The United States isn’t exactly a land of honey and roses, certainly not for the five officers of the Dallas police who were gunned down by a sniper to avenge the killing of a black man in Minnesota by a white police officer. The shootings took place during a march to protest the Minnesota killing. There is a seething anger in the black community over the ease with which white police officers kill black people and more often than not, get away with it. Statistics however, tell a different story. In 2016 alone 238 white men were gunned down by police as against 123 blacks. However, the 123 blacks does become a larger figure when one considers that blacks make up 13 per cent of the population. The statistics missing from the race equation is the number of white people killed by black officers. But numbers aside, the general perception in the US is that blacks are targeted by white officers. If the Minnesota killing was wrong then so was the murder of five police officers because two wrongs do not make a right. The shootings once again expose the weakness of laws pertaining to who can buy a weapon in the US and there is a growing body of evidence to show that these laws need to be tightened.
