Crisis in Ferguson

While racial divide exists, police shootings stem primarily from Second Amendment

By Patrick Vaillancourt, Senior Columnist

You can’t help but feel for the people of Ferguson, Missouri, now in the throes of a massive community divide. The killing of an unarmed teenager, Michael Brown, in August rocked the city, and now, the police officer, Darren Wilson, responsible for the killing will not answer for it through any kind of justice.

I’m not qualified to offer a legal opinion on the grand jury decision on November 24 to not indict Officer Wilson, but will simply state that there are many notable flaws in the process.

There is no question that Ferguson suffers from a racial inequality, and while many believe that the killing of Brown was racially motivated, there seems to be a surprising lack of interest in perhaps the single-greatest reason Officer Wilson open fired on an unarmed teen. It’s the very same reason that prompts police to use lethal force throughout the United States.

The United States of America is the only jurisdiction in the world which provides a constitutionally protected right to all of its citizens to possess and use a firearm. The gun control debate is a decades-long fight between lobbyists and Congress, yet it seems to be ironically absent from any discussion of events in Ferguson.

Yes, it’s true that Brown was unarmed at the time he was killed. However, some need to place themselves in the shoes of Officer Wilson, patrolling the streets of a city that has protections for gun owners and gun rights entrenched in its constitutional law.

The debate would be over if it had been revealed that the deceased teen was in fact carrying a weapon. The fact that he was unarmed makes his death more tragic. On the flip side, the tragedy for Officer Wilson here is that he also needed to protect himself not only against the threat of bodily harm (as was heard in testimony before the grand jury) but also against the very real possibility that this teenager might have a gun in his possession.

The Second Amendment is responsible for the tragedy in Ferguson as well as countless other shootings across the United States. Those who profess their rights as gun owners do so by failing to accept the spirit by which the Second Amendment to the US Constitution was established. The Hobbesian worldview and the revolutionary nature of the American founders is evidence that the Second Amendment’s spirit was meant only for ensuring the freedom of its people from a tyrannical government.

There is absolutely no difference, with the exception of creed and skin colour, between those people who bastardize the spirit of the Second Amendment and those who bastardize the Islamic faith to rationalize the killing of innocent people around the world. It’s also ironic that those most critical and fearful of the Islamic extremists, to the point of being racist about it, are those same people so passionate about their constitutional arguments permitting them to “bear arms.”

In towns and cities across America, there is still the existence of racial disparity. The racial dynamic must not be overlooked, but the greatest flaw is the one that is least discussed in the case of Ferguson; that the right to firearms compels those in law enforcement to second-guess any situation they face, from the pettiest to the most serious crimes.