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The Deceptive Narrative About the Charlotte Shooting
The ongoing rioting in Charlotte led me to look into the details of the shooting earlier this week. The most notable thing is the media’s bizarre focus on whether Keith Lamont Scott (the deceased) was pointing his gun at the police when he was shot. This seems utterly irrelevant to me. Are people really suggesting that a police officer is not legitimately threatened by a man with a gun in his hand, who is failing to comply with police instructions to disarm, until he actually points the gun at the officer?
Here’s a quick review of the facts, as they appear thus far. Officer Brentley Vinson, with other officers, arrived at an apartment complex parking lot around 4 PM on Tuesday, September 20, 2016, searching for a suspect in a case wholly unrelated to Mr. Scott. The officers saw Scott getting out of a parked car while holding a handgun. The officers gave loud, clear, verbal commands to drop the weapon. Scott did not comply and Officer Vinson fatally shot Scott.
Here is an overview of recent headlines focusing on the pointing the gun question:
Keith Scott Shooting: No ‘Definitive’ Evidence He Pointed Gun at Cops, Chief Says – NBC News
Police Say It’s Unclear if Charlotte Man Pointed Gun Before Shooting – ABC News
Charlotte police chief: Keith Scott shooting video ‘does not definitively show gun pointed’ – UPI
There’s No ‘Definitive’ Proof Keith Scott Pointed a Gun at Officers – The Atlantic
Charlotte police chief: Video does not ‘definitively’ show pointed gun – BBC News
Charlotte Police Chief: Video Doesn’t Show “Definitive” Proof Keith Scott Pointed a Gun at Cops – Slate
Charlotte Police: Unclear if Man Pointed Gun Before Fatal Shooting – Yahoo News
CMPD chief: Video provides no ‘definitive’ evidence that victim pointed gun before officer shot him – The Charlotte Observer
Charlotte Police: Video Doesn’t Show ‘Definitive Evidence’ Keith Scott Pointed Gun At Police – WUNC (North Carolina public radio)
Charlotte police chief not certain whether gun pointed at police – Fox8 (local TV station)
All of this strikes me as an intentionally deceptive effort to blame Officer Vinson and exonerate Scott, using a wildly unrealistic standard of police restraint. It seems to me that when a police officer confronts an armed suspect, gun in hand, who refuses to comply with lawful orders to disarm, the officer is justified in shooting immediately.
It’s as if the media desperately want to report: “White Cop Guns Down Innocent Unarmed Black Man!” Oh, he was armed? Let’s try “White Cop Guns Down Innocent Black Man with Holstered Weapon!” You mean it wasn’t holstered? “White Cop Guns Down Innocent Black Man with Gun in Hand Who Wasn’t Pointing It at Cop!” will do.
If there was definitive video evidence that Scott was pointing the weapon at the cops, I imagine that these irresponsible news outlets would be reporting: “White Cop Guns Down Innocent Black Man Who Hadn’t Yet Pulled the Trigger!”
Of course, it wasn’t even a white cop in this instance. Officer Vinson is black. Not that it should make any difference to us, on the side of sanity. But you would think that the proponents of the vicious falsehood that white cops are eagerly gunning down innocent blacks might realize that an incident doesn’t fit their narrative when the cop himself is black.
I’ve saved the best for last, and by “best,” I mean “worst.” Is it any surprise that it comes from the New York Times, a former newspaper? Not to be outdone by the misleading narrative of lesser news outlets, the Times headline asserts:
Charlotte Police Shooting Video Not ‘Definitive,’ Chief Says
No, the Chief did not say that. He said the video “does not give me absolute, definitive visual evidence that confirms that a person is pointing a gun.” The video evidently shows Scott holding a gun in his hand.
The Times does go on to explain this in the news story. But it makes its real point with its misleading headline peddling the Left-wing, Black Lives Matter narrative.
Who cares if Charlotte burns, anyway? They have an election to win!
Published in Policing
“The police planted that evidence. He was just reading his Koran”
according to his mom.
