I want to begin by saying something that apparently needs to be said: four people are dead. I will not be moving past that. I refuse to move past that. I am writing this column in a state of genuine grief, and I want anyone who is already composing their response to understand that before they accuse me, as they inevitably will, of not caring about the right things.

Four immigration enforcement officers were killed Thursday in Founders' Square. Eight more were wounded. They were killed, according to witnesses, by one another — a fact that the Restorationist community has received, based on my scan of social media, with a degree of satisfaction I find troubling. Not illegal. Not even, perhaps, surprising. But troubling.

I am also not going to pretend that Dr. Lena Kahale did anything wrong in a narrow, technical sense. She was distributing pamphlets. She made an argument. The argument was, by all accounts, well-organized. I am told it had good transitions. I believe it. I have read the Gnu Nation Cultural Council's position papers. They have very good transitions.

But I want to ask a question that no one in this city seems willing to ask, which is: to what end?

Dr. Kahale knew — she must have known — that she was presenting a maximally persuasive case in front of twelve armed men whose professional and psychological identities were built on the legitimacy of the very annexation she was refuting. She had three supporting points and a closing summation. She had, apparently, prepared. I am not saying this was illegal. I am saying it was, perhaps, not nothing.

The Restorationists will call this victim-blaming. They will say I am holding a woman responsible for the actions of twelve officers who chose, of their own volition, to discharge their weapons at one another in a public square. And fine. Let them say that. I have been called worse, usually by people who have read only the headline of my columns and not the columns themselves, which are more nuanced than the headlines suggest.

What I am saying is that there is a difference between having the right to make an argument and making that argument in the most incendiary way possible, at the most combustible moment possible, with three supporting points and a closing summation that a witness described as 'devastating in a way I am still processing.' That witness was still processing. Officers were being loaded into ambulances. And we are being asked to celebrate the transitions.

I have said many times in this space that I support indigenous rights. I support the recognition of the Tahumake people. I believe the 1953 annexation deserves serious historical scrutiny. I believe these things. I have believed them for years, at some social cost, which I mention not to seek credit but to establish that what follows is not coming from a place of bad faith.

What I cannot support is the weaponization of coherence.

We live in a city that is already stretched. The sinkhole on Third Street remains open. The holiday has been renamed seven times. There is a monument to a man on a toilet in the center of our only public square. People are tired. Into that exhaustion, Dr. Kahale introduced a four-minute argument with internal logical consistency, and four men are dead.

I don't think she pulled a trigger. I think she did something more durable than that. She made a point so well that twelve people couldn't survive it intact, and she walked away, and we are supposed to understand this as a victory.

Perhaps it is. I am willing to entertain that. I am always willing to entertain things, which is more than I can say for some people.

But I think of those four officers — imperfect, certainly; employed by a system that merits scrutiny, certainly; but also, each of them, someone's person — and I think about what it means to make an argument so good that the room destroys itself, and I wonder if we have confused effectiveness with wisdom.

I don't expect this column to land well. My columns about the things that matter rarely do.