Cooper: Please spare the tired rhetoric

A Dallas police officer, who did not want to be identified, takes a moment as she guards an intersection in the early morning Friday after a shooting in downtown Dallas killed five members of the police force.
A Dallas police officer, who did not want to be identified, takes a moment as she guards an intersection in the early morning Friday after a shooting in downtown Dallas killed five members of the police force.

More stories on the Dallas attack

Not with this shooting. Surely, he wouldn't go there. Not with five policemen, who were trying to help facilitate a peaceful protest over other police shootings, dead and six more wounded.

But he did.

President Barack Obama, speaking from Poland where he's attending a meeting of NATO member nations, again trotted out his worn plea for gun control after Thursday night's bloodbath ambush in Dallas.

"When people are armed with powerful weapons," he said, "unfortunately it makes attacks like these more deadly and tragic. In the days ahead, we're going to have to consider these realities."

You'd think Obama would have learned after his tenure as president has seen a map of the United States virtually drawn by bullet holes: Newtown, Conn.; Charleston, S.C.; Orlando, Fla.; Chattanooga; Dallas; Fort Hood, Texas; Tucson, Ariz.; San Bernadino, Calif.

The guns, in almost every case, were obtained legally. The proposals that were put forth as "common-sense" gun control measures wouldn't have made a whit of difference in the shootings.

Where is any rational thinking from the administration on this issue? Although we'd prefer to never again hear of another mass shooting, we'd like to hear just once following one incident of the comprehensive measures the administration was taking to round up guns from known criminals, gang members and suspected terrorists. Sure there might be constitutional worries, but when has that stopped the administration where other policy issues are concerned?

As the administration is wont to do when it concerns radical terrorists who are Muslims, we want to hear it said what a minuscule number of gun owners use their weapons in mass shootings. We also long to hear the words about the tiny number of police personnel who kill black men (it's fewer than the number who kill whites, incidentally) compared to the number who put their lives on the line daily to make the streets safer for all of us.

The problem, the president should be able to comprehend, is that every police shooting and every mass shooting are different. Dylan Roof in Charleston, S.C., apparently didn't like blacks. Nidal Hasan in Fort Hood didn't like Americans. Omar Mateen in Orlando didn't like homosexuals. Micah Xavier Johnson in Dallas wanted to kill whites.

Some shooters had been treated for mental problems. Some were as normal as your next-door neighbor.

Lumping them together and attempting to blame the guns for the mass shootings and race for the police shootings only lessens the president's credibility and effectiveness in leading the country through divisive times.

Indeed, Obama's statement after the police shootings of Alton Sterling in Louisiana and Philando Castile in Minnesota will only sell more of the guns he abhors and convince people he misunderstands the scope of the problem.

"The data shows black folks are more vulnerable to these kinds of incidents," he said. "We have seen tragedies like this too many times.

"There's a big chunk of our fellow citizenry that feels as if because the color of their skin they're not being treated the same," he added. "And that hurts. And that should trouble all of us."

But Obama wasn't finished.

"[The shootings are] symptomatic of a broader set of racial disparities that exist in our criminal justice system," he said.

The evening after Obama spoke those words, Johnson in Dallas said he was angry about recent shootings by police and "wanted to kill white people."

Since Johnson was blown up by a police robot after negotiations with police broke down, we'll never know whose words - if any - inspired him.

But we still long to hear more practical solutions from the president - perhaps an executive order, instead of allowing immigrants longer stays in the country or approving the release of money to terror sponsor Iran, authorizing money for body cameras and training for police. If certain police are targeting minorities, let's use those cameras to ferret them out. Let's get police on the same page in situations they can anticipate.

Unfortunately, every situation in a police shooting can't be anticipated and every mass shooting can't be prevented. But we have to find ways to get beyond the rhetoric. Until the American people - red, yellow, black, brown and white - believe they have a president who has their back, all their backs, it'll be difficult to feel safer.

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