It's a shooting-death tragedy loaded with polarized and dysfunctional politics. And that's all a community needs to intensify what amounts in American society already in political cold war.
I refer, of course, to the fact that Bryan Malinowski, executive director of Little Rock's Bill and Hillary Clinton National Airport, was shot dead pre-dawn in his Chenal Valley home by an agent or agents of the federal Bureau of Alcohol, Tobacco, Firearms and Explosives executing a search warrant.
Agents were suspicious that Malinowski had become such an active freelance gun dealer at registration-exempt gun shows, and perhaps elsewhere, that he should have done the paperwork and signed a document to be licensed. The point at which a wheeling-dealing gun-trading hobbyist becomes a dealer requiring a license is not clear under law and regulation.
So, there are guns at issue. Then there is the potentially abusive power and behavior of a federal government agency.
Then there is the epidemic of people's pre-emptive rushes to judgment without benefit of fact. Those judgments tend to be based on deep political resentments producing pre-emptive and hard-to-change determinations less based on fact than fervent personal desire.
Right-wing groups rush to crow that an over-reaching federal government is wholly to blame that a man is dead. Left-wing groups rush to say that guns--lax gun laws, gun-dealing abuses and gun-wielding madness--are the fatal factors.
And there is also the matter of race and class. Black people and poor people have been killed time and again by authorities executing warrants and accused of over-zealous tactics. But this time it happened in upscale Chenal Valley to a white man with a good job running the city airport. Suddenly upscale white people are deeply troubled by law-enforcement tactics.
It's going to be interesting to see if people can put politics aside to arrive at and accept a set of facts in this affair.
I fear some people are having their political adrenaline so vigorously pumped by their pre-determinations that they are not going to give up that exhilaration to any evidence of images on body cameras.
Yes, body-cam images. The officers engaged in this incident were supposed to be wearing and using them during this incident. Presumably they were. Presumably the images have been officially viewed.
The victim family's attorney, Bud Cummins, a former U.S. attorney and Donald Trump campaign agent in Arkansas, is seeking release of those images, after which we all ought to be able to see them.
For all the political fuel that pours onto this sad affair, the key question is simple, narrow, brief and presumably answerable. What happened that morning and how quickly did it happen? Did the federal agents knock? Did they announce themselves and their purpose? Did they get shot at before or after they entered the residence? If after, how long did they wait before barreling in? Did they wait before entering for the reasonable time referred to in case law--the reasonable time being a matter of judgment longer by logic for a weapons search than a drug one, since guns can't be flushed down toilets?
I said in an online videocast that the Bureau of Alcohol, Tobacco, Firearms and Explosives ought to have had a press conference the day of this tragedy to answer those basic questions, since it is a government agency presumably operating by and for the people. I got two sets of viewer responses.
One was that the bureau couldn't do that because the answers were bad for it. The other was that the bureau would likely love to do that, but the FBI was probably starting an investigation and muzzling it.
A lot of the issues in this tragedy can be properly considered more broadly as policy. Whether a case such as this is worthy of a dramatic surprise 6 a.m. maneuver in the first place ... that's for the Biden administration to handle in internal review and for the politicians in Congress to address if they choose.
I suspect the first question most people had upon hearing the news account of this tragedy was ... "why 6 in the morning?" That's not uncommon. That doesn't mean it must continue to be common. But it has nothing to do with whether agents acted rightfully or wrongfully on site that morning.
Surprised suspects are supposed to be caught unaware, not killed.
So, it's two separate inquiries. One is whether sleep-rousing surprise is a fair search advantage for authorities against a man charged with nothing but suspected of something.
The other is not a matter of theory for argument, but of fact suitable for finding out: What happened over a couple of minutes at that address that morning?
John Brummett, whose column appears regularly in the Arkansas Democrat-Gazette, is a member of the Arkansas Writers' Hall of Fame. Email him at [email protected]. Read his @johnbrummett feed on X, formerly Twitter.