In New York City, responsibility lies with the killer alone

That being said, the suggestion that those who chanted these words somehow “caused” or are “culpable” for the actions of a killer strikes me as a real stretch — as, for that matter, does the proposition that “anti-police protestors” bear some sort of collective “responsibility” for what happened on Saturday. Unless I am very much mistaken, nobody who chanted their death-wishes proposed any concrete action whatsoever. Nobody singled out a target or discussed tactics or agreed to return later with weapons. Nobody established a training camp or organized a rendezvous point or planted a bomb. Indeed, nobody did anything much at all. As is now clear, there were no ”mobs” or “groups of rioters” involved in the murders at all. Rather, some members within a group of peaceful protestors said something terrible (if abstract), and a troubled man in another locale went on a killing spree. Were these two events in some way correlated? Perhaps, yes. There is no doubt that the man intended to target cops in New York. But can we establish causation, or even blame? Nope.

All told, those of us who value robust free expression should be extremely reluctant to so casually transmute “there may have been a vague connection between these words and these actions” into “those who spoke the most forcefully are morally culpable and their entire movement should be shunned in consequence.” This latter approach was preposterous back when Sarah Palin was blamed for the shooting of Gabby Giffords. It was bizarre when the shooting at the Family Research Council was blamed on the Southern Poverty Law Center’s (sophomoric) “hate map.” It was farcical when the Isla Vista shooting was blamed on “white privilege” and “rape culture.” It was ridiculous when Timothy McVeigh was blamed on “militias” or on talk radio. And it is wrong in this case, too. Words, as ever, do not pull triggers, however harsh those words may be.

Now, I will accept that, in this instance, those words were significantly more direct than is usual. In the case of Giffords, hyperventilating commentators were reduced to relying upon inchoate notions such as “the climate” and “the national temperature”; here, by contrast, they can point to a direct expression of desire. (“What do we want?” some of the protesters sang, “Dead Cops. When do we want it? Now.”) And yet, as clear as that wish is, I’m still not sure that one can apportion blame to its promulgators. I can sound “seditious” from time to time, as can a good number other figures in the media and in politics in general. A few weeks ago, I suggested on Twitter that tarring and feathering public officials wouldn’t be so bad, and I have proposed before that if the likes of Sam Adams were faced with our current Leviathan he would probably have started a revolt. My colleague Kevin Williamson, meanwhile, has confessed that his heart would probably ”leap at the sight of Americans setting fire to a tax office”; and argued, too, that Cliven Bundy’s act of resistance made perfectly the “case for a little sedition.” For better or for worse, these are not uncommon sentiments in the United States.