The Dallas Shooting

[browngirl]

The [alleged--more on this below] gunman is dead, three others taken into custody, after sniping twelve police officers, killing five of them (if I read the news correctly). The gunman is quoted as saying he "wanted to kill White people, especially White police officers".

And I am caught between horror and horror.

This man masterminded and committed the murder of five police officers and the attempted murder of seven more...

... or at least that's what we're being told. Not least with the photo of him giving the Black power salute. And it just -- now the police and their supporters can say, "We lost more than you did, Black Lives Matter is morally invalid" and set this atrocity in resistance to any efforts to change the policing culture that leads to deaths like those of Alton Sterling and Philando Castile, as if it were a tit-for-tat exchange, as if this had already become a side-against-side war rather than being one society struggling with hatred and violence.

Maybe I'm being no-true-Scotsman about this, but part of me feels that this massacre of police officers fits suspiciously perfectly into one particular narrative of these events. Do I distrust this narrative, what we've been told about who killed these officers, for valid reasons or invalid ones?