Dallas plunged into a new grief: Other views

The Dallas Morning News, editorial: “More than 50 years ago, madness struck like a lightning bolt and cut down our nation’s president, leaving shadows that lingered for generations. We rebounded, but slowly. We eventually remade our city into one all but unrecognizable 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. ... Why this city? Why these officers? Why now? 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? A country where thousands of North Texans are driven to our downtown streets to peacefully protest police violence. Where a man could grow so bitter with rage that he gunned down a dozen police officers he’d probably never seen before. ... How we respond will help show a path forward to a divided, reeling nation.”

Jonathan Chait, New York magazine: “The old, tattered ideal of unity may be healthier than it seemed. The demonstration in Dallas was the very model of a functioning liberal society — a peaceful protest against police conducted under the protection of the police themselves. ... Probing deeper, into more tender spots, one could even detect a formative consensus about the underlying cause of the protest: the routine violence by police against African Americans. Videos of the (fatal shootings) of Alton Sterling and Philando Castile have not only galvanized African Americans who have grown accustomed to the constant threat of police brutality, but they also shocked no small number of white Americans.”

National Review, editorial: “The venom of Black Lives Matter may have given us a ‘Ferguson Effect’ in major cities, where less-robust policing appears to have created the conditions for a spike in the murder rate (although more data is necessary for definitive conclusions). The conduct of Dallas’ police is a reminder of why the cops shouldn’t be hounded and smeared: Whatever the unfortunate truth in a handful of individual cases, the vast majority of law enforcement are honorable public servants, who put their lives on the line, day in and day out, for their fellow citizens — white, black, and otherwise.”