This is a point made many times by conservatives since the insane demagoguery after the Gabby Giffords shooting but it really can’t be emphasized enough. Kevin Williamson:

The same people who literally blamed the NRA for the Orlando shooting while the blood was still being mopped up are today demanding that Black Lives Matter not be smeared by association with the violence in Dallas.

The people who blamed Sarah Palin’s use of crosshairs as a graphic-design element on a poster (“targeting” certain Democrats for electoral challenges) for the shooting of Gabby Giffords suddenly have nothing to say about violent and irresponsible rhetoric.

I myself hold to the view that we hold criminals responsible for their actions and that speeches given by third parties are generally, at most, tangential questions. Maybe your view is different, and that’s fine: But pick one.

Oddly enough, impassioned political advocacy seems to be dangerous or not dangerous as it suits the left on a case by case basis. If we’re going to play a game of guilt by association, which is almost always unfair but always politically useful, we’re going to play it consistently. The left can choose the rules but once it does the rules will be enforced. I’m with Williamson in disliking the “climate of hate” argument, though. In fact, the chief claims at one point in the clip below that “the suspect said he was upset about Black Lives Matter.” That’s cryptic: Was he upset with the police violence that Black Lives Matter is protesting or was he upset with the group itself? If the latter, it wouldn’t be the first time a radical denounced a protest group because it wasn’t violent enough to his liking.

Three interesting notes from this presser. One: The suspect apparently told cops he wasn’t associated with any group. As I write this, Drudge is teasing a story from a UK paper noting a Facebook post by a “black power” group claiming responsibility. Why anyone is giving a random social-media fart like that credence without more evidence, I don’t know. Two: It’s unclear right now how many suspects there are. Three people are in custody and one suspect is dead, although the chief suggested that the dead one might have been the only shooter. What were the other three doing to assist him? Or are the police preparing to clear them and announce that this was a lone gunman after all? How did one guy manage to kill five officers and wound seven others?

Three: The chief notes that, contrary to last night’s reports, the dead suspect didn’t kill himself. The cops took him down with a robot — a “bomb robot,” which is the first time I’ve ever heard of that. I’ve heard of a bomb-defusing robot, but the way it’s explained here makes it sound like the cops put their own explosives on the robot and sent it in for the express purpose of killing the suspect. I could be mistaken — maybe the suspect, who claimed to have planted IEDs, had his own bomb nearby and the robot was attempting a controlled demolition of that bomb when it went off, but that’s not how the chief tells it. No one’s going to hassle Dallas cops today about how they neutralized a degenerate who’d just murdered five of their finest but in a few weeks people will start paying attention to it. Some on social media have already described it as “droning” the suspect, which would seem to fit. Has that ever happened before? Could have used an incapacitating agent like gas instead? In what other situations are cops allowed to resolve a standoff by blowing a guy up instead of talking him into surrendering or sending officers in after him? Those are questions for another day, but they’ll be asked.