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Police killings in the USA

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Tannin Capricorn

Can't remember


Joined: 06 Aug 2006
Location: Huon Valley Tasmania

PostPosted: Fri Jul 08, 2016 10:34 pm
Post subject: Police killings in the USAReply with quote

I'm amazed that there isn't a thread on this yet. Have we become so used to policemen in the USA shooting people dead on the flimsiest of pretexts that we just don't pay attention anymore? Have we all written off the USA as a terminally violent and dysfunctional society akin to Mexico, South Africa, or the Democratic Republic of the Congo? Extraordinary.

Meanwhile, nobody anywhere has even bothered asking why some angry black man with a military weapon has been shooting back. Well, fair enough I guess. It's not really a question, is it. We all know.

The real question that deserves an answer, the great perplexing mystery of it all, is this: why has it taken until now? Why in a year with an average of one African-American citizen a day shot dead by the police who are sworn to protect and serve, why has there been no great uprising? In short, the question isn't "why did this black sniper start killing random police officers", the question is "how on earth did they, the black citizens of the USA, manage to restrain themselves and not start shooting back until today?"

I am honestly amazed that it has taken this long, and fear deeply that, now it has started, it will be very, very hard to stop.

Let's face it: the reality is that US police won't stop shooting random black citizens. The don't seem able to stop.

And now that African-Americans have started randomly killing the police who are randomly killing their brothers and sisters, it wil get worse and worse and there will be no end to it.

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Pies4shaw Leo

pies4shaw


Joined: 08 Oct 2007


PostPosted: Fri Jul 08, 2016 10:36 pm
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It's been dealt with in The WTF thread.
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Tannin Capricorn

Can't remember


Joined: 06 Aug 2006
Location: Huon Valley Tasmania

PostPosted: Fri Jul 08, 2016 10:55 pm
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Thanks P4S. I don't get to read all the threads these days, just glance at the headlines.

I see that you wrote "The alternative to the conspiracy theories is to confront the reality that the Land of the Free has systematically subjugated, incarcerated and murdered a major part of its population. It's understandable that some of the Dotty Right would prefer madness to facing the truth."

Just so.

I can't see how the USA is ever going to recover from its terminal decline. (Not this matter alone, a range of other things too. This is just the arsenic icing on a very toxic cake.

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think positive Libra

Side By Side


Joined: 30 Jun 2005
Location: somewhere

PostPosted: Sat Jul 09, 2016 1:43 am
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I just asked our black Jamaican taxi driver what he thought, and he said with a shrug " there will be another one tomorrow and the day after, in church, at the movies, it's crazy, it's madness, it will get worse before it gets better" he doesn't like all the guns, but "what can you do? How Doyle fix it now? They are crazy here about their guns, it's nuts". He was about 25. Long dregs. I asked him if it worried him if he got picked up. He said you just have to do the right thing, behave right, but it could happen to anyone. He lives in buffalo.

We saw a small back lives matter protest in New York, but as with the save Messi one, we just walked around it.

It's a worry though.

I have quite a few American friends, only one is a gun advocate, (and she's nuts!) the rest want them gone.

Just saw on the news (we are at buffalo airport waiting for a flight to Denver,) there has already been an increase in assault weapon sales since last night.

There is a massive police presence, it was noticeable in DC New York, and Boston. Sirens all the time in New York. On the outskirts of all three towns, gangs of black youths in packs. I wouldn't walk around there. We have been to several small towns, and larger like Charlotte, and I felt as safe as I do in Melbourne. But who knows who has a gun, that's the thing. Not good

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sixpoints 



Joined: 27 Sep 2010
Location: Lulie Street

PostPosted: Sat Jul 09, 2016 10:42 am
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I haven't checked any further than this as to what is happening in the USA. Eg demographics of victims, race of victims/perps, reasons for shooting incidents (family violence, gang, robbery, minor disagreements etc), so I offer no attempt at analysis.
But just finding this site and looking at the sheer numbers is staggering.
If this is the price that nation is willing to pay, then so be it. But the trauma of gun violence, by these numbers must be all pervasive. Every one of these thousands of victims has parents, siblings, friends...the place must be full of traumatised people!
Imagine being a cop knowing everybody you pull over could be armed to the teeth? What would that do to the way you approach your job, let alone your psyche?

