The Bullet Counters

"Killing an Unarmed Man." That is how the front-page headline in the New York Times characterized an incident in which a man tried to run over a policeman with his car and was shot by three policemen on the scene, including his intended victim.

An automobile is a deadly weapon. If you are killed by an automobile, you are just as dead as if you had been shot through the heart.

A phrase like "an unarmed man" makes a talking point— as if matters of life and death should be discussed in terms of how you can spin a talking point.

The biggest and most common talking point when the police fire at someone is counting how many bullets they fired. There are politicians, media people and— above all— community activists who can work themselves into a rage over how many bullets were fired.

If we stop and think— which of course the demagogues hope we will never do— it is hard to see any moral difference between killing someone with one bullet or with dozens of bullets.

People who have never fired a gun in their lives say that they cannot understand why the police fired so many bullets. If it is something that they have never experienced, there is of course no reason why they should be expected to understand.

But, even after confessing their ignorance, such people often proceed to spout off, just as if they knew what they were talking about.

It is very easy for a pistol shot to miss, even in the safety and calm of a firing range, much less in a desperate situation where a decision must be made in a split second that can cost you your life or end someone else's life.

In a life-and-death situation, nobody counts how many bullets he is firing, much less how many bullets others are firing. It is not like a western movie, where the hero whips out his six-shooter, fires one time, and the villain drops dead.

A factual study of more than 200 real life incidents where the police fired their guns found that most of the shots missed.

Even at a distance as close as six feet, just over half the shots missed.

Not only can someone who is shooting a pistol for real not know beforehand whether or not his shots will hit the person who poses a danger, often it is not clear afterwards whether the shot hit anybody, depending on where it hit.

Nor does even a clear hit always render the wounded person harmless. When your life is on the line, you keep on firing until you are damn sure it is safe to stop.

Only afterwards does anybody count how many shots were fired. That is when the editorial office heroes give vent to their righteous indignation and their ignorant assumption that better "training" or better "rules" can solve the problem.

Such people seem to have no sense of the tragedy of the human condition, that there are times when decisions have to be made and acted upon immediately, whether or not we know as much as we would like to know or can carry out our decisions as perfectly as we wish we could.

People who are full of excuses for criminals— bad childhood, unemployment, unfair world— sit in the safety and comfort of their editorial offices and presume policemen to be guilty until proved innocent.

And they concoct clever headlines about killing an "unarmed" person, as if someone trying to run you over with a car poses no danger.

Where the person killed is black, as in the present case, that settles it, as far as the politically correct commentators are concerned, even though two of the three policemen who shot him are also black.

Not only do the people who put their lives on the line to protect the rest of us deserve better, we all deserve better than to have our own security undermined by those who undermine law enforcement.

The police themselves can back off on law enforcement when irresponsible charges can ruin their careers and their lives. No one pays a higher price for that than low-income minority communities where crime flourishes.

To find out more about Thomas Sowell and read features by other Creators Syndicate columnists and cartoonists, visit the Creators Syndicate web page at www.creators.com. Thomas Sowell is a senior fellow at the Hoover Institution, Stanford University, Stanford, CA 94305. His Web site is www.tsowell.com.

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