Sportscaster Dale Hansen: Dallas shooting was an ‘attack on our basic humanity’
Texas sports anchor Dale Hansen gave a blistering speech about the state of violence in the United States as the nation mourns the loss of five cops who were killed in an ambush Thursday night.
The WFAA sportscaster told his viewers that he was almost embarrassed that he knows the Texas Rangers lost to the Minnesota Twins 10 to 1 that night — because news of the tragedy should have drawn his attention away from the game.
“It was another shooting in America. It was in our city this time and police officers were being killed, but it was a couple of blocks away and the Rangers were being shut out. This is what I have become. This is what too many of us have been for a long time now,” he said in a segment called “Hansen Unplugged.”
Hansen said that people will fly their flags at half-mast, say the rights things and make promises they won’t keep. In the end, he said, nothing will change.
“Our lives will go on, while the lives of so many others won’t, because we expect it now and we accept it. It wasn’t this way when I was a boy, but it is life in America now,” he said.
Hansen said police officers are great people because they run into buildings we run from and look for people we hide from, but they cannot make mistakes because they have the power of God in their hands in the form of guns. For this reason, he said, we cannot and should not defend all police officers.
“A white man in America doesn’t die for selling cigarettes on a street corner, he gets a ticket,” he said. “A white man in America doesn’t die for driving with a broken taillight, he gets a ticket, too. And the officers who abuse the badge and the power they have should be punished, but too many times they are not.”
But, he said, opening fire on the city streets of Dallas does not do anything to right the wrongs that people deal with every day and that the shooter might have killed good cops in the process.
Hansen said that minority communities hate to suffer the indignity of stereotypes but that the killer did the same exact thing by shooting at any cops “because don’t we all really know, they’re all the same.”
“It was not just an attack on the Dallas police; it was an attack on our basic humanity and the common decency we used to cherish in America,” he said. “But that’s all gone now —we lost that a long time ago.”
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