Why Jonathan Ross was legally justified in shooting Renée Good

Not everyone liked my last post.

Some believe that I have unfairly taken the side of American police; that I engaged in reprehensible victim-blaming or an overwrought attempt to justify illegal force against an innocent woman; that I am thereby “exposing [my]self as deep state controlled opposition”; and probably other things too.

I don’t always succeed, but in general I try to address the substance of issues that interest me. By this I mean I try to ask myself always what is strange or new or anomalous about any given story. As I see it, an officer shooting a motorist driving towards him in a large, heavy automobile is not all that strange; incidents like that happen quite a lot. The vastly bigger story here is the precipitating context, namely the dangerous and provocative protests that women like Renée Good are getting up to. Thus I wrote a broad post that left the door open to multiple views on whether the shooting itself might have been lawful.

Obviously this effort at courtesy was lost on my dyspeptic critics, so to hell with it. In what follows I will tell you exactly what I think about the shooting. I will tell you why it was legally justified, so my critics can get even more mad. I will tell you why, pragmatically speaking, police must have the latitude to use deadly force in incidents like this generally, which will really piss these people off. And then to send them into the ultimate rage, I will explain why almost all the argument and pseudo-forensic video analysis arguing otherwise is beside the point if not openly deceptive. At the same time, and to calm everybody down, I will outline why the preceding are pretty limited determinations and don’t mean the woman necessarily deserved to die or that anybody has to feel good or morally satisfied about unfortunate outcomes like this.

If you like my work, maybe you’d consider subscribing to my newsletter. None of this would be possible without my generous supporters.