SHOOTING TRAGEDY NOT ABOUT MARIJUANA GROWING OPERATIONS

To The Editor:

It is a tragedy the lives of four police officers who had dedicated
their lives to help others has been taken from us. We all share in the
grief their loss brings.

Out of this tragedy will come the opportunity to assess the reasons
these officers lives were taken and make sure that these circumstances
never are repeated.

Rational thought and reflection must be taken in the weeks and months
to come. The last thing we need is a knee jerk reaction that will do
more harm than good.

This story is not about marijuana grow-ops. It's about police
procedures, and how we, as a society, allow dangerous people to live
unsupervised among us.

If all that we can do about this tragedy is go out of our way to crack
the skulls on a bunch of pot growers then we are going to be guilty of
missing the point, and the blood of these four fallen officers will be
on all our hands.

The proper responses will be to evaluate how to make our communities
safer by keeping the types of people that would shoot at someone out
of society and how to improve police procedures so never again will we
lose an officer to walking into a situation under-prepared.

Kirk Stephens