Ferguson, and Michael Brown: Why the proximate facts of the shooting don’t matter …

… really, to the Activist Left.

With the most recent publication of the New York Times article on the Grand Jury findings and the likely Justice Department decision not to prosecute Officer Darren Wilson for the shooting of Michael Brown, it would seem that with a large portion of the uncertainty surrounding this event dissipating, so too would the causes for emotional inflammation lessen at least proportionally.

The Times reports:

“The officer, Darren Wilson, has told the authorities that during the scuffle, Mr. Brown reached for the gun. It was fired twice in the car, according to forensics tests performed by the Federal Bureau of Investigation. The first bullet struck Mr. Brown in the arm; the second bullet missed.

The forensics tests showed Mr. Brown’s blood on the gun, as well as on the interior door panel and on Officer Wilson’s uniform.

Officer Wilson told the authorities that Mr. Brown had punched and scratched him repeatedly, leaving swelling on his face and cuts on his neck. This is the first public account of Officer Wilson’s testimony to investigators …”

So,  Officer Wilson’s testimony does at this point seem consistent with the forensic results.

But, says the Times, “ … it does not explain why, after he emerged from his vehicle, he fired at Mr. Brown multiple times.”

Now let’s just stop here for a moment and consider where we are even if we discount not only Piaget Crenshaw and Tiffany Mitchell’s versions of the encounter at the police car, but also Dorian Johnson’s potential “spin”.  After all, Dorian Johnson was an accomplice in Michael Brown’s moments-before robbery of Ferguson Market and Liquors . So, just for the sake of argument, let’s also suppose that Johnson’s version of Officer Wilson’s reaching up and out through the police SUV window, and grabbing the 6’4″ tall, 300 lbs,  Michel Brown by the scruff of the neck with one hand , and drawing him back into the police vehicle in order to shoot him, is discounted.

Let’s suppose instead, and based on videotaped fact quite reasonably, that Brown, highly conscious of the strong arm robbery he had just perpetrated, and of the success he had just had in assaulting and technically battering the store clerk into submission during the robbery, figured he would try the same technique on the cop who was trying to tell him to get out of the middle of the road and to stop blocking traffic; a cop who in returning to deal with Brown’s refusal, and while in radio contact with headquarters, would in all probability become more curious regarding Brown’s recent activities and current motives.

Let’s suppose then, that Wilson is telling the substantial truth: that Michael Brown, knocking Officer Wilson back into the SUV as he attempted to emerge, went himself partly in through the car door window in order to batter Wilson into submission. And, that during the course of Brown’s battering Wilson, Wilson and Brown struggled for control of Wilson’s gun, and that, as the forensics show, the gun was discharged twice in the vehicle, spattering the vehicle interior as well as Brown and Wilson, with blood from Brown’s arm.

At which point Brown wounded once in the arm, takes off running; and Wilson, battered about the head and face emerges from the vehicle in pursuit.

Ok …

The first point to make here is that many on the left would object to Wilson shooting Brown under any circumstances: even to save his life in the midst of a potentially life or death struggle.

How do we know this? We know this, because in what they are positing as roughly parallel cases, wherein there was perhaps even  more existential provocation for shooting an assailant, such as for instance, having your head smashed on a concrete walk, leftists and race hustlers have in fact vehemently objected.

In the specific instance just now referenced, the case of Zimmerman-Martin, even after it was demonstrated through imagery, and geometrically, and through the testimony of Trayvon Martin’s so-called “girlfriend”, that Trayvon had to have doubled back on Zimmerman in order to assault him; even after Zimmerman’s bloody skull and broken nose were finally shown to the public; even after the ballistics showed that Zimmerman shot up into Trayvon’s chest while, or virtually while, being battered by Trayvon, the blase’ response of the left – agreed to by our friend the Old Gap Bridger for another example – was that Zimmerman had earlier invaded Trayvon’s space, deserved an assault and battery in response, and should therefore have “taken his beating like a man”.

In other words, to some on the left who still like to pose as fellow citizens instead of declaring as outright enemies, it doesn’t matter if you are being maimed or killed by a member of the imagined victim class. You are to passively suffer it; or maybe, flee. The victim classes’ “right” to inflict mayhem on you, trumps your very right to life.

Now in the case of Officer Wilson and Michael Brown, it is apparent, even according to our hypothetical scenario here, that Brown was shot multiple more times after Officer Wilson drove off Brown’s initial attack.  This additional shooting occurred after Officer Wilson extricated himself from the vehicle and, as was his duty, set off in hot pursuit of the man who had mere seconds before been battering him.

It is at this juncture that (generalizing) a further supposition of the activist left comes into play.  Already under their scheme of things, you are presumed to be obligated to to suffer a beating at the hands of a member of an official victim class without responding with fatal or potentially fatal force. At the very least, the moment any such assailant pauses in his attack on you,  he is presumed immune from any retaliation.

In the specific case of Brown and Wilson, Brown (under our assumed scenario) having unsuccessfully attempted to batter and or kill Officer Wilson in Wilson’s car, was fleeing the failed attempt, and thereby had under collectivist moral sensibility become immune from the leveling of deadly force in retaliation. It would not matter if Brown had just 5 seconds before gouged Wilson’s left eye out and ripped off his right ear. As the leftist activist sees it, the perpetrator is morally immunized [legally is another matter] from physical retaliation through the act of flight.

Furthermore, even if Brown ceased flight, not in order to surrender, but only to resume his assault under the transparent pretext of pretending to surrender, the left would still assert that to kill the assailant prior to a repeat of physical contact, no matter how many warnings to halt were given, was “unjust”.

Why?

The reason is that under their scheme of interpretation, neither Wilson, nor Zimmerman, nor any other person not a member of an official victim class, is even entitled to self-defense.  More broadly, no one is under the leftist system, actually.  But this most especially applies to all such people already considered guilty of capitalism, and economic privilege, and of engaging in the pursuit of self-interest. Those, thinks the leftist, of this bourgeois kind, who are not yet the recipients of an assault or battery or murder, are only awaiting their turn at a proper fate.

Unfortunately this attitude, more broadly predicated and subtly construed, at least superficially, has been creeping steadily into law over some generations now.

There can, it is plain, be no real reasoning across this kind of moral gulf.

One can only resist, or submit.