After police officers in St. Louis shot and killed a man wielding a knife, Zerlina Maxwell, a familiar left-wing presence on various cable networks, tweeted her belief that the shooting was unnecessary.
“I mean dude,” Maxwell tweeted, “1 guy with a knife. 2 cops with guns. And you *have* to shoot to kill?” She then suggested, “Maybe we need to teach these cops karate,” before adding the hashtag, ” #Ferguson”.
Your first instinct is to laugh at someone this ignorant of police procedure and the harrowing danger someone with a knife poses. Sadly, Maxwell isn’t some nobody mouthing off on Twitter. She is taken seriously as a Thought Leader by our media.
Chris Hayes enjoys a primetime slot on MSNBC and can’t understand why when their lives are at stake they don’t aim for a smaller, moving target like the legs:
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Hayes has been sent in the field by a major news network to report on events surrounding a police shooting in Ferguson, and he doesn’t know something as basic as this.
Last week the Huffington Post’s justice reporter, Ryan J. Reilly, confused standard ear plugs for rubber bullets.
We live in a media world where people who know nothing about issues they report and comment on enjoy positions of power and privilege.
Follow John Nolte on Twitter @NolteNC