http://www.gunviolencearchive.org/
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watt price tully Scorpio



Joined: 15 May 2007


PostPosted: Sat Jul 09, 2016 1:26 pm
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Not much has changed in some respects. I remember showing this to my then school age daughters when Michael Moore was just starting out on his TV series "The Awful Truth" which we used to watch as a family (on FTA)

https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=xeOaTpYl8mE

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Wokko Pisces

Come and take it.


Joined: 04 Oct 2005


PostPosted: Sat Jul 09, 2016 5:22 pm
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Politicians and media stoking racial tensions and pandering to hate groups like BLM have finally got the payoff they wanted. Same old sheep parroting gun control instead of focusing on the actual issue which is racist hatred of blacks towards whites, incubated from the President down while ignoring the violence of blacks against each other.

Just forget that blacks killing blacks is the real issue, in Chicago (one of the most tightly gun controlled cities in the USA) there have already been 344 homicides this year, overwhelmingly black on black shootings with no arrests.

http://heyjackass.com/
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Culprit Cancer



Joined: 06 Feb 2003
Location: Port Melbourne

PostPosted: Sat Jul 09, 2016 6:10 pm
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People are angry, unemployed, under employed, depressed and can still purchase fully automatic weapons. This is their gun laws coming home to roost. The NRA are pretty quiet but everyone should be able to carry a weapon so everyone can shoot back. It's working, people are shooting back.

My American friends blame Obama, they reckon it's a conspiracy and the media cover it up. They can't wait for Trump to be President. Shocked Confused
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Tannin Capricorn

Can't remember


Joined: 06 Aug 2006
Location: Huon Valley Tasmania

PostPosted: Sat Jul 09, 2016 6:43 pm
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Wokko wrote:
Politicians and media stoking racial tensions and pandering to hate groups like BLM have finally got the payoff they wanted. Same old sheep parroting gun control instead of focusing on the actual issue which is racist hatred of blacks towards whites, incubated from the President down


Ahh, I get it. The reason the white police have shot hundreds of black people dead is that the black people don't like it. Yer right. On your bike.

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Wokko Pisces

Come and take it.


Joined: 04 Oct 2005


PostPosted: Sat Jul 09, 2016 6:49 pm
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http://www.dailywire.com/news/7264/5-statistics-you-need-know-about-cops-killing-aaron-bandler

Educate yourself you numpty.
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Wokko Pisces

Come and take it.


Joined: 04 Oct 2005


PostPosted: Sat Jul 09, 2016 7:02 pm
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https://twitter.com/JoeVargas/status/751623298975358977
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stui magpie Gemini

Prepare for the worst, hope for the best.


Joined: 03 May 2005
Location: In flagrante delicto

PostPosted: Sat Jul 09, 2016 7:13 pm
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It's a messy circular self perpetuating and self fulfilling slow moving disaster.

Cops in the US are on heightened guard whenever they pull someone up, as it's highly probable that person is armed, quite possibly legally. Our cops don't have that pressure. That would put an edge on you for a start.

The majority of cops are white, Blacks are over represented in arrests unsurprisingly as they make up the majority of the poor and disadvantaged, the breeding ground of crime.

So when a white cop pulls up a black person, both are on seriously heightened guard.

BTW, I'm not even going to attempt to justify the two shootings in the lead up to the latest event, they are unjustifiable.

Are the cops racist? Dunno, but doubt it as a generalisation. More likely they're racial profiling and are on a hair trigger so more likely to make an error of judgement faced with a black suspect.

Would the same thing have happened in the two lead up shootings if the suspects were white? Probably not.

If it did happen, would the outrage have been the same? Probably not.

Interestingly in the USA from my observation, the majority of homeless and beggars in Vegas was overwhelmingly white.