Media damned itself by believing the family member when she said the thug was reading a book in his car. He wasn’t the reading type.
And how does the family keep somebody that is mentally impaired from a gun? How are they at fault?
. . . how/why was he driving a car, and carrying a gun? Well, maybe not so impaired, after all . . .
Probably just “disabled” enough to get that Social security disability check every month.
So far, we do not know the man’s state of mind, or what he was taking those medications for.
Is it possible that the “it” his wife was asking him not to do was suicide by cop?
CNN has posted this on their website:
Apparently The New York Times and The Washington Post did report this at the very end of lengthy articles in their print stories.
It is certainly possible that his wife might not have known he had a handgun. There are indications that Mr. Scott has a more extensive criminal history than just the one reported Texas conviction, but I have not seen that confirmed on more mainstream websites. There are stories on what I call “blog sites”. I’ll withhold judgement on multiple arrests and convictions until I see it confirmed by more mainstream media sources that can produce pdf’s from courts.
In the video, the wife says he has TBI, which some talking head said is traumatic brain injury.
The really depressing aspect is that no Black person seems to accept the facts of the incident. I saw one ” eyewitness ” who swore that the cop that shot him was white, and they snuck a Black cop in and said he did it. Other ” eyewitnesses” to the shooting of the protestor swore that the cops shot him, with rubber bullets. Can a rubber bullet pierce a skull?
Possibly, it is much more likely to pierce a skull than logical reasoning.
Why aren’t Americans asking ourselves and each other why this kind of history is so common for black men? Why aren’t we concerned with the waste of life that is represented not only by the victims of murder, but by the perpetrators whose lives are also wasted.
It is, very simply, an outrage that Americans are still having this whole non-conversation; whispering sotto voce about racial disparities in crime, educational attainment, income, rates of single motherhood. We should be done with this by now.
Kate, The left can’t care because they would have to cure, and having to cure means identifying the cause. That would mean their ideology would be proved false. Also, these are their dependent pets, to be kept a dependent voting block.
Could it possibly be that it is not the country in general that is responsible for this but is, instead, the responsibility of the black population itself?
Sometimes I have the feeling that the master-slave relationship is kept in being by do-gooders among the white “elite” who are determined to remake the culture of our black citizens into one resembling their own.
I consider that it is our responsibility to clear any obstacles to the advancement of our black sisters and brothers; but that being accomplished, they need to make their own way. I want them cheered and encouraged when their efforts improve the whole society, reproached and discouraged when they do not. But always we must require everyone in the country to function within the bounds of the law. At least, that is my considered judgment.
We should be shouting it from the rooftops. Maybe Black America will finally wake up and change itself, because nothing else is going to make a damn bit of difference.
I know that healthcare fraud is a huge thing but according to the Charlotte observer neighbors saw him walking around with a cane and a book. I would take this report with a large bag of potato chips (a grain of salt simply isn’t big enough). It seems that the first people to go to the media are usually wrong. That, or the media doesn’t report all the different views.
Think of all that is useful that we could talk about; improving mental health, how families can improve the living conditions of people with disabilities, how to talk to cops, why suicide by cop is horribly common in the black community.
Suicide by cop seems to have some statistical heft behind it. Black people are less likely to commit suicide than any other group but they have extremely high murder rates and other violent criminality. Probably, alot of violent deaths in the black community are driven by a suicidal impulse.
You all may have read this already but this particular article in NRO does a good job of summing up how ludicrously powerful and wrong the narrative is.
They blame slavery but black families did not fall apart until after the progressive social programs were implemented in the 60s. All progress went retrograde then. Dems blame us to get voters and blacks who are losers find it easier to blame us and the country rather than themselves. In fairness to many, that is what they were taught.
The ratty elastic on felon Scott the violent felon’s ankle holster suggest that he was accustomed to illegally carrying a gun, and as @dougwatt mentioned, CNN reported that a gun (that looks like it will fit in the ankle holster from subsequently released photos) with his DNA on it. Apparently Scott’s widow may have been… mistaken.
