I don't get why people freak out over the dead cops in Dallas.

[Igel]

72. it assumes a certain amount of communalism.

That's only deeply rooted in certain portions of American society. Some of the more atavistic ones, who missed the Enlightenment and how it mixed with Christianity to reshape some value systems.

If you fight tyranny, you fight not the abstraction but the action. They come for you, you resist.

Otherwise you're in the same boat as Muslim extremists who fight the tyranny of drone killings in Yemen by shooting people in Paris, and you fight the killing of Iraqi Muslims by shooting people in Bangladesh. It's Western Christians killing Muslims, so you resist that by killing Western Christians. A cop in Florida kills somebody, by mistake or by intent or because of a misperception, you protest in NY City and kill a cop in Oregon. Tit for tat. Just like settling a dispute that reduced your tribe's numbers by requiring that the other tribe present you with a fresh wombs so you can replenish your numbers--ignore the fact that the wombs are attached to female bodies with brains, all that matters is the tribe, the collective, the commune. I think "communalism" is good word for this and use it for such situations. (It's an South Asian subcontinent usage, as far as I know. We use "collective punishment," but that's far too narrow an application of the concept. There's no punishment in assuming that the person with the same skin color or language or religion as you is the one telling the truth in any disagreement, so it's communalism but not collective punishment.)

In this case, it's easy to misconstrue what another person says and to present that misconstrual as the other person's intended meaning. The technical term for this is "straw man."

(Straw men are staples here. And by "staple" I don't mean a small piece of wire bent in order to hold pieces of paper together or to hold something against a flat surface. It's a metaphorical extension of staple, like bread or potatoes.)