I’ve noticed that some supporters of gun rights have grown tired of my editorial position that law enforcement officer-involved shootings—especially the more controversial and high-profile incidents—are important for us to cover and discuss.

There are those who would rather Bearing Arms instead spends its time on gun, gear, and training reviews (which we do intent to ramp up), or talking more about state and local gun legislation. These are all valid opinions.

But the simple fact of the matter is that there are multiple dynamics at play in the nationwide “conversation” about police shootings that are coming to a head culturally.

Some of the issues are obvious, and some which are not so obvious, and all of these issues are more important to our gun rights than many of us seem to understand.

Teachable Moments

While the prudent among us attempt to stay far away from the “bad” parts of town and areas where we expect to find crime, proactive and effective law enforcement officers actively seek out and patrol these areas in hopes of apprehending those who break the law and prey on the young, the old, the weak and the infirm. Since officers seek out these bad guys, they are going to have more interactions both mundane and extreme with the worst elements of our society.

We don’t get to hear about their good days, and the bad days of law enforcement officers often become news. The mainstream media seems to be interested in making that bad day even worse as they attempt to create more click-baiting, cop-hating articles.

We try to find the “teachable moments” in these law enforcement interactions, hoping that they may transfer knowledge of what to do (or what not to do) to the “regular Joe,” whether that person is a serious student of the gun who carries a concealed handgun daily, or who simply has a gun in the home for family protection. We don’t want your bad day becoming your worst day… or your last one.

We hope that the experiences of these officers—some good, some bad, some ambiguous and entirely debatable—can help you see just how quickly an encounter can go from seemingly routine to deadly, in hopes that the experiences of others can educate you and keep you and your loved ones safe.

As smart phones have become ubiquitous and more agencies and individual officers are using both dash and body cameras, we can expect many more of these officer vs. suspect encounters to find their way onto our television sets, our print media, and our social media.

We’re having a lot of conversations about use of force, race, and culture tied to these interactions between officers and suspects, and those interactions and conversations are growing louder, nearly to the point of becoming deafening.

We need to learn what we can from these experiences, and we need to become better-educated consumers of the product called “news.”

Mainstream media organizations are often driven by a toxic mix of political opportunism, police dislike, gun hate, rampant sensationalism, and an overwhelming desire stories to drive more eyeballs to scoop up advertising dollars.

Us Versus Them

The media long ago latched onto the concept that “controversy sells,” and it behooves them to drive and fuel controversy to bring in more viewers or readers, which in turn brings more money and higher salaries. The news is a business, not a public service, and those who do not or cannot understand that that reality are doomed to be exploited again and again.

The mainstream media in this nation is very much in league with the radical left-wing which currently leading the Democrat Party, to point that the “revolving door” from left-wing media figure to left-wing political figure is simply farce.

The media and the race-baiting agitators of the openly socialist and communist groups that make up the current anti-police, pro-criminal agitator class (Democrat Socialists of America, MORE, Revolutionary Communist Party, etc) are more than happy to exploit shootings of minorities by white (or even white-ish) police officers and concealed carriers for their political and economic advantage, using classic Alinsky tactics.

George Zimmerman was easily justified in shooting Trayvon Martin after Martin attacked him, just as Darren Wilson was easily justified in shooting Michael Brown after Brown attacked the Ferguson police officer.

These facts are entirely irrelevant to the political narrative that the political media and their activist allies are attempting to shape.

The ultimate goal of these groups is intentionally obscured, but not terribly difficult to figure out.

They want to destroy faith in local and state law enforcement, casting them as inherently “-ist” (racist, sexist, whatever other low-hanging fruit they can plausibly claim), and in need of federal control/reform.

The goal is the enfeeblement of locally-accountable law enforcement, in order to render them ineffective, in order to build a base of support for an all-powerful and virtually unaccountable national police.

You can scoff at that concept all you want as you remind me where the Department of Homeland Security was prior to September, 11, 2001.

While you’re at it, look at how the snake-bit Ferguson and Baltimore Police Departments have all but rolled over and quit after being overwhelmed by these tactics in short order. These agencies are defensive, demoralized, ineffective, and ripe for replacement… just as the their attackers wanted.

This radical cabal want to destroy the local (and if possible) the state police in order to institute a national police force, and if they are successful in that endeavor, where do you think they will next focus their attention?

Having ingested 800,000 law enforcement officer nationwide, the political media and their allies will next turn their full attention to creating the case to disarm you… and they’ve already telegraphed their efforts in that direction with their fabricated war on “gun violence” (not criminal violence), attempts to undermine your rights via executive orders, and regulations, and even attempts to regulate what you can publish about firearms, which has already lead to a lawsuit. As a matter of fact, it isn’t a sequential attack against the police and then us as much as it is concurrent attacks along two fronts.

This orchestrated campaign against all law enforcement officers (not just the small percentage of bad ones) is just one part of a war on the Second Amendment.

If you don’t wake up to that fact and start learning how to fight against it, you’ll soon find yourself demoralized, disarmed, and shell-shocked, rudderless, and ripe for the picking.

Ask the Baltimore or Ferguson Police departments how that feels.