Yesterday I wrote a piece that’s gone viral — an extended denunciation of a terrible police shooting in Texas. A white officer went to black man’s apartment, apparently thinking it was her own. When she saw the man in the darkness, she claimed she thought he was a burglar. She shot him and killed him. It’s a horrifying story, and it’s not the only terrible police shooting to shock the American conscience.

Whenever I write about police shootings, I get a similar critique. New readers will Google me and find that I’ve been strongly critical of Black Lives Matter. Yet I’ve also written time and again to condemn unlawful police killings — even to the extent of suggesting that police sometimes are more trigger-happy than our soldiers deployed in war zones.

This seeming contradiction prompted a series of tweets from Slate’s Jamelle Bouie and the Washington Post’s Wesley Lowery.