If it’s not an illegal act (and open carry in NC is not), it’s not suspicious. By definition.
Terry v. Ohio allows for stopping, questioning and frisking a person whom the police reasonably suspect is committing a crime or is about to. Openly carrying a gun in a place in which it is perfectly legal to do so does not in any way give police reasonable suspicion to believe a crime is about to be committed.
Refusal to comply is certainly an option when orders are not lawful. The assumption that anything an LEO utters is a lawful order is sad commentary on the government’s, the media’s, many LEO’s, and, most appallingly, the citizenry’s opinion about individual rights.
If I were to believe in conspiracy theories, I would take a wild guess that the media is manipulating the Right’s respect and honor of Law Enforcement to desensitize us to socially stigmatizing open-carry and, in the end, supporting regulatory law against it.
I say this because at the end of the day, here is a highly conservative, pro-2a, standard Republican blog/zine arguing that a citizen carrying a gun is justified in being shot by law enforcement for carrying a gun.
Do I think this guy was innocent? I do not know. I really don’t. I have no idea what details are missing or if we will even know about them and either does anyone else here. But the fact that, in the absence of that information, we default to defending the cops because the citizen was carrying a gun says we really don’t have any idea what being pro-2a actually means.
Rod Dreher’s blog at The American Conservative provides some additional context for this incident:
http://www.theamericanconservative.com/dreher/in-keith-scotts-neighborhood/
I’m a little confused here. Is open carry a holstered handgun that’s in plain view? Or is open carry holding a handgun in your hand as walk around town, a parking lot, grocery store, a park, or wherever? If your not at a gun range why would you carry a handgun in your hand rather than in a holster? Why do you remove a gun from a holster?
Is it unreasonable for someone to hold a gun when they feel threatened? Leaving Scott out of this, if an average citizen feels threatened by another entity with guns who are shouting at him to drop it and he does not comply because he lacks trust, are they entitled to shoot that citizen? I would really like to know – are the gun wavers screaming justified in shooting a man with a gun at his side while claiming self-defense? For a regular, every day citizen?
At what point do we acknowledge that we actually have no right to protect ourselves from the government? Or acknowledge that shooting people for holding guns violates 2nd amendment rights?
How can you leave Scott out of it? Under Carolina law he is not allowed to possess a firearm? He’s a convicted felon, convicted of a violent crime. This was a specific incident that involved police officers and someone who was holding a deadly weapon and refused lawful commands to let go of the weapon.
How much of this information was on hand as he got out of his car? How much of that did the cops on the scene know BEFORE he was shot? Because all of this sounds like information obtained after the fact.
Which means he was shot for having a gun. Not because he broke the law.
And the arguments presented here carry that out. No one here is arguing that he unlawfully had a gun. They are arguing that he had a gun. Do you spot the missing word?
The Scott case is tangential to me. The method that conservatives are arguing is absolutely concerning to me as they are arguing away a right to open carry permits by suggesting that someone who is simply holding a gun is life-threating. If you had shot him, you’d be on trial in Sanford, FL.
That’s exactly the point. There shouldn’t be any legal difference between a private citizen and a police officer as regards the determination on whether the shooting is justified (there are differences in penalties in many jurisdictions but that’s a separate issue).
I’m not certain if you are in agreement here or not. Do you think the avg citizen is justified in shooting someone who is holding a gun? There is a difference between threatening and life-threatening. One is a persuasion tactic of intimidation and the other is a real danger.
The avg citizen would not be able to meet the burden of self-defense if all the other person was doing was holding a gun. You can not tell me there were no other options when the man was not pointing a gun or shooting after we somehow managed to bring in a terror suspect alive after an actual gun fight.
He wouldn’t have been shot if the justice system had kept him in jail
I don’t either a police officer or private citizen is justified in shooting someone just holding a gun (that is, absent other aggravating factors).