‘The Fire This Time’

I wrote today about the last time the cops were the targets of an assassination campaign:

In the past two weeks, the “war on police” has gone from a metaphor to a reality, with eight officers killed in targeted attacks in Dallas and Baton Rouge.

 

The country hasn’t seen anything like it since the early 1970s, when a lunatic fringe of the Left undertook a violent campaign against law enforcement.

 

Today’s spate of anti-police violence isn’t remotely as organizationally or ideologically coherent, but it is more lethal. The Black Liberation Army, a homicidal splinter group of the Black Panthers, never killed more than two cops in one operation, and its body count over the course of about two years was only slightly higher than what we’ve seen just this month.

 

Vanity Fair writer Bryan Burrough recounts the history in his exceptional book Days of Rage. He dismisses as a myth the popular idea that the Left’s violent underground was motivated primarily by opposition to the Vietnam War. “Every single underground group of the 1970s,” Burrough writes (excepting the Puerto Rican FALN), “was concerned first and foremost with the struggle of blacks against police brutality, racism, and government repression.”