NICHOLAS REARDON IS AN AMERICAN HERO FOR SHOOTING 16-YEAR-OLD MA'KHIA bRYANT,

A Great New Idea for Reducing Police Shootings 

 

By Dov Fischer

 

The American Spectator

April 26, 2021

 

Our country’s social stasis is disrupted terribly by police shootings. Now that police wear body cams and members of the public scour the streets for interesting events to film on smartphones and then to post to social media, more police shootings get disseminated than ever before. When the target of the shooting is Black, we become infused with the news. When the target is White, we instantly move on because a White target generates few clicks and followers and fails to accord with the left-media narrative. In the same way, on the rare occasion that an Arab Muslim is attacked, the media run wild, but when a Haredi Jew is attacked in broad daylight on the streets of Brooklyn it barely merits a mention in the Food & Wildlife section.

As with the left-media cartel’s preferred and disdained targets, it is much the same when it comes to shooters who generate their interest. A Bernie Sanders supporter shot Rep. Steve Scalise at a baseball practice session. Not interesting, so just one story. Gabby Giffords was shot by her own  Democrat supporter. Not interesting. A nut with orange hair shot up a movie theater showing Batman. Not interesting. An Arab Muslim shot up a military site. Workplace violence. The active Colorado supermarket shooter a few weeks ago generated a storm of interest. Then the media found out that the arrested guy is named Ahmad Al Aliwi Alissa. End of that coverage.

If a mentally ill Caucasian shoots up a bunch of sleazy massage parlors that offer services not covered by health insurance as part of a medically prescribed rehab program, and if those operations happen to be sites whose women the shooter actually preferred patronizing, and if they happen to be women of Korean or other Asian descent, suddenly we have a national campaign generated by Democrats and their left-media cartel regarding anti-Asian hate. These campaigns “against anti-Asian violence” get launched and intensified by the same exact anti-Asian bigots on the left who keep worthy and deserving Asian-Americans out of many of our best universities. Thus it is fine to discriminate against Chinese Americans, Japanese Americans, Korean Americans, and Vietnamese Americans in our universities and at the workplace — but let’s take to the streets to defend those neighborhood massage parlors.

This is America 2021. Of course we are amid a horrible once-in-a-century pandemic, but systemically we have no real societal problems — so we make up our own problems. With a generation and more of comparative peace outside the Muslim Arab world, with any foreign entanglements adequately handled by our heroes in our all-volunteer army, no one of college age has faced a military draft for half a century. The last remaining vestiges of racism in America ended at least a quarter century ago, as we institutionalized giving preferential treatment to discrete minorities applying for schools, for jobs, for government loans, for housing assistance. We even elected a Black head of government — twice — something that no other White country has done: not England, not France, not Italy, not Scotland, not Ireland, not Germany, not Greece, not Belgium, not Russia. Throughout Asia: China, Japan, Korea, and Vietnam always have been headed only and exclusively by people in the dominant racial and ethnic majority. Meanwhile, the rest of the world — except where Muslim terror dominates — is so much improved racially and ethnically. There is no more apartheid. No more military junta in Greece or in Chile. Just repressive and murderous communist dictatorships like the ones in China, Cuba, and Venezuela, but the left-media cartel, the Democrats, and academia don’t care about those.

The Left has absolutely no real problems it can find in today’s America, so it fabricates new ones that do not exist:  Systemic racism. White privilege. A new falsified history called “The 1619 Project,” to be taught to children instead of such toxicities as cursive writing and Dr. Seuss.

They fabricate “systemic racism.” They start canceling conservative professors, as though students’ minds will be broadened in an echo chamber where they do not get challenged with a single antithesis in the five or six years they vegetate for their undergraduate degrees. The Left changes school curricula to replace reading, writing, and arithmetic with critical race theory and gender-fluidity studies. Faced with a  single academic sanctuary from the madness — the final redoubt for normalcy in “STEM” courses in science, technology, engineering, and mathematics — they now advance woke math, where precise accuracy no longer will exist. Thus, 8+6 = 14 … but that is only “your truth.” By contrast, “my truth” is that 8+6 = 3. If you insist otherwise, you are manifesting White privilege. And, of course, racism.

This is America 2021. Nothing is honest anymore. Maybe it never was. Really, the news has been fake for at least a century. The New York Times covered up the Holocaust. They covered up Stalin’s Holodomor mass murder of Ukrainians. Hearst did not really start the 1898 Mexican–American War, but he leveraged his newspapers to help foment the mood. Fittingly, the highest prize journalists give each other is named for the Father of Yellow Journalism: Joseph Pulitzer. What other field of endeavor names its highest honor for its most disreputable player? Does Broadway name its Tony Awards instead for someone who repeatedly forgot the lines on stage? Yes, Meryl Streep publicly celebrated Harvey Weinstein as “God” to a cheering, agreeing Hollywood audience. But does Hollywood name its award for Ed Wood, the guy who gave us Plan 9 from Outer Space, Glen or Glenda, and a posse or rafter of other golden turkeys?

The “news” that is plated for us mostly is fake. It is not the Torah. It is an enterprise that seeks to generate profit among us by baiting us into clicking and into becoming “followers” and ginning up their ratings, all while the media also seek to sway public opinion. Hitler proved with Der Stürmer that an entire country could be brainwashed and turned politically by newspapers. Stalin proved the same with Izvestia and Pravda. Americans have proven no different, no less gullible and malleable. A concerted full-court press by CBS, NBC, ABC, PBS, CNN, MSNBC, the New York Times, the Washington Post, Twitter, and Facebook is enough to sway elections. Lies may abound before the voting, with other uncomfortable news stories suppressed like the one about Hunter Biden’s laptop. Then, after the final election tallies are announced, a day or two of apologies for lying can be offered to Ted Cruz and Josh Hawley at Senate hearings, and that refreshes the ground until next time. We live amid lies.

