Mostly Peaceful Columbus Protester: Time For An Eye For An Eye

I’m not an expert, but I’m pretty sure that this is what the media and Democrats call an incitement to violence… or at least it would be if it were someone on the Right saying something like this.

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“Maybe we need an eye for an eye, y’all. They shoot us, we shoot them. You shoot us, we shoot you.”

That was the message from a “mostly peaceful” demonstrator in Columbus, Ohio on Thursday in the neighborhood where 16-year old Ma’Khia Bryant was shot and killed by a police officer as she was preparing to stab another teenage girl.

Now, I have no problem with the idea of “if you shoot at me I’m shooting back at you” in theory. When it comes to individual acts of self-defense, of course that’s an appropriate mindset. But that’s clearly not what the guy with the megaphone is calling for. No, he’s saying that for every officer who uses their firearm in the line of duty, someone should take a shot at a cop.

The clip above, shared by Columbus gun store and range L.E.P.D. Firearms and Training (owner Eric Delbert, an active duty law enforcement officer himself, was a guest on Thursday’s Bearing Arms’ Cam & Co), runs less than a minute, so perhaps it simply didn’t capture the protester urging teenagers to solve their conflicts without violence. Given the narrative on the Left regarding the Bryant shooting, however, I’m guessing that Bryant’s attempted murder didn’t come up.

This is truly awful stuff, and it’s only going to make things worse in Columbus, but its far from the only bad idea being tossed out, and in many cases the folks still spewing misinformation have a much bigger megaphone than the guy advocating for the killing of police officers.

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While the public continues to demand answers, identifying the 911 caller could be the first clue to understanding what transpired prior to the shooting, Grace said in Thursday’s episode of Fox Nation’s “Crime Stories.”

“If the girl Ma’Khia Bryant is the one that made that 911 call, that changes everything because that tells me that at some point she was afraid of a knife attack if in fact, that was her making the call … where she’s begging an officer to come to the scene because someone has a knife and is attacking her and others,” the former prosecutor explained.

“That really changes everything because that takes her away from being the original aggressor,” Grace emphasized.

No, it doesn’t necessarily change anything. Even under Ohio’s new Stand Your Ground law, individuals have the right to meet force with force without attempting to retreat, but in order to use deadly force you still must be in fear of great bodily injury or death. Looking at both the bodycam video and the video from a neighbor’s surveillance camera, at no point from the time that officers arrived until Bryant was shot was she acting in self-defense. In fact, she was the only one using force at that moment, except for the man who comes barreling out of the home to kick one of the teen girls as she’s laying on the ground.

But we also don’t know that Bryant was the one to make the 911. According to Bryant’s foster mother, the incident started when a couple of her former foster kids dropped by the house.

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Angela Moore said two of her former foster children had come to her Columbus, Ohio, home Tuesday to celebrate her birthday when the young women and Ma’Khia bickered over housekeeping.
“It was over keeping the house clean,” Moore said. “The older one told them to clean up the house because
‘Mom doesn’t like the house dirty,'” Moore recalled being told after she arrived home from work. “So that’s how it all started.”
… Moore relayed for CNN the story she said she was told by one of the girls in the house at the time.
“You’re not the guardian of me,” Bryant replied, according to the story Moore said she was told.
“They argue all the time,” Moore recalled, “but I never thought it would escalate like that.”
Moore said she received a frantic call from one of the former foster children, who is seen in police body camera footage wearing pink and recoiling as Ma’Khia lunges at her with a shimmering knife.
“Mom, get home. Where are you? They’re going crazy,” Moore said the young woman told her. “She said they shot Ma’Kiah and I said, ‘Huh?’ It was just crazy.”
The 911 call that came in was from a girl frantically screaming for help because she was about to be stabbed. The first officer to arrive on scene is immediately confronted with Bryant attacking one girl, who falls to the ground and is kicked by a man while Bryant wheels around and charges towards the teenager in pink, who is posing no immediate threat to Bryant whatsoever. When Bryant pulls her arm back to plunge the knife into the teenager, the officer opened fire.
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It’s obviously outrageous to call for violence against police officers because of what happened to Ma’Khia Bryant, but it’s also terrible for Nancy Grace and her guest to suggest that if Bryant were the one to have made the 911 call and not one of former foster kids who showed up to celebrate a birthday, that would have mean that the officer acted improperly. There’s no basis for that in either the law or the evidence that has been released to date, but Grace has always embraced her truculent righteousness, even when she’s completely wrong.
Between the media, politicians from Joe Biden down to city council members, and anti-police activists, there’s so much misinformation around the death of Ma’Khia Bryant that it’s a small miracle we haven’t seen more violence in Columbus this week. Hopefully the relative calm amidst the insane chatter means that most people are rejecting the lies outright, but I’d be lying myself if I said I wasn’t worried about where this is going to lead.

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