Avenging Alton Sterling?

Three Baton Rouge policemen are shot to death less than a month after a Baton Rouge policeman murders a helpless Black man, Alton Sterling, the act witnessed on a viral internet posting. 

One might think these two events are related. 

But the violence against the police is incoherent. The shooter, a Black man, might be thought to have been motivated by desire for revenge of the shooting of a Black man by white police for the crime of being Black, but the shooter: A/ Did not target the white police officer who was so visibly guilty of the murder  B/ Shot to death a Black police officer, who, one would think would be blameless of harboring homicidal racial prejudice against Black people. 

This is the problem with shooters: They, ordinarily, are not rational.  

The Washington, D.C. sniper, who shot mostly white people randomly from the back of his car, using a teenager as his accomplice, was thought to be a Black man with a rage against white people. How it was decided a Black guy was doing the shooting I cannot recall, except all the people shoot, in the first week or two were white people walking about in mainly Black neighborhoods of Prince Georges County, a Black suburb or Washington. But then the sniper killed a couple of Blacks. Incoherent violence.

Turned out the Black shooter was creating a diversion: He intended to shoot his estranged wife, but he realized he would be the prime suspect if his wife was found shot dead, so he intended to make her simply one of the random victims of the Washington sniper.  So, in this case, the exception that proves the rule, the random deranged shooter was not deranged, simply murderous. He was banking  on the idea that in America, lunatics with guns simply do this and anyone, randomly, can be a victim.

Clever guy.

One wonders why white police who murder Black men are not killed by snipers more often. In fact, I cannot think of a case this has happened. 

Why not?  At least this violence would be comprehensible. What is incomprehensible, on some level, is why there is not more of this sort of violence.

One guess is that the victims of police murders simply do not have relatives or friends who are willing or inclined to risk losing their own lives or liberty for the sake of revenge. For he who goes out to seek revenge: First dig two graves. During the 1960's, a number of professors and politicians and pundits commented, sotto voice, the wonder was why the Black community had not erupted before and more universally. 

Of course, we hear from media people, trying to stoke their stories and we hear from Republican politicians how very unusual the current climate of killing and violence and strife our current day is--but these are people with ulterior motives for beating the drum.  The fact is, anyone who remembered the 1960's, when we had Vietnam and National Guard troops on every street corner in downtown Washington, DC and ghettos from Detroit to Newark to Watts to Washington burning, anyone who remembers that will view today's events as sad but not particularly intense.

For whatever reasons, the American Black population has not reacted to seek revenge. It might be interesting to figure out why.