Utterly Clueless Joy Behar Suggests Officer in Ma'Khia Bryant Case Should've Shot the 'Gun in the Air'
Joy Behar, co-host of ABC’s “The View, chastised an Ohio cop Thursday for shooting an armed teen this week rather than fire his gun into the air in a populated area.
Critics of Columbus police Officer Nicholas Reardon continue to pile on with hot takes regarding his decision to shoot 16-year-old Ma’Khia Bryant on Tuesday as she lunged at another teen with a knife, according to body camera video.
An apparent part-time expert in cases involving police use of deadly force, Behar proved she doesn’t understand the fundamentals of gravity — or much else, for that matter. What goes up, including a bullet, must come down.
That’s ignoring the fact that someone with a blade inches away from another person will likely not be stopped by the sound of a gunshot. Reardon was forced to make a quick life-or-death decision, and he apparently followed his training.
That wasn’t good enough for Behar, who told ABC’s audience the cop should have fired his gun into the air and not at the armed teen who was lunging with a knife toward an unarmed girl right in front of him.
Behar told her co-host, Whoopi Goldberg, that she had spoken to CNN anchor Don Lemon, who surprisingly has defended Reardon’s actions, about Bryant’s death.
She said she and Lemon disagreed.
“Well, he texted me because I mentioned this case yesterday in, vis-a-vis the George Floyd case,” Behar said. “And he said, you know, that the cop had no choice or something to that effect. And my feeling is I don’t know if that’s true or not. I really can’t figure it out anymore.
“I mean, it seems to me in a situation — this is what it looked to me, and I’ve looked at the tape and I still can’t figure it out. Shoot the gun in the air as a warning. Tase a person. Shoot them in the leg. Shoot them in the behind. You know, stop them somehow.
“But if the only solution is to kill a teenager, there’s something wrong with this. There’s something very, very wrong with the way these things are being conducted.
“Even if the cop had to do it, there’s something wrong with it. I can’t explain it any worse, any better than that.”
She added, “All I can say is, we keep talking about this over and over again, and kids still keep getting shot. It’s like the gun issue in this country. People keep getting shot, and nothing ever gets done about it. It’s a very frustrating conversation to have. But I don’t — I can’t add much to it.”
Columbus Division of Police interim Chief Michael Woods already addressed the matter of appropriate use of force earlier this week in addressing reporters. One of those reporters asked him why Reardon didn’t shoot Bryant in the leg.
“One of the difficult things with that is we don’t train to shoot the leg because that’s a small target. We train to shoot center mass — what is available to stop that threat,” Woods said. “There was a threat going on, a deadly force threat that was going on, so the officer was trained to shoot center mass — the largest part of a body that is available to them.
“When you try to start shooting legs or arms, rounds miss and then they continue on and there are people behind that that could be in danger that are not committing anything, so we try and minimize any danger to anyone else if we have to use our firearm.”
Facts such as those are never likely to sway someone such as Behar, as she’s clearly never been in a tense situation where life was on the line. Behar, like so many other mainstream media talking heads, would rather propose unreasonable police tactics to save potential killers than simply admit that, just maybe, a girl is alive today because of the police officer’s quick thinking.
Of course, such an admission would force her to re-evaluate her positions on policing, crime and the false narrative that the country and its institutions are inherently racist.
To Behar and other race-baiters, the shooting death of Bryant boils down only to the fact that she was black while the cop who fatally shot her was white.
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