I love swords. I study how to fight with them and teach it to others. Swords are cool. They are not, however, the best weapon one can use in today’s climate in most cases. The exception is when you have a sword and the other person has nothing, generally speaking. Most people don’t know how to disarm a sword-wielding attacker, especially if they’re unarmed.
Every now and then, someone will lose all touch with reality, though, and use a sword on the streets of some American city. We’ve always sent the police to deal with these people, and it often involves them being shot.
In the aftermath of George Floyd, though, the Defund the Police movement tried to argue that responding with law enforcement simply made these encounters deadly when they didn’t have to be. What we needed to do, they argued, was send social workers to talk down these individuals.
I mean, it sounds like a nice idea, and there are times when it may well work. Yet we all know it would just be a matter of time before we heard about social workers being killed.
That almost happened in Boston recently.
In the summer of 2020, after the death of George Floyd and the protests that followed, the far left decided cops were the problem. Their theory? Armed officers escalate mental health crises. Send social workers and clinicians instead, and people would stop getting hurt. On Saturday in Boston, one of those clinicians was attacked with a sword.
The clinician was knocked to the ground inside an apartment building on Hemenway Street, steps from Northeastern University’s campus. A police officer was stabbed in the arm. The man who attacked them, apparently in the grip of paranoid delusions, was shot by other officers and later died at a hospital. He had spent close to 45 minutes talking to the clinician through his locked door before he opened it.
The clinician did everything the activists said would work. It didn’t.
Color me shocked.
Of course, the above-linked piece points out that the poster program for all of this is one from Oregon that doesn’t actually respond to calls where there’s a risk of violence. They talk people down, and no one gets shot because they don’t put themselves in a position where someone is likely to get shot.
Boston’s program apparently isn’t as discerning. Weird, right?
Look, when people are having a mental health crisis, there’s a wide range of possibilities as to what that means. It could be someone who is thinking about downing a bottle of pills and ending it all, or they could think they’re the freaking Highlander and there can be only one. There’s an entire spectrum of possibilities, and some of those are people who are so violent that the only way to keep innocent people safe is by shooting the person.
Is it a damn shame when someone who is just sick gets killed? Yes, it is, but it’s more of a damn shame if that sick person murders innocent people.
And when someone’s that far gone, social workers aren’t really going to be the ones to talk them down. I’m sorry, but that kind of delusion usually requires pharmacology, not chit-chat.
The good news is that it seems the only one severely injured was the wannabe swordsman, though an officer was injured, and I hope it wasn’t serious.
This could easily have been a story of a social worker being hacked to pieces on the streets of Boston. I’m glad it wasn’t, but if social workers are going to go into the field, there needs to be some serious care taken as to when they’re deployed.
Or have them carry guns so if things go sideways like this, they can take care of themselves.
Editor’s Note: The radical left will stop at nothing to enact their radical gun control agenda and strip us of our Second Amendment rights.
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