The paramilitarization of American life proceeds apace. Following the seven armed undercover agents required to confront a female college student in last month’s sparkling-water stand-off and the 13 armed officers needed to take down a baby deer called Giggles, in Cook County the other day five-to-seven police officers showed up at the Victory Centre senior living facility to tase, fire at, and kill a 95-year-old man for refusing to take his medication:
First they tased him, but that didn’t work. So they fired a shotgun, hitting him in the stomach with a bean-bag round. Wrana was struck with such force that he bled to death internally, according to the Cook County medical examiner.
“The Japanese military couldn’t get him at the age he was touchable, in a uniform in the war. It took 70 years later for the Park Forest police to do the job,” Wrana’s family attorney, Nicholas Grapsas, a former prosecutor, said in an interview with me Thursday.
Mr. Wrana used a walker. For his entire “confrontation” with the five-to-seven cops, the nonagenarian veteran was apparently seated in his chair. This detail from his daughter is poignant:
Wrana wanted to talk to her. The doctor held the phone up to his ear, she said.
“He just said, ‘Thank you for everything you’ve done for me. I love you and goodbye,’” Mangerson recalled, her voice cracking. “That was it.”
I wonder what Mr. Wrana’s final thoughts were of the country he fought for 70 years ago. Too much law enforcement in America has lost all sense of proportion: If you need six armed officers to police a nonagenarian in an old folks’ home, seven armed officers to police a 20-year-old female you suspect might have a beer in her shopping bag, thirteen armed officers to terminate Giggles the baby doe, you’re doing it wrong — and you’re the real threat to public order.