Footage shows white man shooting at black boy who asked for directions

never forget that especially on the topic of gun rights violence there are paid commenters up the whazoo. not to mention russian actors ( why oh why can’t this be a dippy conspiracy theory like it should be. ) and the particular ( peculiar? ) bias of fox news moderators.

you cannot trust that what you read there reflects any real world person’s thoughts or viewpoint.

instead see it as the viewpoint that vested interests are trying to promulgate.

that can still be interesting and useful. just don’t believe that it’s real humans without knowing them personally.

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“Well, he’s not just serving to validate all the “shirtless racist redneck” stereotypes, he’s also validating the “gunowners are looking for excuses to kill people” stereotype. Probably worth noting that the Venn overlap of those two is not insignificant.”

um, yeah. when you use vast generalizations of entire groups, people may think that you’re generalizing about an entire group. Weird huh?

The implication that I immediately got was “hey, of course all gun owners are shirtless rednecks looking to kill someone”… But, there are actually a lot of really responsible and reasonable gun owners. People you’d actually be comfortable with owning guns. The problem is that when you fail to acknowledge the positive in a group, and try to drown it in the negative stereotype, the reasonable people no longer want to engage with you, and it only strengthens the group position of those you’re stereotyping.

I’d assume that you’d want “gun people” to side/agree with you on things like more thorough and restrictive background checks, greater ability to remove guns from a situation if there is a history of threat of violence, and restrictions on the type/firepower of what private citizens can own. There are actually a lot of reasonable gun owners who also would consider the above. But probably not if the side promoting those things lumps them in with clearly unstable racist shitheads like the dude in this story.

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i don’t know what part of the country you live but in the part of texas i’m from way, way too many gun owners fulfill most of the checkboxes for “shirtless rednecks looking to kill someone” for either my happiness or my peace of mind. and yes, one is too many, but it’s a large plurality if it’s not a majority around here. i’m a gun owner, college educated, far left liberal/progressive, and i keep my rifle, shotgun, and handgun, along with the ammunition in a gunsafe unless i’m going hunting or target shooting. i’m the kind of responsible gun owner who does believe in stricter regulations of firearms in general. i’m not offended by the way @Aeroplane framed his discussion because i see that kind of gun owner around here all too often.

maybe you live in a place where that’s a lot less common, if so i say good for you.

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I think that the important lesson here is that we should always challenge our preconceived notions, and be reluctant to form our limited information into an easy narrative. And that is true whether that notion is that black people are criminals or that a policeman is a racist. One of the reasons that prejudice is so persistent is that it is EASIER to make facile judgments than to carefully examine all the evidence. On occasion, it is even useful. “All salesmen are lying sacks of shit” is demonstrably untrue as well as being unfair. But it can be a good idea to use that as a working assumption. “All policemen are racist” also unfair, but “be careful, this policeman might be racist.” is probably a not a bad thing to keep in mind.

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I just want to point out that is this sort of thing is exactly what leads to people like the asshole shooting shotguns off his porch.

Our brains tick an unconscious counter ever time we see a “shirtless red neck type with a gun”, but doesn’t always tick one when we see the opposite of that. For every person who fits that stereotype, how many do we see that does not? How many “normal” gun owners do you see ever day but have their shirts one and not wearing a hat with a Confederate flag or reference to boobs? Most of the time we don’t even notice them. (Note - not disputing these types of people exist. I did spend a couple summers in Texas.)

Conversely, this guy is probably sitting at home, reading about break ins, watching the news about crime with black suspects being flashed on the screen, hearing crime stats on the news. His brain over his life has been ticking a counter with every event he hears about. He may or may not have exposure to “normal” black people - a neighbor, someone at work, someone at the grocery store. But even if he does, those encounters aren’t adding counter ticks to his bias. And before you know it this guys brain thinks any 14 year old black kid on his porch is clearly there to rob the place - because what else could it be? He has let his biases completely rob him of rational thought. :confused:

Same goes with things like “Mexican rapists” and “Muslim terrorists”. Clearly those two things exist, and there is ample proof those two thing exist. But, statistically, treating any new encounter with someone as if they were a rapist or terrorist is going to have someone mis-characterized based on one’s bias.

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The above statements are all true, and well thought through. The key is @simonize comment about “easier.” Humans are inherently lazy creatures and take shortcuts whenever and where ever they can. It cannot be overemphasized how important taking the time to actually know something about someone before passing judgment is. I am also a liberal, responsible gun owner in a rural area where hearing gunfire when working in the yard is a normal and unremarkable thing, but so are shirtless rednecks, some of whom are also liberal, responsible gun owners. But you have to talk to them to know that.

