News

“A Portland tattoo artist fatally shot a homeless man in the parking lot of his business. Oregon law says the shooting was legal,” Willamette Week reports.

I won’t go through a rewrite/rewording of what happened here – go to the link and read the story for yourself. Nor will I second-guess the actions of the tattoo artist, who will have to live with the consequences of them.

What I will observe is that he is the one who approached the homeless man and the end result was a fatality. Assuming things went down essentially as presented, I leave it to you to assess what you think you would have done under similar circumstances.

I’m also not going to second-guess the way authorities handled things. My interest in bringing this to your attention is to compare outcomes with another Portland defensive gun use, one that resulted in criminal charges, convictions and punishment.

I’m referring to the case of Michael Strickland, an activist videographer known for his “Laughing at Liberals” productions, who drew a gun in self defense to keep a mob of leftist Portland agitators from attacking him. Again, I am not going to comment on Strickland’s actions and leave it to you to put yourself in his place.

Oath Keepers covered the incident at the time and Strickland posted his own video, accompanied by mitigating information that was suppressed by the authorities:

This video was my first person video of the events that night. I was arrested a few minutes after I was attacked, and my camera and SD were seized immediately. This video was part of the sealed evidence. The prosecutors, Kate Molina and Todd Jackson, and Judge Thomas Ryan did not want the public to see this video before the trial. The evidence has since been unsealed.

The end result?

On February 10, 2017, Strickland was found guilty of all 21 counts: 10 counts of unlawful use of a weapon, 10 counts of menacing, and one count of disorderly conduct. He was sentenced to 40 days in jail, 240 hours of community service, banned from taking video of people or events for at least 2017, and is also banned from owning guns.

“How do they pursue me for not harming anyone when they let this other guy off who went out to confront someone?” Strickland asks on Twitter.

Without suggesting anything happen to “even things up,” it’s not unfair to suggest it’s because Strickland has been a thorn in the side to “progressives” controlling Portland, routinely exposing the insanity of their policies and their followers to a growing audience. It’s not unfair to wonder if his prosecution had less to do with the law and with justice than it did with discrediting, sticking it to and neutralizing an obstacle to their ambitions, one they wanted to silence by using the overwhelming “public” resources under their personal control.

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David Codrea’s opinions are his own. See “Who speaks for Oath Keepers?”