Less than two years after being acquitted for manslaughter, former Tulsa police officer Betty Shelby, who shot and killed unarmed Terence Crutcher in September 2016, is scheduled to teach a National Rifle Association pistol-shooting course at Tulsa’s United States Shooting Academy. While we could accuse NRA of having impure motivations here, we will just offer a little bit of constructive criticism in case any of the people involved with this tasteless, terrible idea are somehow genuinely confused about why this is a tasteless, terrible idea.
Here are three simple suggestions for making this class not just acceptable but beneficial to society.
1. Make it exclusively about firearm safety, specifically about how firearms are equipped with safeties and why you should make sure to leave them on when you are, say, pointing said firearm at an unarmed father who is walking away from you with his hands up.
2. Make Shelby one of the students, not the teacher.
3. Schedule the class for sometime before September 2016. Otherwise, what’s the point?
In November, Tulsa World reported Shelby, who now works as a sheriff’s deputy in Rogers County, was scheduled to speak at Southeastern Homicide Investigators Conference on the topic Surviving the Aftermath of a Critical Incident before criticism from civil rights groups including NAACP Legal Defense and Educational Fund caused the conference to rescind its invitation. As of press time, Shelby has mercifully never made an appearance on the ABC drama How to Get Away With Murder, probably because it does not air on NRA TV.
