| I was never a big Pantera fan, but this irked me... |
[Dec. 10th, 2004|12:11 pm] |
So, on the bus this morning the driver had the radio tuned to 'I100', which is a cheesy classic/ contemporary rock thing with an awful morning DJ.*
Awful Morning DJ (I think his name is Tony but I'll just call him AMDJ) and his vapid female sidekick were reading off the news, and they discussed the Pantera shooting a little bit.
First, they were saying how no one knew the motive yet, and were rattling off some theories about the deranged fan thing, upset about Pantera breaking up, etc. etc... and then AMDJ said something about crystal meth possibly being involved and the vapid sidekick said "Oh, I have no doubt it was" or something to that effect.
Now how the hell would she know? The article on CNN isn't even mentioning crystal meth as a possibility, and even if the idea is being floated other places, I doubt she was there at the event or performed the autopsy on the guy, so there is no way she could possibly be in a position to be sure that crystal meth was involved. That's just sloppy behavior for a newsreader.
Then they segued into how great it was that the cop who was present was able to shoot the guy before even more people got hurt. And they're right, it is great**. But then they started gabbling about how so often cops have it so hard, and they're not allowed to shoot the bad guys without having their hands tied by a bunch of paperwork....
Buzzawha? I'm sorry, but that's apples and oranges. There is a murky grey area in the kinds of cases where a cop shoots because he thinks, or says he thinks, or in the heat of the moment confusedly thinks, that someone has a gun and it turns out they have a wallet or a hoagy or something. In those cases you have to judge what was going on in the cop's mind, which is hard if not impossible in some cases. But AFTER SOMEONE HAS SHOT SEVERAL PEOPLE, it's not hard to follow the thought process that would lead you to think he has a gun! The mean bad liberals aren't trying to stop police from shooting people in situations like this. The only way I could see someone second-guessing the cop in this instance is if he had shot the hostage. Which he didn't. Or possibly, just maybe, if there had been a reasonable method to rapidly bring the shooter into custody with sub-lethal force, which there wasn't on hand from what I can tell. I don't think that this cop has anything to fear from the Big Bad Paperwork (which frankly is there not only to protect the mean bad criminals, but also ordinary folks, from overzealousness and/or self-interested behavior by people whom we've given a great deal of power, including firepower.)
After that I stopped listening.
*At least it wasn't tuned to the country-western station that the other bus driver favors. I LOVE roots music, Johnny Cash, the Carter family, the folk tradition of the rural whites of the south (I also love the folk tradition of the rural blacks of the south, of the urban people of all areas and races, of Mexicans and Brits, etc. I'm a big sucker for folk traditions.) It's precisely for that reason that I fucking LOATHE what corporate Nashville radio country-western has become. Also, for some reason that station had "She's in Love with the Boy" on heavy rotation, and of all the country songs I hate, I think that I hate that one the most, excepting the collected worths of Toby Keith.
**Relatively speaking, of course. Really great would be all this shit not happening.
Crossposted to my livejournal. |
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