Uproar over shooting.

A few days ago a man who was wielding a knife that he had just used to stab his wife and another woman was shot by police. Now there are cries that the police used too much force against the man. From the reports I\'ve seen in the papers and heard on the radio, the man had come out of his house (having stabbed two people in the house) and was brandishing the knife in a threatening manner at the police. The man was ordered to drop the knife several times, when he didn\'t, he was shot by the police. Now the way I see it, if after stabbing two people, you start waving you\'re knife at the police, you\'re going to get shot, period. Should there be an investigation? Yes, of course. Any time the police use deadly force an investigation should be held to make sure that the force was appropriate. This will keep police from getting trigger happy. In this situation I think that such an investigation will show that the use of force was appropriate.

Now there is a fact in this case I haven\'t told you about yet. The man involved belonged to an ethnic minority. So currently there are cries that the police shot him because he was a minority. I hate to break it to the community groups about this, but he got shot because he was wielding a weapon that he had moments before shown a willingness to use. Have there been cases where a members of a visible minority group have been treated unfairly by law enforcement? Yes, of course there has been, the police are human beings too and have all the same strengths and weaknesses the rest of us have. Should they be using THIS case to bring attention to this problem? I think no.

This isn\'t like the cases where a member of a minority was driving his/her car home from work and was pulled over by the police because they thought the car was stolen, since no member of that minority would ever own a car. In this case there was a very clear situation. People who brandish bloody knives at police get shot regardless of their ethnicity. To use this case to attempt to right past and future wrongs sends the wrong message to the public. Yes the man who was shot may have been a victim of discrimination in the past, perhaps even by a police officer, just not in this instance. By using this case, the message is, yes he broke the law in a violent manner, but it\'s OK, he\'s part of ethnic group X and to do anything about it would be racist.

This man wasn\'t Rodney King. Police didn\'t pull him over and shoot him because he was a different ethnicity. People have to pick the examples to hook their causes onto carefully, lest they destroy their cause.