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In the aftermath of the brutal ambush-style July 4th murder of 8-year-old Secoriea Turner by armed “protesters” near the Wendy’s where Rayshard Brooks was killed during an altercation with Atlanta police officers on June 12th, Georgia politicians from both sides of the aisle have expressed outrage and vowed action.
Atlanta’s Democrat Mayor Keisha Lance Bottoms was one such politico who proclaimed “enough was enough” after the tragic shooting occurred. While her powerful comments about how Secoriea Turner’s murder shined a brighter light on “members of the community shooting each other” have been applauded, they ring hollow with U.S. Senate candidate and Rep. Doug Collins (R-GA) who made an appearance on Fox News Tuesday to make a critical correlation between the rash of shootings in Atlanta that have occurred after Brooks’s death, and the CHOP shootings in Seattle.
“Why does it take a death?” for leaders to act, Collins asked during the “Fox and Friends” segment. Here’s what else he had to say:
“It just is sad because these minority communities, the communities that are hardest hit right now, are the ones that blow the brunt of this,” he added. “Why are we doing this? We need to stop it now, that’s why the governor, I think, brought in the National Guard.”
Collins went on to say that “this is the thing that has to happen because it shouldn’t take a tragic death for somebody to all of a sudden say, ‘Wow we need to enforce the law.’”
Collins noted that “anywhere where you allow lawlessness to exist,” when “the police are told to disengage” and when “the mayor’s office seemingly was just letting it [violence] happen,” lawlessness won’t “be contained,” which he said is “going to cause more and more problems.”
He added that “unfortunately” that’s what “we saw it in Seattle, now we’ve seen in Atlanta.” Collins had referenced the infamous Capitol Hill Organized Protest (CHOP) zone in Seattle, which was forcefully cleared out last week after the city’s leadership finally acted following two deadly shootings and weeks of scrutiny.
Watch:
It should not take a tragic death to realize that we need to enforce the law. pic.twitter.com/oexWsGsQif
— Rep. Doug Collins (@RepDougCollins) July 7, 2020
Collins is right on the money here, and it’s also a point that was made by my RedState colleague Nick Arama in the aftermath of Turner’s murder.
The fact of the matter is that Turner’s murder and other shootings that have taken place in the area after Brooks’s killing were preventable, just as the violence and deaths in Seattle’s CHOP zone were preventable.
All it would have taken in both cities is leaders who were willing to shut the danger zones down before they had even a moment to take root. But they didn’t. They wasted time, hoping things would get better, thinking they could “negotiate” with the “protesters” to get them to leave. But placating the mobs didn’t work. As a result, people – including an 8-year-old girl in Atlanta and a 19-year-old Seattle special needs teenager named Lorenzo Anderson are dead, with the families left to wonder why their loved ones’ lives didn’t seem to matter to the “peaceful protesters” and local Democratic leaders who allowed the lawlessness to continue for weeks.
This is why President Trump, his White House team, and other Republican leaders need to continue push the point home between now and election day that it’s Democrat-run cities where the problems between police and the black community are most prominent, and it’s also in those cities where we see the most lack of support from local leaders for law enforcement and the highest violent crime rates.
People who want to continue to support Democrats are free to do so, but there needs to be a political reckoning for Democrats in power whose inaction in cities like Atlanta and Seattle unfortunately has lead to more and more heartbreak, despair, and tragedy.
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