Dallas shooting is the latest American nightmare

To a nation already approaching something like a nervous breakdown from a confluence of race, violence and social media, here’s a nightmare from the darkest corner of the American attic: a Texas sniper, a twisted hatred, a slaughter of innocents.
Yet there’s at least one big difference between Micah Xavier Johnson, accused of killing five cops Thursday night in Dallas, and Charles Whitman, who in 1966 opened fire from a tower at the University of Texas at Austin, and Lee Harvey Oswald, who three years earlier assassinated President Kennedy.
The motives of Whitman and Oswald remain murky to this day. But who can watch the cellphone video of a black Minnesota man shot by a white policeman at a traffic stop, or of another black man shot in Louisiana after being pinned to the pavement by two white officers, and not understand the urge to retaliate? Especially following death after death of black men at the hands of white officers who are almost always exonerated?
Before he was blown up by a robot bomb, the gunman made this explicit, according to Dallas Police Chief David Brown: “He said he was upset with black lives matter’’ and “the recent police shootings,’’ and “wants to kill white people, especially white officers.’’

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