Many in North America are asking how the suspect did not end up dead in a hail of police gunfire. It contrasts with incidents in the US where police have shot and killed unarmed people.
It's simply a question of culture. The police culture in Canada, and in other places, is more civilized. The police culture in the US is not.
People in the US were brought up on Shane and Clint Eastwood and every kind of "I'm wearing dark glasses and I'll kill ya" heroes, and violent action is deeply embedded in the DNA. apparently. We know that violence begets more violence. It has become customary to accept such violence in the US because of any number of things, esp. "the law". Naturally, "the law" has become more important than God, and while the poor, destitute, unfortunate and the underprivileged somehow trip and fall on the wrong side of "the law" and pay a serious price, anyone who has enough clout (political, financial, legal etc) gets to do whatever they want as long as the clout lifts them above "the law". Sometimes there are accidents and they succumb too. When they do, their friends use them as examples of how fair a society we are. But we are not.
Regarding people who commit such crimes and invite police action, we can only guess at what makes them cross a one-way boundary. Once across the boundary, their thinking is no longer guided by the ethic of the society in which they function. Ethics are easy to violate if your cultural inflection is different. For example, Chinese students routinely cheat on homework assignments and they struggle to understand the problem. As a result, their American counterparts (who at one time may never have considered such a thing) have begun to do the same. One culture influences another, and people yield to pressure.
The issue of moral violation is a harder one. We have to understand if they have principles, and what these principles are. These principles are informed by the society in which they grew up, their families, their religions. These are much harder to influence from the outside even if it were possible.
I've never seen "the law" as a great regulator. If that thing on the inside does not work right, then no amount of "the law" can get it to work right. All the fixing has to be done on the inside, and that means by the person and no one else. Others can only help, and for this others have to have an unusual capacity for understanding. The violence we see both ways (e.g., the looting rampages when there is a hurricane or some social unrest) is a symptom of this problem. |
