Obama again blames the guns, not the shooters or their hatreds

“When people are armed with powerful weapons, unfortunately it makes attacks like these more deadly and tragic,” Obama said. “In the days ahead we’re going to have to consider those realities.”

The police shootings came during a demonstration in Dallas, Texas following the police shooting deaths of black men in Louisiana and Minnesota earlier this week.

After the police killings, he said the reaction in Dallas was “symptomatic of a broader set of racial disparities” in the U.S. We know from statistics that more black men were killed by cops in 2015 than cops were killed for felonious reasons in the same year. More whites are killed by cops than blacks, but as a percentage, blacks are more likely to be killed by police.

But the real issue here is that no innocent person should be gunned down, whether they are a black man or a police officer. And to shoot at law enforcement simply in order to intimidate cops is to attack the law itself.

Here’s the troubling thing about all these shootings by police: Those of us viewing the tragedy after the fact have the benefit of hindsight. We know the victim didn’t have a gun or wasn’t reaching for his gun or was cooperating fully. But we weren’t there in the moment. We don’t know how things appeared from the cop’s perspective. We don’t know what they were told about the situation before they arrived.

Cops are trained to handle situations a number of ways. But due to budget constraints, not all cops are trained as well as we think they should be.

Earlier this year I had the pleasure to be asked to take part in a use-of-force simulator owned and operated by the Law Enforcement Legal Defense Fund. The former police officers I talked to as part of this training simulator told me that because of how much the system cost ($25,000 plus the salary of someone to operate it) many police departments can’t afford it.

I didn’t have any police training before taking part in this simulator, obviously. But it helped me to realize that when you’re in the moment, things aren’t always what they seem. During one simulation, someone took off running, grabbed a person out of a car and drove away. I shot out the tires, as I had seen in movies, but I was promptly informed that you are never, ever to do that.

After the run through we rewatched the tape and my trainer asked me what I was thinking at any given moment. When I said I tried to stop the car because the suspect was hijacking it, the officer presented an alternate scenario. What if the suspect didn’t see or hear me (I had a big problem with talking to suspects, given they were just recordings on a screen), and had just had his car stolen by his own son and his friends? And what if, instead of hijacking the car, he was forcibly removing his child and taking his car back?

It’s something I didn’t think of, and it shows that there could always be alternate explanations for what you’re seeing. But when it’s just you out there, you might not think of them all. It gave me an incredible appreciation for just how difficult a police officer’s job is, and just how hard it is to assign motives to a particular cop in a particular situation when we weren’t there and don’t know what they saw or thought.

After every officer-involved shooting, armchair cops act like the situation was so simple and straightforward that anything the cops did that resulted in injury or death must have been malicious and racist.

And then come those like Obama, who would rather politicize the situation and blame guns when people are responsible. Every killing is different, and requires a rational review of the situation and motives of the killer. It’s just easier for people who don’t know exactly what happened to assign blame based on their own biases.

Ashe Schow is a commentary writer for the Washington Examiner.