A Watershed Moment for Gun Control in America?
George Floyd galvanized lawmakers and voters to support policing reform. Will Uvalde and Buffalo do the same for gun control?
The killing of George Floyd in Minneapolis by then-police officer Derek Chauvin was, sadly, not unique.
Granted, most of America had- blessedly- never seen a snuff film prior to May 25, 2020. Most hoped never to do so and hope never to do so again.
But George Floyd, as gut-wrenching as his death was to watch, was hardly the first unarmed man killed by excessive force while in police custody.
In 2018, as an example, contacts between police officers and members of the public numbered upwards of 61.5 million. Out of those, police kill a grim average of 1,000 people per year, most years. A small percentage of the 1,000 are unarmed, 77 out of 1,136 people killed by police officers in 2021, for instance. Most are armed suspects actively trying to kill police officers or others; 73 police officers were killed last year while on-duty, a number up by almost 60%.
George Floyd wasn’t the first Black man killed by police, either; he wasn’t the first man to be killed by a police officer later found guilty of murder in the case, though most officers involved in fatal force cases aren’t prosecuted.