by a racial benchmark for privilege or penalty. And, thus, the “sins” of one member of a designated collective group – any, especially males, within the black community and every policeman regardless of location and circumstances – falls upon all in that group.

A “war on drugs” has turned portions of American cities and communities into war zones in which proper rules of police engagement between law enforcement and citizens have heavily broken down with a militarization of police forces in a setting in which there has been a weakened, proper understanding and protection of individuals’ rights under the law and the Constitution, and many in the African-American community feel this intensely.

Finally, it has been said that one of the dangers of Western “recruits” going off to the Middle East to join the Islamic State is that they are trained in military warfare and terrorism and intensified in a radical and violent ideology that they may bring back to their home country. For more than a decade, a generation of American recruits have been trained and sent off to fight a designated group of religious radicals and political enemies in Afghanistan and Iraq, in a setting in which life requires a reduction of everyone into “them vs. us” in a setting of life or death, in which the individual easily is reduced in or disappears from the landscape.

We should not be surprised, therefore, if one or more individuals “radicalized” by domestic collectivist categorizes of “white,” “black,” Hispanic,” or “Asian,” and trained in military combat with marksmanship accuracy in a setting of “us” versus the “enemy” return from a war zone (and maybe combined with psychological problems of his own), proceeds to exact revenge and retribution on one collective (“police”) considered the enemy or threat to one’s own collective (“black people”).

Best,
Richard