A police shooting in Milwaukee is followed by a racially based riot; our left-wing friends tell us a police officer shooting an armed fleeing felon should cause a riot. The oppressed people have the right to free speech and protest after all.

To protest, as the Reverend Martin Luther King did before his assassination, is constitutionally protected free speech and every American’s right. To burn down and rob stores has become, in the minds of our progressive friends, a politically correct act of speech. We find some African American and liberal community leaders encouraging violence.

The outcome of the violence is the loss of jobs and further degradation of the very community that needs the jobs. Loot a store and you will eat for a week, get a job in a store and eat for life.

The left side of the political aisle will tell us that a police officer exists to protect and serve the people, not murder them; no argument from me with that. A fleeing felon is running away and thus no threat to a police officer so they should not be fired on; the Supreme Court and I disagree.

An armed fleeing felon can turn in a fraction of a second and murder the police officer; chasing an armed felon at night is a very high stress situation. The armed felon who was shot was a threat to all, but mostly to the very folks who are taking part in the riot in Milwaukee.

The Black Lives Matter movement needs to rename the group to Black Lives of those killed by Police Officers Matter. More African Americans have been murdered in Chicago in one month than are killed by police officers in a year in our entire nation.

More than 50 years have passed since the birth of the modern civil rights movement, two to three generations. We were told all that was needed was more African American and minority police officers; many major cities have an African American heavy leadership in the police department and a racial makeup representative of the communities; NY City has a majority/minority police force but the hatred for the police still exists.

We are now seeing the rise of a new dynamic, in that the killing of an African American by a police officer of the same race is called a racially motivated killing.

Our nation has made being a victim, having an excuse for failure or unlawful acts, a noble thing. The good folks on the left will tell people that you cannot succeed in life because (fill in the blank), thus you need us to care for you and to enable you to fail.

If programs and money were the answer, the Great Society programs in effect since the 1960s would have fixed the problem many times over. After every riot, a boat load of tax dollars is dumped into the usual programs; not much gets to the folks who will benefit from the programs, but the operators of the state and federal failed programs get even richer and the bureaucrats gain more power.

The mayor of Milwaukee has called for the arrest of the rioters and those who “egged them on;” that will never happen, but perhaps it should.