Make Fearless Fosdick Fiction Again

 

Probably few people remember or know of Fearless Fosdick.  He appeared from time to time as a parody of Dick Tracy in a strip within a strip in  Al Capp’s L’il Abner as Abner’s comic strip  hero.  Among other quirks and shortcomings, he had the unfortunate habit of randomly blowing away innocent bystanders in his pursuit of the villains. It was good, silly, often black humor, and Capp ran the gag for years.

In real life careless, trigger happy cops are not funny at all, but rather a menace to the lives and property of people around them.  On the evidence there are plenty of them out there and plenty of cases where they behaved badly. We hear more about it in the news when the victim black, but that is because such shootings are exploitable politically. It is an equal opportunity problem.  Whites, blacks,  Hispanics Asians, American Indians, men, women, and kids have been gunned down unnecessarily.

The case of Breonna Taylor has been in the news recently. She was an innocent bystander killed by cops who broke into her apartment in the middle of the night and got in a gunfight with her boyfriend who is said to have assumed he was facing a home invasion from criminals.  She was shot five times, while her boyfriend was only wounded. (He was charged with assault  and  attempted murder of a police officer, but all charges have been dropped.)  Several shots from the cops went into an adjacent occupied apartment. It was a drug raid, but no drugs were found in the apartment.

It is hard to see how Taylor’s killing was not at least negligent homicide. It is a rudimentary rule of basic training in safety with guns that one does not fire until one has identified one’s target.  Parents teach it  to kids learning to shoot with their first .22s or BB guns.  Yet a group of professionals with years of training and opportunity to practice forgot or ignored it, and seemingly blasted away like Fearless Fosdick.

At a time when leftists are encouraging looters and rioters and spreading false claims that all or most policemen are trigger happy bigots, it is appropriate to  “back the blue” and oppose  the crimes and nonsense.  However reforms are needed.  The United States should ban Gestapo and KGB style middle of the night raids, whether no knock or not, as unnecessary and too dangerous, both for the raiders and the victims. (There might  be a case for well defined exceptions for a Ma Barker or a Baby Face Nelson, but the exceptions should be rare, and even then care should be taken not to harm bystanders.)  Cops should be held to at least the same standards and requirements as the rest of us for using guns safely and for demonstrating that a use of force was appropriate. As a small practical step, it might be a good idea to switch officers back from large magazine semiautomatics to five or six shot revolvers as sidearms.  It is surely a good idea to train officers to understand that policemen and soldiers in combat  are different things, operating in different environments and  under different rules and to behave accordingly.

Fearless Fosdick should be only in archives of the funny papers, not on the streets.