Christopher Dorner was a real-life super hero … like Django Unchained in real life … it’s kind of exciting.
That’s what Columbia University Professor Marc Lamont Hill claimed on CNN in attempting to explain the outpouring of social media support for the alleged killer in part because of the grievances expressed in his so-called manifesto on Facebook.
Christopher Dorner, the ex-cop and Navy reservist with a vendetta against the LAPD for firing him, was the subject of a massive manhunt in California.
Dornier allegedly murdered four people: Monica Quan (the daughter of former LAPD Captain Randal Quan, who was Dorner’s lawyer when he appealed his dismissal from the force), her fiancee Keith Lawrence, Riverside police officer Michael Crain, and San Bernardino County Sheriff’s Deputy Jeremiah MacKay.
Officers reported hearing a single gunshot on Tuesday as they were pumping tear gas into a mountain cabin near Big Bear Lake where Dorner was cornered during his final, deadly gunbattle with police, and authorities suspect he may have taken his own life .
Marc Lamont Hill subsequently went on Bill O’Reilly’s FNC show The O’Reilly Factor to try to clarify his controversial remarks that he made about Dorner on CNN:
“Well the first thing is, you just mentioned the family members of the victims, and quite frankly my heart goes out to them. And if my words in any way caused them any pain or trauma or stress, more than they’re already experiencing, then I offer them my deepest condolences and my apologies…
“What I was saying on CNN was not that I support Dorner, not that he was a superhero to me. I was asked to explain why he was getting so much online support. What I was saying is that to many people people, they’re not seeing him as a mass killer. The media narrative isn’t that he’s just a mass killer. The media narrative is that he was someone wronged by a corrupt department and now he’s exacting his revenge, which was the Django comparison. I’m not condoning what he did, but Americans are capable of having two thoughts at the same time … We can critique him and say, look Dorner was wrong for what he did but there might be a real story about corruption, about violence, about targeting individual people that we can also talk about at the same time, and I think that’s what this crisis has produced for us.”
Watch the full interview below.
Do you think Prof. Hill has a point or did his comments on CNN drawing some sort of parallel between Dorner and the Quentin Tarantino movie appear insensitive to the victims of Dorner’s acts and their families and to victims of violent crime generally?
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