High among today’s lies in an era when America no longer has racial bias — except insofar as keeping worthy and deserving Asian-Americans from gaining as many university admission as they have earned and deserve, by attributing to them unmeasurable stereotypical attributes (too quiet, not curious, too insular) — are lies regarding policing.

We Jews have a joke that runs a century and more, in a wide range of iterations, about Jewish mothers wanting their sons to be doctors and mourning the news when a son announces he will be only an attorney or, if an utter disappointment, an accountant. So be it. But is it fathomable how any sane person today, of any nationality or ethnicity or religion or creed, would sign up to be a police officer? How explain it? Why would anyone who has not already committed the years to police academy and to the years needed for pension eligibility, now choose such a career?

They are among our best. The police are selfless and respond before anyone else. They protect us. They maintain the peace. Without them, our entire society would be a jungle of predators. Data show what happens in cities where they lose popular support. When a shooter is loose, we turn to the police. When a spouse is beating up another, the police risk personal harm to bring th peace. When a senior citizen who is ill, infirm, and alone falls on the floor, a 911 phone call brings First Responders from the police or fire department to the scene to raise the person gently, clean him or her compassionately, and place him or her on a bed. As I was taught as a boy in yeshiva elementary school — and as still is true today: the police officer is your friend.

The police are to be loved and to be honored. Blue Lives Matter. Feel for them. Tell them you support them. When a journalist is in personal mortal danger, they don’t call the news desk; they call 911. Just give a careful listen to Pelosi and Ocasio after January 6: Sure, defund all the other police and ICE — but beef up the Capitol Police.

And yet the inevitable police shootings of civilians continue to happen. One asks oneself, as if talking to a cop: “For goodness sakes, Fool, why did you discharge that gun? What’s wrong with you? Didn’t you get the memo?”

Say His Name: Nicholas Reardon — American hero.

There was a news story the other day about some 16-year-old sweet innocent Black girl in Ohio named Ma’Khia Bryant. She had called the police for them to protect her, darling that she is, but instead those racist animals came and murdered her in cold blood. “What is wrong with them?” one may well have wondered. And then the extra few seconds of video came out. The original news story had been all lies. The officer, Nicholas Reardon, turns out to be an American hero. Were it not for him, a young Black lady would have been brutally murdered in broad daylight, stabbed to death. If hat person ever has any more children, they all should be named “Nicholas Reardon,” even if female. That brave and heroic officer risked his career — which he surely knew he was imperiling by discharging his gun — to stop a vicious knife-wielding person at the very last possible moment. Ma’Khia Bryant got exactly what our society expects when people try to stab others in broad daylight. Nicholas Reardon is an American hero.

Maybe some other stuff will come out in the media as the left-news cartel now research all they can to discredit him. It would be a terrible shame if there is a social media post out there, or something he said in elementary school, that will tarnish what he did by shooting Ma’Khia Bryant exactly as he did. But at that moment of truth he did what he was trained to do, what we hope a police officer will do as he or she sees a knife-wielding stabber in the act of stabbing perilously: he shot to take down the stabber. Good for him.

At a split-second moment like that, a cop cannot be expected to aim his pistol at the knife blade. This is not skeet shooting at the Olympics, and the slightest miss would kill the intended victim instead. If the cop aims for the legs of the stabber whose arm already is thrusting forward, with knife inches from the intended victim’s chest, the murderous stabbing will be completed. Officer Reardon is a hero.

It is difficult to fathom what motivates such heroism, such willingness to risk one’s life on the beat every single day and to face a career-ending media onslaught when the inevitable law-enforcement moment comes when one is called upon to act. But this much may be known: There is a very creative way to reduce these shootings, going forward. It is Nobel Peace Prize–worthy: The Fischer Plan to Reduce Police Shootings ®:

1. Don’t wield a knife in broad daylight and start to stab someone as a police officer says to stop.
2. Don’t wrestle a Taser gun out of a police officer’s hands and then shoot the Taser at him as he pursues you.
3. If a police officer starts cuffing you and says “Get into the car,” then get into the car.
4. If a police officer enters a home searching for drugs, don’t shoot at the officer.
5. Don’t (i) wear bullet-proof armor and (ii) then crash your car into a police car and (iii) then position your hand behind your back as though holding a firearm and (iv) then, while glaring at the cop in front of you, start counting “3, 2, 1.”
6. Don’t wrestle a police officer for his gun while he is arresting you and placing you in his car.
7. When a cop stops you, never argue with him or her. Maybe briefly explain your side of the incident, and maybe not even that.
8. When encountering a cop, know when to hold, know when to fold, but never walk away, and, for goodness sakes, don’t run. There’ll be time enough for accounting later with a lawyer and judge.
9. Even if the cop is a bad apple — and there absolutely are police bad apples, as there are in all fields of endeavor including even kindergarten teachers, clergy, and medical doctors — remember that he or she has a gun, handcuffs, and a badge. Just suck it up. Don’t test them. If they want to see your registration and proof of insurance, and it is in your glove compartment or inside your coat, tell them so respectfully and ask their permission to open that compartment or to put your hand inside that coat. Later, if they have been evil, you can get them fired and can sue for damages. To everything there is a season and a time for every purpose under the heavens.

Has any other worthy advice been overlooked here? Feel free to add it below, and maybe we can share a Nobel Peace Prize together.