Normal Americans seeing mobs of mostly masked “youth” wantonly stealing from stores and pharmacies are surely thinking: “why don’t the police just shoot them?” That’s a very good question, and one increasingly on the minds of Americans, particularly black Americans who find the neighborhood stores that provide their daily needs closing for good, unable to survive in the current blue city, consequence free, environment.

This isn’t a problem in red state America. Jason Aldean was right. Those “youths” know better than to try that in a small town. At the 2020 Sturgis (SD) Motorcycle Rally, a small group of Antifa dimwits, thinking highly of themselves after their success burning and looting blue cities, showed up in Sturgis. Aldean hadn’t yet written his song. One of them made the mistake of kicking a motorcycle.

Sturgis hires police officers from around the nation to help out during the Rally, and they quickly surrounded the self-imagined and very frightened revolutionaries and escorted them out of town to the delighted applause and jeers of the crowd. Had they not, there would have been nothing for Kamala Harris to bail out of jail.

Graphic: Twitter Screenshot

No one, not Antifa or anyone else, has tried that at Sturgis since.

So why don’t the police shoot these mobs?  There are two primary reasons.

(1) Deadly force is lawful, for the police and everyone else, only when a reasonable person would believe they, or another, is facing an imminent threat of serious bodily injury or death.

(2) Every police officer, particularly blue city/state officers, knows using any force against a member of a favored victim group—in this case, largely black people—is deadly to their hopes of a career and pension, and will probably put them in prison, even as the people they’re trying to arrest go free. This reasonable, but lunatic—in a free society under the rule of law--fear also applies, to lesser degrees in red states, though for most, policing goes on as it always has, which is why those officers can be pro-active in deterring and solving crimes.

Generally, under pretty much any circumstance, it is illegal to use deadly force to protect property, though non-lethal force can be used in most places to prevent theft of pretty much every kind. Still, what does a shopkeeper, with four or five employees, most of them women, do when a mob of 30 aggressive young men and women start ransacking the store? They’re outnumbered, facing people used to violence and practiced in mass theft tactics.

Graphic: X Screenshot

The police, if they get there in time, face essentially the same dilemma. They’re badly outnumbered, and can, at best, arrest a few of the thieves, but they’re always facing overwhelming numbers of thugs unafraid to use violence, even deadly violence, against the police. When people see several police officers wrestling with a single criminal, they think the police are ganging up, unfairly beating that poor thug. In reality, they’re trying to subdue them without hurting them. It’s not like TV where every move, every blow, is meticulously choreographed. And remember if an officer hurts a member of a favored victim group, or if they lie about being hurt or even claim their feelings were hurt, that officer, black or white, is likely in trouble, not the thug.

Obviously, if a few criminals burst into a store with deadly weapons--guns, knives, baseball bats, etc.--they’re presenting an imminent threat of serious bodily injury or death, and while deadly force might be justified by the letter of the law, in blue states, the victims forced to use deadly force might very well be prosecuted, and civilly sued by the survivors of the criminal who will suddenly be the newest social justice martyr expecting their Vatican canonization notice any day. That’s less likely in red states, but never impossible. Even if one is arrested, prosecuted and acquitted, expect to pay a minimum of $300.00 an hour for a lawyer.

It's the inevitable result of abandoning the rule of law, of abandoning equality under the law for equity under social justice, of abandoning merit and accomplishment for entitlement and resentment. Once a city or state begins to embrace social justice, they lock themselves into a doom loop. Defunding, persecuting and prosecuting the police means officers will flee. Few, if any will apply, and decline becomes irreversible. Even in the red, such decline can inevitably lead to a “3S” society: shoot, shovel and shut up. What else can good people do without the rule of law? What else can they do when they can no longer depend on the institutions that can be trusted to relieve them of the burden of 24/7/365 law enforcement?

Decline is always a choice.

Mike McDaniel is a USAF veteran, classically trained musician, Japanese and European fencer, life-long athlete, firearm instructor, retired police officer and high school and college English teacher. His home blog is Stately McDaniel Manor.