Fuck… another one???
It hasn’t even been a full 24 hours since the last one.
So much for leveling the field for African Americans, NRA. This gentleman played by the rules and he was still executed. Would the same outcome have occurred if he were white?
Police claimed they stopped Mr. Castile for a “broken taillight.” Below is a photo of Mr. Castile’s car after the shooting, with both taillights intact and working. Photo credit to Rashad Turner.
No. As our resident gun enthusiasts and noisy NRA/police apologists will attest, Open Carry is only for people who look like this:
Trick question. He probably wouldn’t have been pulled over in the first place if he were white.
The video shows them pulled over during the day, so maybe the officer was talking about brake lights, not running lights. Which are we looking at in the nighttime pic?
Why was the officer talking to the passenger at all? Did he start talking to the driver, then cross over when he found out the man was licensed to carry? Why was he asking ID from a passenger at all?
EDIT1 - Video was left-right mirrored, thanks @doomslang, I didn’t know about that. So Mr. Castile was driving and the officer was standing at the driver-side door.
EDIT2 - The stop was at about 9PM according to sources, but it still looks bright out, so it could have been either set of lights, I guess?
Not for nothin’, but if the revolution doesn’t get started soon there won’t be anyone left to participate.
She’s using the forward facing camera on her phone. Some/most people have that set to mirror everything by default.
So this was a “Good Guy with a Gun Licence” possibly shot because he had a licence?
sleazy criminals. fixing lights after shot dead only to make the police look bad.
I wonder is the goal of equal treatment even attainable. Certain attitudes are so deeply ingrained, and laissez faire economics plus the ocean of guns just make it really toxic.
At some point, it will. This is not just a race issue, it is mostly for now, but as law enforcement continue increasing their authoritarian execution methods (and keep getting away with it), I’m sure no one will be safe eventually.
Next time I hear of a cop’s death, I’ll try my best to feel reaaaaaaaaal sad…
I don’t even have words for this.
How did the presence of hand guns protect anyone in this scenario?
These things aren’t needed.
It doesn’t take a genius to work out that if the general public may be armed legally, police called to an incident (I know this wasn’t that) have to cope with the possibility, not only of being shot by a criminal, but also of being shot by some “law abiding citizen” who wants to be a hero. Such as the one who stalked and shot Trayvon Martin. Concealed and open carry potentially escalate any incident. Making it easy for the clueless to carry guns increases the risk of “collateral damage”.
But it’s no good preaching to the converted and it’s even less use preaching to the gun nuts. The story of St. Francis and the birds is misunderstood. He preached to the important people and they ignored him. So he went to the graveyard and preached to the carrion birds, as a silent way of indicating what he thought of the powerful. He never expected the crows and the magpies to listen to him. It’s convenient for many of the powerful to have armed, scared sheep around the place because it provides ever more justification for control and police repression. Telling them that they are in charge because they are armed is just icing the cake.
Almost all countries have patrol cops with guns, and some of them are bound to be racist. Why do other countries don’t have this issue?
My guess is that the proliferation of guns in the US leads to a “shoot first” attitude that informs US cop training and procedures. That plus a sharp social divide (for a first world country) along racial lines. Oh, that and a Hollywood-fuelled “gun culture”. Anything else?
How about a centuries-long mainstream tradition of white supremacy anchored most heavily in fear and demonization of black men?
