When Circumstances Don’t Matter
My comment, just now, posted here, in reference to one of my previous entries.
"The cops were equipped with deadly force but they weren’t trying to prevent an act of suicide with deadly force."
That’s exactly, fundamentally, what they were doing, and they succeeded. They did not have to do anything. They forced the situation.
The bottom line and my meta-point is that it does not matter the context of the circumstance — whether a murder investigation or a traffic stop. The police employ the explicit or implicit threat of deadly force, and you will ultimately submit to their demands, whether right or wrong, or you could be killed.
The moral issue is whether you have done anything to harm anyone else, or are reasonably likely to do so. If you have not, and — logically excluding the police who have now injected themselves into the situation — are not, then what makes the moral status of the police any greater than that of a common mugger with a gun?
This is not about the law; it’s about right and wrong; and if you in any way believe that one equals the other, then you ought to consider this country’s legal legacy with respect to men owning other men.
(edited for clarity)
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Free The Animal is an eclectic writing project about everything since November 2003. 23 years, 5,500 posts, 5 million words.
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