brazen 復習
先日ダラスで起こった警官銃撃事件についてです。
Dallas Police Are Used to Recovering From Being in Harm’s Way
DALLAS — The officer was standing in a hotel cafe here when he was asked — as he no doubt had been asked dozens of times since Thursday — how he was doing.
He shook his head. “Second time in 13 months,” he said.
The officer was talking about what happened last year in Dallas. A disturbed man had a brazen shootout with the Dallas Police Department on June 13, 2015, driving an armored van to Police Headquarters, ramming a patrol car and opening fire on officers while poking his rifle through the van’s gun portholes. That is right: Fifty-five weeks before a lone gunman attacked police officers on Thursday in downtown Dallas, another lone gunman attacked some of those same police officers last year at the edge of downtown Dallas.
Both gunmen used Soviet-style rifles. Both were mobile and created confusion about whether there were multiple gunmen. Both attacks ended in standoffs. Both gunmen were killed by the police. Both assaults spread panic in parts of the city, caused evacuations and brought a level of warlike violence to the center of the country’s ninth-largest city. One planted homemade explosive devices, but the other may have just threatened to plant them.
The first attack began one mile from the second. The first gunman, James Boulware, 35, was white. The second, Micah Johnson, 25, was black. Mr. Boulware, who blamed the police after he lost full custody of his son after his arrest in 2013, fired nearly 200 rounds but did not kill or injure any officers. Mr. Johnson, driven by his hatred of white officers, fired perhaps just as many rounds but killed five officers and wounded nine.
But there is more: Rewind the clock a few additional months from June 2015, to October 2014 during the Ebola crisis. Dallas was the site of the first threecases of Ebola confirmed in the United States. The Dallas police fought that war, too, helping to calm the first American city to contend with a widespread Ebola public-health emergency. Officers stood guard outside apartments suspected of being contaminated, the very places many residents wanted to get far from. That line that is repeated often these days — that the police run toward danger as the public runs away from it — applies even when the danger is invisible.
以下略
記事の中で取り上げるのは、"brazen"です。
LDOCEで確認してみると、"used to describe a person or the actions of a person who is not embarrassed about behaving in a wrong or immoral way"や"to deal with a situation that is difficult or embarrassing for you by appearing to be confident rather than ashamed"という意味があることが分かりました。
また、『ジーニアス英和辞典』第4版(大修館)でも、形容詞で「鉄面皮の、恥知らずの」「真鍮の、不快な金属音の」や、動詞で「...に臆面もなく(大胆に)立ち向かう」とあり、"brazen it out"で「厚かましく押し通す」という意味があります。
また、"brazen faced"では、「厚かましい」となります。
ここでは、「躊躇ない銃撃」と表せると思います。(Akim)
