God damn.
Peace to all the victims created by this terrible action.
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The main factors are racism, racism and racism. The gun culture aggravates the problem, but it isn’t the cause of it.
If it was the guns, they’d be murdering white folks at the same rate as black folks. But they aren’t.
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Police are trained by cop movies.
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If that is so, why don’t we see something remotely similar in other countries? the exhibits of US mainstream culture I receive via the internets don’t seem to indicate that it is more racist than in European countries. Europe has racist cops, too. What you don’t have is cops walking around with a finger on the trigger by default.
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How about a centuries-long mainstream tradition of white supremacy anchored most heavily in fear and demonization of black men, and in centuries of slavery right on American soil that was limited to people of African descent?
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In another incident (which is unfortunately newsworthy,) the SFPD somehow managed to not kill a black man yesterday. For once. And he even had a gun this time!
All the noise did wake me up though, so it was a tragedy after all
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Fuck.
Just…fuck.
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From my experience the problem starts with how we hire and continues with the “brotherhood”. Here is how you get hired as a police officer in the US in descending order of likelihood:
-Already be a cop
-Be related to someone in local government, preferably a police officer
-Be a veteran
-Don’t be a white male (unless you already have enough tokens, then no advantage)
-Be in a place so desperate for bodies they’ll take anyone
Whereas in Germany, it’s based on actually being able to do your job without shooting everyone first. That’s definitely not on this list.
You see the shitshow this creates? You end up with a force of horribly racist locals who have nepotism-based job security and no care for diplomacy, ex-military (who probably haven’t had any mental problems treated because that removes all chance of getting an LEO job), and some tokens to keep the populace happy. And they all get into this “brotherhood” where they’re like family, and it creates a loop of hating everyone outside their little circle of friends.
We need centralized police hiring to keep out the local bias and break up the brotherhood. Maybe then we’ll actually have cops who were hired because they could actually be good cops, but until then we’ll have idiots like this slaughtering innocents.
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Ok, so how does this work? Most of the shooters are probably not walking around thinking “I hate those black people, I’m going to shoot the first one who gives me an excuse?” - are there any good studies, psychological or social?
Here’s a Washington Post article, Study finds police fatally shoot unarmed black men at disproportionate rates.
“Black individuals shot and killed by police were less likely to have been attacking police officers than the white individuals fatally shot by police (…) “Officers are perceiving a greater threat when encountered by unarmed black citizens (…) We’re trying to argue that the government should collect this data properly (…) We should know exactly why a cop pulls the trigger each and every time he or she does”
But the first (most popular?) Google hit for “police shootings by race study”, also by WP, actually argues the opposite - it seems strange that even at this basic level there are all kinds of weird interpretation. There may be an audience that desperately wants to hear that the police is not racist at all?
The British “Guardian” started its own body count, too, “in response to widespread concern about the federal government’s failure to keep any comprehensive record of people killed by police.”
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How is the authorities not enforcing the rules on a level field and systemic racism of the police the fault of the NRA? Your snark/anger is misplaced.
What issue - cops shooting first, asking questions later? Who said they don’t? Have you seen videos of police in like Brazil? They have cops shooting from moving motorcycles and helicopters.
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I know this is totally not what we should focus on, but this detail is screaming in my brain. Anyone else notice the steering wheel was on the RIGHT side? Maybe an formal postal carrier car?
We have a greater number of racist cops who are more racist?
I have doubts about the reliability of your sources. US movies and TV generally represent USians as much less racist than they actually are.
Are you more likely to shoot someone you’re scared of, or someone you’re not scared of? I mean, I don’t have any studies, but racism is a psychologically plausible explanation if you don’t go out of your way to discount it.
Also, you don’t think the NRA plays up fear of the black man at all to encourage gun sales?
The phone camera used to take the video was probably mirrored.
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“And the NRA’s president should know: His organization was intimately involved in this history, promoting gun control laws that were tainted with racism.”
That article is bunk because it only tells half the story. Yes, in the past the NRA had a more compromising approach, and did back many laws many people today would call “common sense”. But there was a leadership coup in the 1970s and since then the NRA has taken a much more hardline approach. Condemning them now would be like condemning Democrats as racists because they were against civil rights legislation in the 60s.
Show me an NRA publication that promotes this. Odds are you have never seen one, but are just making biased assumptions. Hell, even in advertisements I have seen, pretty much any “bad guy” portrayed is white - probably for this exact reason as to avoid BS labels. Heck the new face of the NRA is Colin Noir. If anything they are promoting a positive image of black people.
Beyond that, the NRA has a very valid point that many gun controls ARE racist. I suppose magazine limits and the AWB is not, but things like having the Sheriff sign off on a pistol permit certainly is. Because the people signing off on such permits are the same people who are shooting minorities in the streets for little to no reason.
I took a CCW with my black and Asian friends. I had mine approved in 3 weeks and they called me. Both them had to wait the full 4 weeks and no one called them. They had to check up on them. Now I am hoping, because I applied a month later than them, that the reason was just because the workload was greater. The pessimist in my says they had to wait because they were minorities.
Huh. WHY have I never noticed that my phone does that. Sure enough, Boba Fett is backwards on my shirt. Well I learned my thing today.
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good studies == no funding, because NRA.
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Brilliant logic here.
Cop shoots black guy…blame the NRA.
Fuck fuck fuck fuck fuck.
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I did say that the gun culture contributes to the problem. US cops aren’t just trigger-happy; they’re hyper violent in general.
I’m Australian, from a working class background. I spent my late teens in the inner city, living with heroin and methamphetamine addicts and teenage sex workers. The sorts of folks who have a much higher than average frequency of adversarial interaction with the police, in other words.
Despite that, apart from riot cops at political protests, I have never seen a police officer deploy any sort of violence against anyone. Not so much as a brandished baton, let alone a drawn gun.
Yeah, there’s plenty of racism in Australia. Indigenous Australians get royally screwed over (although the situation there is more analogous to Native Americans than African Americans) and whichever ethnicity provided the latest wave of refugees also tends to suffer.
But, again: if it were just the guns, why aren’t US cops routinely murdering white people? Why do aggressive, armed drunken whites get protracted deescalation tactics, while unarmed sober nonaggressive blacks get shot within seconds of meeting the police?
US racism against African-Americans is an outlier; it’s extreme even by the standards of international racist dickishness. Not all Americans are racist, but white supremacy is deeply ingrained in the culture. The Confederacy lost the war but won the peace.
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