It was a day I won’t forget: October 30, 2024.
I had just turned onto the main street out of my neighborhood in my Town & Country van, heading out with my kids to pick up last-minute Halloween costume supplies. The speed limit was 35. I enjoy driving fast when it’s appropriate, but not there. Too many kids, too many (adorable) dogs, too many variables. I stayed right at the limit.
Up ahead, a landscaping crew was clearing leaves. One of the workers, leaf blower roaring at full blast, stepped straight out in front of me without so much as a glance to the left.
I had maybe a second, a second and a half, to react. I slammed on the brakes and swerved as much as I dared. It wasn’t enough. Just as my van came to a stop, I hit him.
He wasn’t thrown. He wasn’t dragged. He dropped straight down in front of the vehicle. I must have been going well under five miles per hour at the moment of impact. It didn’t matter. He still suffered three broken ribs and required a hospital stay.
There was no perfect option. Only less bad ones.
I tell this story for one reason only: the physics of a large vehicle colliding with a fragile human body matters far more than the media wants to admit, and far more than our public conversations are willing to acknowledge.
Physics Doesn’t Care About Intent
What surprised me most afterward wasn’t the damage. It was how little speed it took to cause it. We imagine vehicle injuries to be only the result of high-speed collisions: flying bodies, crumpled metal, catastrophic injury. That’s a cinematic distortion. In reality, most of the danger comes from mass, proximity, and imbalance, not velocity.
A modern passenger van or SUV weighs two to three tons. A human body weighs a fraction of that and is vulnerable in predictable ways. Legs buckle. Hips rotate. Heads snap forward. Pavement finishes what momentum begins. A vehicle does not need speed to break bones. It does not need malice to cause grievous harm.
Sometimes it doesn’t even need contact.
The ground matters. Traction matters. On icy or slick pavement, sudden movement alone can be enough. A startled step backward, a hurried pivot. a reflexive attempt to dodge, and the unfortunate target loses footing, balance, and control. Once a body goes down near a moving vehicle, the danger multiplies instantly. At close range, a car does not need to strike someone violently to kill them. It only needs to disrupt stability. A stumble or fall is enough. A tire does not need speed to destroy a leg or crush a pelvis. Gravity and steel will do the rest.
This is why vehicles are treated as deadly weapons in law enforcement training and in courtrooms, not because drivers are assumed to be evil, but because physics is unforgiving. Science does not wait for intentions to clarify themselves. In this case, facts really don’t care about feelings. Panic moves steel just as effectively as malice. Confusion presses the accelerator just as surely as rage. The laws of motion do not care what anyone meant to do.
The Minneapolis Mathematics
Now apply those physical realities to what happened in Minneapolis. Strip away the slogans and the biographies. What matters is geometry.
An ICE officer was positioned at the front-left corner of a vehicle so that when he fired, the bullet entered straight through the windshield roughly a foot from the bottom and several inches in from the driver’s side. He was probably right-handed, which matters, because it tells us how his body was oriented and how little room he had to move.
The vehicle began to move toward him.
At that distance, intent is irrelevant. There is no time to determine whether the driver is panicking, fleeing, confused, or attacking. A human being standing in front of a vehicle does not get to pause and assess motives. He gets fractions of a second to decide whether he will still be standing a second later.
People keep arguing about whether the vehicle actually struck him, as though contact were the standard. It isn’t. The question is whether a reasonable person, standing where he was standing, could believe he was about to be knocked down, pinned, or run over. This is where their imagination fails; they can’t put themselves in the position of a human being staring down a large mass of metal and carbon.
Given the proximity, the angle, the movement of the vehicle — and the near-certainty of slick footing on the icy road — it was likely that quick movement would end up with him on the ground, helpless. Once you are inside the wheel arc of a moving car, escape options collapse. Reaction time is measured in tenths of a second. A stumble is enough. The pavement does not care why you fell.
None of this requires believing the driver was malicious. In fact, fear and confusion are the most likely explanation for her decision to hit the gas. But fear moves mass just as effectively as hatred does. Physics grants no moral exemptions.
Once again, there was no perfect option. Only less bad ones.
What the Law Actually Asks
The law governing use of deadly force is far less emotional than the commentary surrounding it.
It does not ask whether the person who died was good or bad. It does not ask whether the officer guessed intent correctly. It does not ask whether, in hindsight, things might have turned out differently.
