Time to dial down the rage

Views from around the world. These opinions are not necessarily shared by Stuff newspapers.

This country has an anger management problem. The political right and left are not just talking past each other, they are screaming. It’s causing people to get hurt.

The driver of a pickup truck who reportedly drove into a crowd of protesters in Buffalo on Wednesday night, injuring a bicyclist, is the latest manifestation of rage gone wild. Americans need to dial it down.

To be clear, there is no equivalency between exercising one’s constitutional right to protest and driving a 3000-pound truck into a crowd. Protesters were demonstrating against racial injustice in response to the fact that none of the three officers involved in the killing of Breonna Taylor in Louisville, Kentucky, was charged with her killing.

The First Amendment guarantees the right of the people “peaceably to assemble, and to petition the government for a redress of grievances’’. When protesting gives way to rioting, that is criminal behaviour, not peaceful assembly. All too often, however, peaceful protests and criminal rioting are treated as the same by some broadcast outlets and social media accounts.

Anger over the killing of unarmed Black people by members of law enforcement will continue to build so long as the killings continue. Protesters will best serve their cause by using legal means.