The sin of vigilantism
Ahmad Arbery was jogging through a neighbourhood in coastal Georgia (about an hour North of Jacksonville) when a group of men thought they recognized him from a video of a robbery a few nights earlier. They piled in trucks, chased him down, ambushed him, and in the ensuing fight shot and killed him. Those facts aren’t really in dispute, as the killers themselves provided them to the police. Although they didn’t use the word “ambush,” they did capture his killing on video, and the video certainly shows an ambush. Arbery’s death has stoked all kinds of obvious reactions. It hits upon our nation’s racial issues, and it rightly has drawn comparisons to a modern-day lynching. There are understandable questions about racism in this kind of shooting. A group of three white men in pick-up trucks chased a black man in a white shirt through the streets while pointing guns at him, all because a black man in a white shirt was possibly seen cutting through a nearby construction site. Clearly...