The standard is simple: would a reasonable officer, in that moment, given what he could see and what he had time to process, believe he was facing an imminent risk of death or serious bodily harm?
“Imminent” does not mean inevitable. It means immediate. It means unfolding faster than deliberation allows.
This is why actual contact is not required. The law does not demand that an officer absorb injury before responding. It does not require him to wait until a bumper hits a knee or a tire rolls over a foot. Intent is legally irrelevant in these moments because it cannot be known. Officers are trained to assess behavior and positioning, not internal states.
The law is built around human limits, not moral fantasies.
The Red Herrings
Once the physical reality and legal standard are understood, much of the public conversation reveals itself as avoidance. Intent becomes the centerpiece, because it feels morally meaningful. It is also unknowable and irrelevant in real time. Biography becomes evidence. We are told who she was — a mother, a writer — as though virtue alters physics. It doesn’t. This framing sanctifies the dead so that discussing threat assessment feels like desecration.
We are told the officer “could have moved,” a claim that assumes unlimited reaction time and ignores proximity, wheel arc, human biomechanics, and ground conditions. Training rules are selectively invoked. Officers “should not shoot at vehicles” is stripped of context and used as a suicide pact rather than a preventive guideline. Yes, he made a mistake in being in front of the vehicle. No, once he was in that position he was not required to sacrifice himself to procedural trivia.
And finally, there is the fixation on contact, as though danger only becomes real at the moment of impact.
These are not misunderstandings. They are red herrings. Each redirects attention away from motion, distance, and time — the factors that actually determine survival — and toward narratives that feel more satisfying to the media and angry mob, and more useful to the politicians.
Why the Media Needs Martyrs
Physics produces tragedies, not villains. Law produces standards, not saints. Neither offers the kind of moral clarity modern media, activists, and politicians crave.
“Moral clarity” is an intoxicating phrase. It promises certainty without effort and righteousness without humility. It works just as well for activists and politicians as it does for newsrooms. Once invoked, it replaces understanding with symbolism and imagination with dogma. It clears out all the confusion of shades of grey and replaces them with a simple black-and-white narrative.
A tragedy without malice is unsatisfying. It resists mobilization. It offers grief, not righteousness. And grief is hard to transform into political power. Righteousness and justice, however . . .
So the story is reshaped. The dead are elevated into symbols (or, in my way of thinking degraded from complex humans into flat caricatures.) Situational complexity is flattened. Technical constraints are dismissed as excuses. Fear becomes guilt. Self-defense becomes aggression. Once martyrdom is established, discussing mechanics or law is treated as a moral offense.
This is not a failure of information. It is a failure of imagination.
Ironically, the same cultural voices that celebrate Imagine — a song that asks us to discard the hard constraints of reality in favor of moral fantasy — are often the least willing to actually imagine themselves inside someone else’s physical limits. They imagine intentions. They imagine purity. They imagine perfect judgment under pressure.
What they refuse to imagine is fear.
Or slipping.
Or losing balance.
Or being one bad step away from a tire.
Physics is intolerable to moral fantasy because it does not assign blame on demand. It does not care who deserved what. It does not pause for biography. It simply exists as a set of immutable rules. And so it must be ignored.
Naming It Correctly
What happened in Minneapolis was a tragedy.
It was not an act of oppression or tyrrany. It was not a crime disguised as policy. It was the collision of fear, confusion, mass, proximity, bad footing, and human limitation. Calling it a tragedy is not a dismissal of loss. It is a refusal to lie about reality. When we invent villains where none can be proven, we do not honor the dead. We conscript them into a story that flatters our moral certainties. They become useful tools, not human beings. And when we demand that officers read minds instead of physics, we ask them to gamble their lives to preserve a narrative.
A mature society understands that some deaths are not preventable by virtue or better intentions. It understands that fear can be reasonable even when the outcome is unbearable. It understands that the world is not obligated to arrange itself into moral parables.
And it understands something else: truthfulness is not the enemy of compassion. It is its foundation.
When we tell the truth about what happened without distortion or mythmaking, we allow space for grief without demanding hatred, for sorrow without requiring blame. We return dignity to all the human actors.
We can mourn a life lost without inventing monsters on either side. That doesn’t make us colder. It makes us truthful — and more compassionate.
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