Justice for Simran Gordon.
That’s what the city councilwoman posts on Twitter. That’s what the city council candidate says on the evening news.
Justice for Simran Gordon.
The guy who went into the Family Dollar on West Main Street with a gun and took the manager hostage. The guy who had, over the course of about a year, in three separate incidents, killed three people and left three families grieving.
The guy who, as two Rochester cops ran blind into the Family Dollar, raised his gun and fired.
That guy. Justice for him. Seven people shot over the weekend, 63 murdered thus far in the year, and the cop-haters, ginning things up for the looming election, howling to their woke gods, want justice for Simran Gordon.
Well, he got his justice.
This time he shot at someone who was armed, and could shoot back, and that didn’t work out so well for him, and he dropped where he stood, raising his gun again in his last act in this life.
Live by the sword, die by the sword.
Ashes to ashes, dust to dust. Simran Gordon got his justice.
Who didn’t get justice was the terrified manager, or the frantic employee in the backroom on the line to 911, or the three families whose anonymous sons were taken in the flower of life. They didn’t get justice, and nobody is chanting for you to remember their names.
Who doesn’t get justice are the families and neighbors preyed upon by the likes of Simran Gordon, people whose lives are circumscribed by fear and uncertainty, who live constantly with the tension of potential evil and threatened malevolence. People who are both exploited by and abandoned by the politicians and activists who clamber for the TV cameras and the bullhorns, charlatans who want nothing more than power and money, who step over the victim to celebrate the criminal.
They are the people who rule this state, from City Hall to the state legislature and the governor’s mansion. Politicians who have eliminated bail and disemboweled parole and who have the blood of innocent New Yorkers on their hands.
Those are the ones howling for justice for Simran Gordon.
And the ones who will call for the jobs of the officers who confronted him.
He fired first, but the cameras don’t clearly show that. The store video is of low quality – imagine that, in an innercity Family Dollar. And the body cam video isn’t conclusive.
That leaves the word of the officers.
And the manipulation of the politicians.
Because, though Simran Gordon was the first to fire, it doesn’t matter. The issue of who shot first is raised by confused reporters and plotting activists. If someone is pointing a gun at you, you don’t have to give them the first shot. You don’t have to give them a chance to kill you before you can defend yourself. This isn’t “Hamilton,” this is the real world. And the threat of lethal force justifies, legally and morally, the use of lethal force. You point your guns at someone, and they’ve got the right to shoot you.
Even if they’re a cop.
Especially if they’re a cop, and you are a threat to innocent people.
Like the three men you’ve already put in their graves.
And what kind of sick and twisted political opportunism is it that ignores the names and lives of victims in order to rally to the defense of predators? How long until there is a mural to Simran Gordon, and a march and a protest – another protest – in front of the Public Safety Building? What woke calculus will decide that his life matters above all others as Rochester slogs through its deadliest year in a generation?
For the activists and opportunists, this isn’t about caring for people – or there would have been protests all summer long of the heartbreaking slaughter in the city’s streets. This is about hating the cops, about breaking apart the society, about gaining personal political and financial advantage by exploiting manufactured rage.
Lives matter to these people only to the extent that they can be exploited for political gain.
You see that in social media, and on the ballot.
God bless the family of Simran Gordon at this terrible season of loss. God bless the families of the people he murdered.
And God bless the officers involved in this matter as they are hung out to dry for doing their job and doing it courageously and well. Where they should be honored, they will be pilloried. There will be no justice for them.
The city councilwoman and the city council candidate will see to that.