In San Francisco, I'd call it 50% black, 30% white, 15% mexican and 5% Asian.

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Pies4shaw Leo

pies4shaw


Joined: 08 Oct 2007


PostPosted: Sat Jul 09, 2016 9:39 pm
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I hear the strains of "Strange Fruit" far off in the background.
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David Libra

I dare you to try


Joined: 27 Jul 2003
Location: Andromeda

PostPosted: Sat Jul 09, 2016 10:00 pm
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http://www.newyorker.com/news/news-desk/the-silence-and-violence-of-the-n-r-a

Quote:
The silence and violence of the N.R.A.
Evan Osnos


In the language of todays National Rifle Association, an armed society is a polite society. The aphorism, borrowed from the science-fiction author Robert Heinlein, is the inspiration for one of the N.R.A.s most popular T-shirts, which bears the word coexist, spelled out in brightly colored ammo cartridges and guns. To promote the shirt ($17.99), the N.R.A. store says that Heinleins quote emphasizes the independent, tolerant nature of gun owners in a fun and thought-provoking way.

It is a vision at the heart of the modern gun movement: the more that society makes the threat of violence available to us, the safer we will be. In forty-eight hours this week, the poisonous flaw in that fantasy has been exposed from multiple angles: on Tuesday, two police officers in Baton Rouge, Louisiana, fatally shot a black man, Alton Sterling, while trying to arrest him. Some reports say that, before police arrived, he was openly carrying a gun, which, under the makeshift patchwork of American gun law, would have afforded him more legal protection, not less. Louisiana is one of the forty-five states that allow residents to carry firearms openly in public, and though Sterling was a convicted felon (and therefore probably ineligible to obtain a concealed-carry permit) police could not have known his criminal record before investigating him. It was absurd not to ask whether a white man, exercising his right to open carry, would have been approached differently.

The next day, during a traffic stop in Falcon Heights, Minnesota, a police officer fatally shot a black man, Philando Castile, who, according to his girlfriend, Diamond Reynolds, was licensed to carry a concealed firearm. According to Reynolds, who was in the car and broadcast the aftermath on Facebook, Castile had told the officer that he was carrying his gun, but when Castile reached for his license and registration, he was shot. In the hours that followed, as America turned, once again, to the ritual of mourning the killings of black men by police officers, the N.R.A. was silent. Its official Twitter feed, which often draws attention to cases of police questioning gun owners for exercising the right to carry, said nothing, even as the silence became conspicuous. (@CoolJ90: @NRA care to come to the defense of a man murdered by police who had a license to carry his weapon?)

For critics of the N.R.A., it was an awkward exposure of what is usually left unsaid: the organization is far less active in asserting the Second Amendment rights of black Americans than of white ones.

On Thursday, the politics of race, guns, and security exploded in a horrific attack on law enforcement. While protesters in Dallas marched in the name of Black Lives Matter, denouncing the latest killings, a sniper ambushed police, killing five and wounding seven others, along with two civilians. In a standoff, a suspect was killed by a police bomb. Dallas police later identified him as twenty-five-year-old Micah Xavier Johnson. In his statements to police, they said, he wanted to kill white people, especially white police officers. Three other suspects reportedly were in custody.

In turning guns on police, the Dallas ambush scrambles the usual polarities of gun politics. For more than two decades, the N.R.A. has maintained a facsimile of respect for law enforcement, reflexively announcing its devotion to warriors and heroeseven as it has pushed to relax laws that police routinely describe as a threat to the safety of their officers and the public. Last year, under lobbying pressure from the N.R.A., the Bureau of Alcohol, Tobacco, and Firearms abandoned an effort to stop the sale of armor-piercing cop killer ammunition that authorities have tried to ban for thirty years.

