Seriously? Now Cops are Shooting Blonde 40-year-old Women

There's been a lot of outrage over the deaths of black men like Philando Castile who have been shot by police while obeying their commands.

Now two cops in Minneapolis, just a few miles from where Castile was killed, have shot and killed a 40-year-old blonde white woman:

An Australian woman was fatally shot overnight Saturday by Minneapolis police officers who did not have their body cameras turned on, officials said.

The woman, Justine Damond, was shot as the officers were responding to her 911 call of an assault near her home in the suburb of Fulton [Note to the Times: Fulton is not a suburb -- it's an upscale neighborhood of Minneapolis]. Ms. Damond, 40, who is from Sydney and who also went by the name Justine Ruszczyk, was engaged to be married to an American man, according to Australian news media reports.

Police officials said they were looking into the circumstances of the shooting, and why the officers were not using their body cameras.

What the hell? Did they shoot her because they thought she was some dangerous illegal alien, with a suspicious Australian accent?

What is wrong with these cops? And what's wrong with the police department? The killer has been put on paid administrative leave, instead of being fired on the spot.

I know being a cop is dangerous. I know cops are deathly afraid of being shot any time they venture out. That fear is almost completely due to the fact that there are too many guns on the streets, thanks to the NRA and the Republican Party.

This shooting is no more and no less outrageous than the shooting of Castile. It shows what a load of crap the cops are spewing when they try to justify shooting black men. It's clear that cops who shoot innocent civilians are cowering ninny who pull their guns and fire at the slightest thing that spooks them before properly assessing the situation.

This is criminally negligent homicide. Which is also what Castile's killer, Jeronimo Yanez, should have been found guilty of.

Yanez excused the killing by claiming he smelled marijuana smoke and was afraid for his life because Castile was slowly killing a child with second-hand smoke (Yanez really said that!). What excuse will these guys use? "When I saw her hair I thought she was the Atomic Blonde and I would get radiation poisoning!"  "When I heard that Australian accent I immediately thought of Crocodile Dundee and was afraid she had a really big knife! Or maybe a crocodile!"

Can we stop making excuses for bad cops? When they shoot innocent people they are committing crimes. It is the worst possible dereliction of duty for a police officer to kill the person who just called them for help.

Yet this happens all the time: in Seattle, in Indianapolis, in Chicago, and so on. To be fair, cops have also been shot by people who called 911: in Georgia, for example. So, yeah, I get why cops are trigger happy. But that's no god-damned excuse for killing innocent people!

The real problem, again, is that there are too many guns on the street. Police are rightly paranoid that they could be shot by some nut job. But these people are supposed to be trained professionals paid to protect the public, not kill them because their panties get in a bunch.

These killings are not "tragic accidents." They are catastrophically stupid blunders of sheer incompetence. We have got to find a way to train cops to handle these situations and weed out trigger-happy cops who are not up to the job.

But the real questions is why these cops are so trigger happy?

The sheer quantity of guns in the United States has put the entire nation under a pall of fear and paranoia, with the NRA, gun manufacturers and the Republican Party constantly stoking that fear with lies and hatred, all the time pumping more and more guns into our communities. All those guns are making it harder and more dangerous for the competent cops to do their jobs. All these guns do not make us safer -- Castile's gun got him killed.

In the final analysis, Justine died so the NRA could have their toys.