Dear Internet Detectives,
By Please just stop. It’s abundantly clear where my sympathies rest on this issue, but everyone needs to stop scrutinizing low-quality cell-phone videos and determining, definitively-to-their-mind, whether Alton Sterling did or did not have a gun.
The problems are larger than this incident and whether he had a gun or was only thought to by the officers — the problems are systemic. If he turns out to have had a gun, conservatives will crow about “the convicted sex offender who resisted arrest while armed and got what he deserved,” and dismiss the need for any larger issue to be addressed.
And then we lose.
So stop playing Internet Detective with insufficient evidence and base your argument on the fact that because Sterling was SUSPECTED of having a gun, he was slammed to the ground, held down, and shot dead — whereas Dylann Roof, the Charleston church shooter, was KNOWN to have murdered multiple innocent parishioners and pulled over, escorted to Burger King in a bullet-proof vest, and is currently receiving the due process supposedly guaranteed to every American.