Originally published at: https://boingboing.net/2020/05/07/two-months-ago-an-unarmed-bla.html
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From a brief scan of Breitbart, even the commenters there thought it was murder. I didn’t even see a “But we don’t know what happened before the video” fluff.
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So let me see if I get this right, if you are a woman and you don’t fight back when somebody acosts you, you a) are getting what you deserve, or 2) are lying that you were being accosted because everybody knows the automatic reaction to somebody getting up in your business is to fight back, nobody ever has a freeze response.
But if you’re a black man, if you were innocent your automatic response to somebody getting up in your business is to freeze and not protect yourself in anyway whatsoever because that’s what innocent people do all the time, and guilty people act out and they get what they deserve.
It’s science or something, right?
This makes my heart hurt.
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I am trying to imagine the kind of mind that sees someone running along in broad daylight wearing shorts and running shoes, and thinks “Crime in progress – grab the shotgun!” rather than “Oh, there’s some guy out for a jog.”
I don’t ultimately care what the intent of the killers was; they’re simply too dangerous to be allowed out around normal people, and need to be locked away for the protection of society.
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Seems to me if you go out locked and loaded posse style, you don’t get to claim self defense.
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Sounds like they remembered why George Zimmerman walks free today after a very similar case, his murder of Trayvon Martin.
Racist vigilante justice is not only alive and well (especially in a lot of former enslaving states), it’s flat out encouraged.
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Discrimination Calculus, I think.
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I am still confused about how you can simultaneously “stand your ground” and chase someone.
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You try to arrest them as a suspect, they fight back because they’re just minding their own business and you’re not a cop, so you “stand your ground” by killing them.
That supposedly makes sense.
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God. Fucking. Dammit.
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It offends me deeply that somehow George Zimmerman still draws breath.
It sickens me that the legal system hasn’t taken these two murderers into custody and dealt with them yet; anyone who has made the calls to keep them on the streets within the police and DA departments need to be tried as accessories after the fact.
This only ends when we make it end.
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My understanding of Stand-Your-Ground and other NRA-advocated laws is:
- It’s OK to accost other people for no reason
- When being accosted in any manner it’s OK to shoot the person initiating the confrontation
- If someone responds to being accosted in any way it’s OK to shoot them
- If one person might be about to shoot another person it’s OK to shoot the person about to do the shooting
- Everyone has a right to carry a concealed weapon at any time anywhere
Or, in short, any confrontation whatsoever makes it OK for anyone aware of it to shoot anyone else in the area.
Yes, there’s a bit of hyperbole there, but not nearly as much as I wish there was.
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I think the “legal” argument here — which I fucking hate, but some lawyer’s going to use it, and it has held up in court before — is that as soon as Arbery tried to defend himself, it suddenly became legitimate for the people who attacked him in the first place to now kill him in self-defense, because they had a valid reason to fear for their lives.
Granted, by that logic, it also means that Arbery’s actions were in self-defense, but it would have been better under the law if he had killed his assailants in self-defense, instead of trying to, ya know, end a conflict without death.
There’s also that un-ending irony that the “facts don’t care about your feelings” crowd have also setup a legal system where someone (usually a cop or ex-cop) can subjectively claim that they “felt scared,” and that feeling alone can be used as legal justification for anything.
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I think this is absolutely the NRA’s wet dream of society. If everyone carries guns, then you compel people to behavior better out of fear of conflict (it’s only bad when the government compels you to do things — compelling out of fear of retribution is a right reserved for private citizens). Eventually, the “natural selection” of this society will weed out all of the rats in a kind-of free market of gun-toting morality, and everyone will be better off in the end (but also still carrying guns).
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A very clear case of a Denial of Civil Rights. Seeya boys!
If he had been jogging while wearing body armour and carrying an assault rifle while storming a state capitol he would still be alive…oh yeah and also the whole being white thing.
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I sure hope this opens up an opportunity to revisit District of Columbia v. Heller.
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I went through some threads yesterday. It was rather less clear cut, and plenty of people bickering about what the video showed and how the law should treat the killers.
I wonder if they nerfed the folks saying it was justifiable self-defense? There was a lot of them. (Of course there was)
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I’ve always suspected that they turn on comment bots to flood out any discussion that doesn’t go the way they want, but investigating that is not on my list of priorities.
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