Amid the recent US mass shootings in Buffalo, New York, and Uvalde, Texas, it is imperative to revisit the story of the three North Carolina police officers that got fired over racist rants.
On June 25, 2020, national and international news channels, online magazines, and blogs in the US reported a situation involving the Wilmington police department in North Carolina. Donny Williams, the police chief, came across a nearly two hour long police dash cam recording of a phone call during a routine audit of the patrol camera and immediately fired the officers involved.
One of the officers by the name of Kevin Piner could be heard telling his colleague Jesse Moore, “…a civil war is coming and he is ready…he is going to buy a new assault rifle.” In the same prolonged conversation, Piner said, “we are just gonna go out and start slaughtering them f***ing n***rs” (CBS). Piner revealed his deep rooted racism towards black people and went on to say, “…society needed a civil war to wipe ‘em off the f***ng map. That’ll put ‘em back about four or five generations.” While on the phone call with Moore, Piner spoke about a black woman he had arrested either that same day or around the same time, and said how the woman “needed a bullet in her head right then.”
After they got apprehended, the officers blamed their words on the stress of being in law enforcement during the climate of unlawful police shootings, which have always occurred in the US, and the ongoing protests that oppose law enforcement as an institution.
In a recent scholarly column titled Will The US Gun Massacres Continue written by Dr. Duncan R Shaw for Grayaxiom, he recalled his encounter with a gas station gun owner when he stopped for a beer during his hitchhike while living in the US. The gas station owner took Shaw to his back room and showed him all of the assault rifles he could purchase. Shaw also mentioned how his positive mood of wandering in the US was, “soured by meeting right-wing vigilantes who boasted about stockpiling assault weapons “for the coming race war” – and by witnessing an appalling police shootout in tense Los Angeles.”
The mass shootings in the US and the unlawful police shootings encompass numerous personal reasons. But historical evidence and people’s personal experiences expose one particular factor that American citizens have always believed in, racism.
A country where the first currency was slavery, pushed and implemented with racist policies and marginalization for centuries, is doomed for division and chaos for more centuries to come unless the means to carry out violence is completely eliminated. As a nation that offers the freedom to keep and bear arms, mass shooters have the liberty to carry out their deeds and have their own unique reasons for them.
A constitution written centuries ago cannot be the moral guide of a country that’s attempting to move on from a past full of hate, abuse, maltreatment, marginalization, and segregation.