We still know very little about the shooting in Minneapolis, yet there is jumping to conclusions. Admirably, Grim is not. I'm a bit of a broken record - I recall saying this about Michael Brown and Trayvon Martin as well. But that's rather the point, because those are two incidents where the public still believes untrue versions which they picked up in the first few minutes of hearing about it.
It seems to all of us that social media has made these leaps more likely, yet I wonder if that is actually true. Human nature abhors an explanatory vacuum, and that is likely true throughout history and prehistory. I doubt that we lived less by rumors and lies a century or a millennium ago.
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There's only a couple of things known so far: He was an active and maybe even aggressive protestor, he sought confrontation, and he came to the protest armed, with spare ammunition. And the topic had been broached before with his parents, who had advised him against arming himself while protesting.
I'm sure it will all come out, and almost as sure that it will not be perceived accurately, in the final analysis and polling.
Just for "interest," much is made of the fact that he was an ICU nurse. Nurses are a very high-responsibility/good judgement group, but I have know a few who would make me nervous if I heard they were going armed to any protest. In fact, one rare Trump-supporting psych nurse at my hospital made even me shiver a bit. It is best not to assume.
I mean you know how I feel about trial by internet. I'm barely willing to accept he was an ICU nurse yet. Kidding. Mostly.
I think another thing to flag is that as far as I can tell, there are 3 simultaneous discussions happening, and people are not overly clear when they are moving between one or the other:
1. Are various public figures (Walz/Frey, Noem/Patel, whoever else is jumping in) statements about the events truthful/justified/helpful. I have seen people occasionally emphasizing some point that seems random, only to discover that one of the above folks or some other elected official initially claimed the opposite, so some level of pushback was justified.
2. Was the shooting legally justified. Obviously most of us have never dealt directly with lethal use of force law, and what does/does not make something justified is often non-intuitive to an outside observer, even with a recording of the event.
3. Could it have been avoided. This is what most people are really commenting on, but importantly it does not necessarily impact point #2 above.
So I think it's not just what we know, it's why we think that information is important, and for which conversation.
Many things can be true at once, yes. The media and Anti-ICE activists might be emphasizing that he was an ICU nurse, just as Renee Good is described as a mother of three because that makes them sound sympathetic. And both may have been attending the protests for bad reasons with bad plans. But that doesn't give ICE agents permission to do whatever they want, and they may have acted criminally themselves in response. And all of those may turn out to be the most likely explanations without any of them being provable in court. Speculation is easy, proof is hard.
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