Two things about the recent mass shootings in Dallas and Baton Rouge, both of which involved black American war veterans targeting and killing law enforcement officers. Early in each attack, it was thought that more than one shooter was involved. In the case of the most recent shooting, there was even talk about the cops in Baton Rouge being attacked by a whole militia. But, as with Dallas, it turned out to be one person, a "lone wolf."
Second, many on the right worked very hard on social media and blogs to force a connection between the cop killers and the Black Lives Matter movement. But the problem with this assertion is that BLM is not an organization. It has no base of operation, no leaders giving orders, no soldiers executing anything. BLM is not like the Black Panther Party of the 1960s and it is as different from ISIS as a cloud is to a pack of hyenas.
What there hasn't been enough of in mainstream media is serious talk about what might really make sense of these acts of violence, that being mental illness and war. Posts on The Root and Raw Story have addressed the shootings from this position, but both emphasize the element of race. And so, along with the usual readjustment problems that war vets usually experience, there is the added mental stress of being black in America, a racist society. But I think the crisis of the cop-killing vets had a racial expression rather than race being the crisis itself. What I'm getting at is this: As time passes and heads cool, we will find that the black American cop killers and war vets, Micah Johnson and Gavin Long, have much more in common with Rambo than the radicals and militias of black nationalism.
Rambo: First Blood, a Reagan-era action movie about a Vietnam vet who, after serious provocation, is thrown into a battle with small-town police officers, ends with Rambo surrendering and facing his demons, his war-broken mental health. My guess is that this ending tells us more about Johnson and Long than anything to do with BLM.
