He should be in jail for a very long time

Video has surfaced from the Charlottesville rally/riot that shows a white supremacist asshole pulling out a pistol and saying “Hey n*****.” Then, pointing his pistol directly forward, he tries to shoot that pistol at someone. But his safety is on. After he takes the safety off, he thinks better and points the pistol toward the ground and shoots. The New York Times has the video care of the Virginia ACLU, and doesn’t quite report exactly what happened—which is peculiar.

To make his escape, a video recording shows, the armed protester strolled past a line of about a dozen state police troopers who were safely positioned about 10 feet away behind two metal barricades. None of them budged. “We all heard it and ran — I know damn well they heard it,” said Rosia Parker, a community activist in Charlottesville. “They never moved.” Police had a suspect in the shooting in custody on Saturday morning, according to an official familiar with the investigation, who requested anonymity to provide information not yet public. But residents are still demanding to know why officers did not act in real time as heavily armed people fought and a car sped toward a crowd, killing a woman. So stark was the police failure to intervene, many participants in the protest and counterprotests believe it was by design.

Maybe they cannot say that this was an alleged attempted murder on the part of the man in the video, but it sure seems that way. The fact of the matter is if that guy was black and he had an ounce of weed on him he might end up in jail for a decade. The case that white supremacist groups should be treated similarly to Islamic terrorist groups domestically is very strong. Video like the one in Charlottesville makes you wonder whether that would even matter if law enforcement is already too compromised.