‘Instantly, shockingly, the murder of five police officers on duty at a peaceful protest in Dallas has compounded the nation’s continuing agony,” said the New York Times in an editorial.
“In mere hours, the carnage left the country with a wrenching shift: From grieving the latest black victims of police shootings in Minnesota and Louisiana to grieving for the police officers slain so viciously in Dallas. It looked like an execution, honestly ... Addressing horrifying violence for a second time in two days, President [Barack] Obama called the murders ‘a vicious, calculated and despicable attack on law enforcement’.”
Examining the possible motives behind the horror, the paper said: “The police and protesters alike could only wonder what might truly account for such a level of atrocity. Disgust may well summarise the nation’s reaction to such an appalling twist in what seems to be a nonstop cycle of violence. As with the lives lost in Louisiana and Minnesota, the murdered officers in Dallas now cry out to us for something better, for a fresh and far stronger resolve to repair relations in the cause of law enforcement and to stem the nation’s bleeding.”
The Dallas Morning News came out with a very emotional and heart-felt editorial, harking back to the assassination of former president John F. Kennedy and pleading for peace to prevail in the days to come. “This city, our city, has been tested before. Now we face a new test. More than 50 years ago, madness struck like a lightning bolt and cut down our nation’s president ... We rebounded, but slowly. We eventually remade our city into one all but unrecognisable to anyone alive in 1963. Thursday night, another kind of lightning flashed across our horizon and plunged our city into a new kind of grief — and brought fear back to the place we call home. And we are surely not alone in asking, as our hearts break, what kind of country are we creating where such violence has become so frequent?”
The Baltimore Sun also reiterated the same point. “The shots that killed five police officers and wounded several others reverberate far beyond Dallas. They strike fear in the hearts of police everywhere, the very sort of fear that led to the deaths of two more black men this week,” it said in an editorial, adding: “Those shots upend the Black Lives Matter movement, an overwhelmingly peaceful response to years of dehumanisation of some communities by officers who swore to protect them. And those murders in the midst of a protest march terrify all of us who are now forced to wonder whether we have just witnessed an irrevocable break in the fabric of society, one that leaves us all less safe.”
The USA Today underscored that robust fabric of the American society and said: “Dallas Police Chief David Brown had a simple, prayerful message: ‘All I know is this must stop ... this divisiveness between our police and our citizens.’ Brown’s heart-felt pleas were the appropriate balm for a shaken nation that is approaching a precarious fork, with one road leading to rage and violence, the other towards calm and understanding.”
_resources1_16a31069e4e_small.jpg)
