By Scott Boyd
The shooting of two police officers in Louisville yesterday highlighted a night of violence that spread through many Democrat-led cities across the nation. Riots were rampant in Louisville, Austin, Portland, Seattle, and the other usual suspects following an announcement of “light” charges against one of the officers who shot and killed Breonna Taylor.
According to The
Blaze, a suspect is in custody:
The interim chief of the Louisville Metro Police
Department said that a suspect was in custody after the shooting of two officers during the violent protests
over the death of Breonna Taylor.
Interim Police Chief Robert Schroeder said in a short
media briefing on Wednesday evening that the two officers were in stable
condition, and that one was undergoing surgery.
Schroeder said that police were responding at about 8:30
p.m. to a call of shots being fired at the corner of First and Broadway streets
when more shots rang out and two police were struck.
Those police were taken to University Hospital with
non-life threatening injuries.
Many took to social media with concerns about why the
riots were allowed to get so out of hand. Law enforcement at every level has
known there would be protests and likely riots for over two days when
Louisville announced they would be releasing the results of the grand jury
investigation of the officers involved in the shooting. As our EIC noted
yesterday, the riots
were definitely going to happen and had very little to do with Breonna Taylor
herself.
There were attacks on law enforcement reported in
multiple cities, including Seattle and Portland. According to Tayler Hansen and Andy Ngo:
Seattle: Antifa rioters
beat a cop on the head who is knocked to the ground. #SeattleRiots #antifa #BLM https://t.co/OVyqe4LsRf
— Andy Ngô (@MrAndyNgo) September
24, 2020
But the violence was not just isolated to attacks on law
enforcement. Many independent journalists reported attacks, including Savanah Hernandez, a journalist based
out of Austin who has gone to several hotspots since the Black Lives Matter and
Antifa riots began in the spring. She was hit in the head and had her phone
stolen.
With all of this unrest, one has to ask why more wasn’t
done to prevent it. Again, they had over 48 hours to prepare. The National
Guard was called into Louisville, but clearly it was not enough to prevent this
level of violence. As journalist Jack
Posobiec said in a video he posted last night, fingers shouldn’t just
be pointed at local and state leaders. FBI Director Christopher Wray did not do
enough to prepare for or prevent the domestic terrorism that everyone knew was
coming.
Anyone who has been paying attention could see this
brewing from a mile away. We had 48+ hours to prepare. It’s inexcusable for
this level of chaos and violence to be happening in America.
_________________
RELATED
ARTICLE
Dems Admit Portland Is a Problem They
Can’t Solve
By Cam Edwards
The nightly violence from the far Left in Portland,
Oregon has become campaign fodder for Republicans rom Donald Trump on down, and in a new piece
at Politico Magazine, several Democrats are reluctantly admitting that they don’t have a good answer to the accusations that politicians
like Mayor Ted Wheeler are soft in their response to the ongoing unrest.
Of course the Politico piece is sure to try
to lay some of the blame for the disorder in Portland on the Right as well,
noting that as agitators have continued with destructive acts of violence on a
nightly basis, conservative groups have responded by coming to the city to
counter the protests.
Portland’s homegrown clash of extremists on
both sides has become so entrenched it is creating a gravitational pull on
others from around the country. Left-wing forces, including antifa and others,
insist that “Riots andlooting” are “a legitimate and profound form of protest,”
as a post on one of the popular far-left regional Facebook pages encouraging violence
recently read. Meanwhile, the pro-Trump group Patriot Prayer, headquartered
north of the city, are eager to confront the opposition. “They go there to
provoke physical confrontation, to try to bait people into street fighting,”
Daryl Johnson, a former Department of Homeland Security official focused on
domestic extremism, said. “Now people are transiting the country, learning from
people in Portland. People may have traveled from Portland to get some battle
experience, so to speak.”
What’s a Democratic mayor like Ted Wheeler to do?
Unsurprisingly, gun control activist Chelsea Parsons from the Center for
American Progress tells Politico that the answer lies in going
after gun owners.
The solution, such as it is, rests largely on
being proactive, rather than simply reacting to the latest convoy of would-be
Minutemen facing off with masked antifa crowds. “In the absence of leadership
federally, it is incumbent on state and local leaders to get in front of it and
at least start educating the community,” Parsons said.
Part of that solution stems not from new
policies, necessarily, but from local leaders familiarizing themselves with the
laws as they exist—especially those laws that prohibitarmed crowds massing near
polling places, or that limit open-carry rights. There are still “widespread
misunderstandings of the scope of the Second Amendment, and the scope of the abilities
to openly carry firearms in the community, and where lines are around the
ability to do this,” Parsons said. Or as Justice Antonin Scalia wrote in the Supreme Court’s
2008 Heller decision expanding the rights of private citizens to
wield firearms, the “Second Amendment right is not unlimited.”
No matter how much gun control activists claim that
“police violence is gun violence,” they always come back to the idea that armed
agents of the State targeting gun owners is the way to make our society safer.
Parsons is actually correct when she says that officials
in Portland need to be proactive in their approach to stopping the violence,
but she’s off-target by focusing on gun owners. People have a right to keep and
bear arms. They don’t have a right to try to burn down a federal courthouse or
go rampaging through the downtown streets destroying every business they can
break into.
Confrontations—and escalation—will almost
certainly continue in Portland and its environs, from the steps of the Oregon
capitol to the Confederate memorial just a few miles north of the city. “I
thought some of the recent killings might cause some people to pause for a
moment, take a breath,” Pitcavage said. “But that doesn’t seem to have
happened, and I don’t see any reason for it to go away in the conceivable
future.”
“We’re in for a long six to eight months,”
Johnson said, “and maybe even longer than that.”
It didn’t have to be that way. Ted Wheeler and Gov. Kate
Brown have had years to let the far-Left in Portland know that violence
wouldn’t be tolerated. Instead, he gave them space to riot and excused their violence
by blaming Trump and conservatives for the destructive actions of Antifa,
allowing the unrest to grow exponentially worse. How do you solve a problem
like Portland? Thanks to the continued cowardice of Wheeler and Brown, all of
the easy options are now off the table.
https://jonsnewplace.wordpress.com/2020/09/23/dems-admit-portland-is-a-problem-they-cant-solve/
