According to The Washington Post, 933 people were shot and killed by police in 2021. According to the FBI, 59 police officers were killed in the line of duty in that same year. Lee Roy Lollar bewails that four police officers have been killed in January of this year, of twenty-four wounded. That projects to eleven fewer than last year. Given that police kill eleven times as many people as people manage to kill police, we might hope for only 850 deaths by cops in 2022. This does not include people who died while in custody, many handcuffed and on the ground. In any case, the number of police deaths while on duty is lower so far this year.
There are shooting deaths all over this country. Mass shootings, revenge shootings, gang shootings, drunken shootings, drug-deal or other crime-related shootings, shootings for kicks, or good old fashioned money-related or sex-related shootings are everywhere. Police even shoot each other while drunk in cop bars. Mr. Lollar suggests that some shootings in Columbus could be prevented by proper patrolling of high-risk areas (by the way, repo men die while stealing back—err…repossessing— their cars at a frighteningly high rate—not a very convincing example). If the city and county had ten times as many officers as they do, they could not patrol all the hot spots in town to much effect. Thanks to the current interpretation of what constitutes a well-regulated militia, everybody has a gun. Seldom just one. It is a situation that makes any altercation potentially lethal. Good for population control, I guess.
Mr. Lollar goes on to complain about what he calls “the Soros effect.” Poor old rich guy. Billionaires are supposed to give their money to the GOP. I assume, perhaps wrongly, that Mr Lollar means that the Democratic party, in its efforts to enforce the rest of the Bill of Rights, has created an environment in which criminals are generally left unpunished. I do not know where Mr. Lollar gets his notion that 50 percent of drug charges are dismissed, but if they are, it may be that half the cases brought do not have enough evidence to prosecute. Sloppy work by the prosecutor, if so. As for punishment, sociologists, criminologists and others have shown, in study after study, for decades, that punishment does not significantly deter crime. I think that Mr. Lollar’s remark, “we law-abiding citizens are the ones being punished,” points up the real reason for punishment—to reward rectitude by the absence of punishment. If bad guys are not punished, what is the point of my being good? Pastors would, no doubt, have a comment on that. In the nineteenth century, people were hanged for practically everything, including petty theft. That must have really rewarded the innocent, especially as they were usually invited to watch the hangings.
Bill Gillmore, Columbus
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