Cop at Traffic Stop: "We only shoot black people"

You would think this was a Saturday Night Live sketch, but video shows this really happened in Georgia in July, 2016:

A white Cobb County police lieutenant has been moved to administrative duty for telling a white woman during a traffic stop, “Remember, we only shoot black people.”

The footage shows the officer speaking through the car window to a female passenger in a vehicle who had been stopped for suspected DUI.

Channel 2 Action News reported that its request for body camera footage of the traffic stop prompted an internal investigation of Lt. Greg Abbott, who has been on the Cobb force for 28 years.

The woman tells Abbott that she is afraid to reach for her cellphone because “I’ve just seen way too many videos of cops ... ”

At that point, Abbott cuts her off.

“But you’re not black. Remember, we only shoot black people,” the police veteran of nearly three decades can be heard saying. “Yeah. We only kill black people, right? All the videos you’ve seen, have you seen the black people get killed?”

It's clear from the cop's tone of voice that he's just telling her what he thinks she wants to hear, appealing to her racism: You're safe, he's saying. You're white, and cops don't shoot white women.

Except they do. Just last month a Minneapolis cop shot Justine Ruszczyk Damond, a white woman, behind her house when she was in her pajamas. Authorities say that it'll take until the end of the year to decide whether to charge the cop.

So that Georgia woman was right to be afraid of the cops shooting her: they even kill middle-aged blonde white women when they're afraid or surprised.

Because they don't know who's got a gun when they stop a car or someone approaches them from behind. As long as cops are afraid of being ambushed by some nut packing heat, innocent people are going to die needlessly at the hands of the cops.

You can blame a lot of this on incompetent, or racist or trigger-happy cops -- but the biggest share of the blame should be placed on the NRA and Republican office holders who keep pushing the fallacy that more guns make us safer.

The prevalence of guns makes the cops feel like someone's going to shoot them at every traffic stop or when they're parked in their cruiser having a coffee break.

Justine -- and a lot of innocent black men -- died so that gun nuts can have their toys and feed their power fantasies.