Flesh Wound

It’s safe to say that Joe Rogan is not a very smart person. I think we always suspected that, but he made it very clear recently when he said in response to the fatal shooting of 37-year-old ICE agitator Renee Nicole Goode in Minneapolis, that “ICE are villains.” And then asked, “are we really going to be the Gestapo?” That is about as an inane of a comment as anyone could make in regards to ICE’s deporting criminal aliens from this country. They are doing their job. Does Joe Rogan believe that an ICE agent who is lawfully performing his duties, should just stand there and allow a hate-filled woman to accelerate her 2,000-pound SUV and run over him? He should just take one for the team? Take the charge. Damn the consequences?

Minneapolis Mayor Jacob Frey tried to minimize the violence of the ICE agent being struck by an SUV when he said, the agent "walked away with a hip injury he might as well have gotten from closing a refrigerator door". His farce of a press conference after the incident, stirred up the memories of the scene in Monty Python and the Holy Grail where the knight gets both arms and legs cut off in a sword fight and he continues to want to fight, calling his injuries, “a flesh wound.” According to Jacob Frey, getting hit by a moving SUV is a mere “flesh wound.” It’s no big deal.

Anyone who believes that the ICE agent should not have acted in self-defense because getting hit by an accelerating SUV is nothing, can meet me in a parking lot in Dallas. I will have my SUV with me, you can stand there, and I’ll run over you. If you think that it’s no big deal to get hit by an accelerating 2,000-pound SUV, you can experience how great it feels for yourself. Anybody? Anybody? Bueller? Bueller? Of course, nobody’s going to take me up on that because it would absolutely be insane to allow yourself to be run over by an SUV. Just as it would have been absolutely insane for the ICE agent to allow it to happen to him.

What these people fail to understand is that the ICE agent could easily have fractured his femur bone, which is one of the most painful injuries you could get. He could have dislocated his hip when he was struck by the car. He could’ve broken his back and been paralyzed from the waist down for the rest of his life. Or he could’ve been knocked back and struck his head against the frozen asphalt, fractured his skull, causing a brain bleed and died. All those things, are legitimate outcomes that happen to people when they are struck by moving cars. Yesterday, it was reported that “according to two U.S. officials briefed on his medical condition, Jonathan Ross, the ICE agent who fatally shot Renee Goode in Minneapolis, suffered internal bleeding to the torso following the incident.”

Every year, over 7,300 pedestrians are killed by being struck by a moving automobile in the United States alone. That’s about 20 per day. Does anybody remember Charlottesville 8 years ago, when James Fields drove his car through a protest, struck a woman, and killed her? He was sentenced to life in prison for doing what Renee Goode tried to do to Agent Ross. Should we allow James Fields out of prison because running someone down with your car is no longer a crime? All the same people who were saying that Renee Goode running over an ICE agent was no big deal, were completely outraged when Fields ran over that woman with his car in Charlottesville.

Does anybody remember the terrorist attack last year in New Orleans that killed 14 people? How did all those people die in that terrorist attack? They were all run over by an automobile. Automobiles are deadly weapons. Automobiles can and are often used to intentionally kill people. I don’t even understand why we are having this discussion. She pointed her car at an ICE agent, and she accelerated the car and struck him with potentially deadly force. He only shot at her in self-defense to stop her in the act of trying to kill him. 

Has anybody considered that maybe the ICE agent shooting the woman could have actually saved his life and is the reason why he was not more seriously injured? I don’t know for sure, but maybe when the bullet struck the driver, her foot came off the accelerator, and he was not hit with the same force he would’ve been if he didn’t shoot her. Maybe when she was struck by the bullet, she turned the wheel to the right and the agent was not struck as directly as he would have been, thus lessoning his injuries. Maybe shooting her actually saved his life. I don’t know. We don’t have enough video evidence to determine whether it did or it didn’t, but it’s possible. 

I’ll bet every single person who was killed in New Orleans last year wished they had a gun so they could have shot the driver who was about to run them over. It may not have saved their lives, but it could’ve saved some of the 13 others who were killed that night. If the ICE agent did not shoot her, how do we know that Renée Goode would not have run over other ICE agents? If she was willing to run over one, she may have been willing to run over three or four more. Maybe that ICE agent saved the lives of other ICE agents on the street that day when he pulled that trigger.

The fact remains is that this woman intentionally drove her car at an ICE agent, striking him and could have easily killed him. Those are the facts. And the fact that he didn’t die or wasn’t more seriously injured, doesn’t excuse her attempt to run him over and doesn’t allow us to conclude that he shouldn’t have acted in self-defense. If a criminal is pointing a gun at a police officer, and starts to pull the trigger, should the police officer wait and see if the bullet actually kills him or merely causes a flesh wound before deciding whether to shoot back in self-defense? It doesn’t even make any sense. But this is where we are in American politics these days. Nothing makes sense. Everybody is contorting the facts and logic to fit their pre-fabricated narratives – ICE agents are bad which means that if an ICE agent doesn’t stand there and allow himself to be run over by an SUV, then according to Joe Rogan, he is a villain and ICE is the Gestapo. And the consequence of that type of rhetoric is that yesterday evening, three illegal aliens who had been released into the United States by the Biden administration, viciously beat an ICE agent with a shovel in Minneapolis.

Remember how we got to this point. Joe Biden allowed 15 million illegal immigrants, many of whom are violent criminals, to merely walk into this country unvetted in order to help Democrats win elections, and turned a blind eye as they ran rampant in our country raping and murdering people, while the Democrats created a network of far-left sanctuary cities who refuse to work with ICE to detain and deport these violent criminal aliens because they needed the votes. And for years, Democrat politicians and far left-wing pundits have been encouraging violence against their political opponents and law enforcement. They created all the conditions necessary which led to Nicole Goode being shot by an ICE agent. Her death should be laid at the feet of Barack Obama, Joe Biden, Nancy Pelosi, Chuck Schumer, Tim Walz, Jacob Frey and every other mayor of a sanctuary city in this country. But they do not care about her because they got their desired narrative that “ICE is the villain” and “ICE is the Gestapo”, so ICE will stop deporting criminal aliens, so Democrats can win more elections.

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Mr. Garrett is a graduate of Princeton University, and a former NFL player, coach, and executive. He has been a contributor to the website Real Clear Politics. He has recently published his first novel, No Wind.