After each high-profile public massacre in recent years, the N.R.A. and its allies have deployed a reliable strategy: deflect criticism from the basic problemthe unqualified availability of military-grade weaponsby fixating on technical details that serve their political ends. After the massacre in San Bernardino, they emphasized that, despite strong gun laws in California, the killers had legally purchased some of their gunsas if that proved that gun regulation is useless, and so society shouldnt bother. After the slaughter in Orlando, in an effort to defuse attempts to impose stricter regulations on AR-15s, the military-style rifle used in San Bernardino and many other attacks, gun-rights advocates fixated on the fact that the Orlando killer did not use an AR-15. (He used a similar military-style rifle, produced by Sig Sauer.) It was, in retrospect, an especially shortsighted strategy: by drawing attention to the broader range of weapons that are widely available to civilians and capable of inflicting mass harm, gun-rights advocates inadvertently aided their opponents by making it newly evident that banning AR-15s alone would not solve the problem.

The Dallas ambush will be harder to explain away. There is much still to learn about the guns involved, but early videos appeared to show a man executing a police officer using a military-style rifle, which has proved to be especially deadly for American police. The Violence Policy Center, a gun-safety group, noted that, in 2014, the most recent year for which information is available, one in five law enforcement officers slain in the line of duty were killed with an assault weapon. The centers executive director, Josh Sugarmann, said in a statement, Responsibility for this lethal assault falls directly at the feet of the gun industry, which designs, markets, and sells the military-bred weapons necessary for such attacks. They must finally be held accountable.

The Dallas ambush has also exposed an uncomfortable fact for the gun-rights movement: for decades, even as it maintains its abstract tributes to law enforcement, it has embraced a strain of insurrectionist rhetoric, overtly anti-government activism that endorses the notion that civilians should have guns for use against American police and military. In a 1995 fund-raising letter, the executive vice-president of the N.R.A., Wayne LaPierre, called federal law-enforcement agents jack-booted thugs, and suggested that in Clintons administration, if you have a badge, you have the governments go-ahead to harass, intimidate, even murder law-abiding citizens. In Texas, where the police ambush occurred, an open-carry advocate last year urged the killing of state legislators if they do not approve a more relaxed policy. (They better start giving us our rights or this peaceful non-cooperation stuff is gonna be gamed up . . . We should be demanding [Texas legislators] give us our rights back, or its punishable by death. Treason.) At the annual N.R.A. convention last year, the board member Ted Nugent said, Our government has turned on us. Stopping short of calling for violence, he urged members to focus their ire on the bad and the ugly. He said, Its a target-rich environment. If it was duck season, thered be so many ducks, you could just close your eyes and shoot em.

The consistent failure of our politics to take reasonable steps to prevent guns from getting into the wrong hands makes it difficult to predict with any confidence that even the slaughter of police officers will alter the frozen politics. But it may have a subtler effect, causing gun owners to reconsider whether the N.R.A. truly has the countrys best interests at heart. More than a hundred million Americans live in households with guns, but many remain largely uninvolved in gun politics. The N.R.A. has between three and five million members, which means it represents only a sliver of American gun owners. Moreover, even among its members, many are unconvinced, I and others have found, by the belligerent rhetoric; they own and love guns for a variety of reasonsfrom sports to hunting to self-defenseand they overwhelmingly support reasonable steps to prevent innocent people, civilians or police, from being killed by gunfire.

On Friday, after hours of silence, the N.R.A. issued a statement from LaPierre, who had authored the jack-booted thugs letter. This time, he expressed the deep anguish all of us feel for the heroic Dallas law enforcement officers who were killed and wounded, as well as to those who so bravely ran toward danger to defend the city and the people of Dallas.

The N.R.A.s explicit call for a more armed society reveals the lie behind its homage to coexistence. By directing rage against the government, by preventing politicians from heeding the overwhelming demands of their constituents for broader background checks, by endorsing Donald Trumps plan for mass deportations and bans on Muslim immigration, the N.R.A. has assembled a volatile case against the idea of coexistenceand then disavows the result when it explodes.

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HAL 

Please don't shout at me - I can't help it.


Joined: 17 Mar 2003


PostPosted: Sat Jul 09, 2016 10:04 pm
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That seems like quite a lot.
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