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i agree that confirmation bias is a problem. we tend to see what we want to see, especially when the amygdala joins the observations. i have to say that i don’t feel a fear response when i encounter the “shirtless, angry redneck” type because in the part of the world i grew up and the area where my university is that type is, as i indicated above, way too common. some of them are relatives of mine. i also know plenty of responsible gun owners around here as well. most of them disagree with me about regulating guns but some do agree with me. given my upbringing, my life experiences, and my location i’m going to say that i’m probably not suffering from confirmation bias in what i said above. certainly we aren’t necessarily good at recognizing such bias in ourselves but i stay too alert to its possibility to fall to it easily.

the part of your argument i really disagree with is your framing. it reminds me of some of the conservative pundits who claimed that 45 got elected because liberals were mean to conservatives. it was a tendentious argument from them and it annoys me here. the aspect which offends me most is the removal of agency from the ones doing the awful things. at a blog i read there is a concept called “murc’s law” which goes along the lines of “only democrats have agency to cause anything that happens in american politics.” that plus the bothsiderism rampant among the pundit class have helped excuse the ugly criminality of the republican party for 25 years or more. but i ramble.

the man with the gun, unless you know something that would make a reasonable person think otherwise, is a mature adult with the capability of making rational choices. confronted with a child, a 14 year old black male who looks more like he’s 12, on his porch, ringing his doorbell, he chose to come to the door armed, and when the child ran away because that scared him the man stepped onto his porch, aimed his shotgun, and fired.

if it had been me, i would have been more likely to reach for a shirt than a gun. pointing out the man’s conformance to a type does not excuse his choices.

edited to remove a redundant “really” and to include three instances of the article “a” for clarity.

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Um… no. That’s being a racist asshole. Our private thoughts that HE CAN’T FUCKING HEAR have nothing to do with it. HE SHOT AT A CHILD LOOKING FOR HELP, so he can go fuck himself and rot in jail for a while.

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OH make no mistake that I agree he is a racist asshole who made a conscious decision to act like a racist asshole.

My point was more - how do racists assholes form? It is, you pointed out, “that confirmation bias is a problem”.

Oh, okay, it’s liberals fault, for not accepting that it’s just one point of view among many?

Having grown up in the south, in a more rural place that was much whiter than the ATL, that isn’t how that works. I was the one rejected and was an outsider for not embracing racist views. I was the outsider, not this jackass with a gun. I’m still the outsider - in my family, in the community I’m from… ME. Not people like this. I’m the loser and idiot who doesn’t understand reality. Getting a phd in a black majority city only confirms that. If shit goes tits up, THEY WILL HAPPILY KILL RACE TRAITORS LIKE ME. Do you get that?

I’m sick of accommodating racists. It hasn’t changed shit for hundreds of years. It’s not going to change shit. People don’t magically become racist because they get called a redneck. They embrace it as a world view because it gives them a feeling of superiority over others. Period. The mainstream culture in America aids and abets that world view, in a million little ways. They’re not some beleaguered minority, THEY ARE RUNNING THE FUCKING COUNTRY RIGHT NOW. Fuck their feelings. Fuck them. I’m DONE with tip toeing around this shit when people are dying thanks to assholes like this one.

But I need to shut up, since I’ve been told I"m too angry. So, believe whatever you want about who is to blame here. Blame me, I don’t really give a shit anymore. We’re fucked as a world, because people believe stupid shit, like racism will be solved by civility and accommodation. It SHOULD be abundantly clear now that this is NOT the case. But no matter how much reality we see, we have to keep on accepting this nonsense. I’m just DONE accepting it. As long as people like man want to treat his fellow human beings as animals, then we can’t move forward and fix this country.

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What? No. That’s not at all what I am saying.

How many threads have you had to remind people that not all people in the south are backwards, uneducated, racists hicks? Even though clearly you and others have met people who fit that description?

Nor am I asking anyone to empathize with racists.

My point was a person’s biases and stereotypes is what create racists and ALL of us can fall into the same trap, even if we don’t apply biases to race. Blondes are air heads, hackers are losers in their mothers basement, girls can’t do math and would rather talk about shopping and wear pink, Irish are drunks, real men don’t cry, gay people want to turn you gay, etc etc etc , or the thing that prompted my reply: gun owners are looking for people to kill.

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Oh no, please don’t. This needs to be made clear: we as liberals are under no obligation to “solve” the divisiveness in America by having to engage with and find common ground with right-wing bullies and ignoramuses. I’m not interested in ending a debate by agreeing that the sun is green because someone is insisting it’s blue.

I may live in a Coastal Elite filter bubble of liberalism, but that doesn’t mean I don’t know what conservatives are saying; indeed, as someone who’s studied history and worked in the media I’ve heard it all before, right down to the what they thing is clever and subtle apologism. That BS isn’t deserving of respect or civility, let alone a “fair hearing”.

I wish more liberals and progressives were saying what you did. We need to be angry. We need to be what the late Steve Gilliard called “fighting liberals”:

http://stevegilliard.blogspot.com/2003/12/im-fighting-liberal-you-know-ive.html

ETA: might as well post the whole thing

I’m a fighting liberal

You know, I’ve studied history, I’ve read about America and you know something, if it weren’t for liberals, we’d be living in a dark, evil country, far worse than anything Bush could conjure up. A world where children were told to piss on the side of the road because they weren’t fit to pee in a white outhouse, where women had to get back alley abortions and where rape was a joke, unless the alleged criminal was black, whereupon he was hung from a tree and castrated.

What has conservatism given America? A stable social order? A peaceful homelife? Respect for law and order? No. Hell, no. It hasn’t given us anything we didn’t have and it wants to take away our freedoms.

The Founding Fathers, as flawed as they were, slaveowners and pornographers, smugglers and terrorists, understood one thing, a man’s path to God needed no help from the state. Is the religion of these conservatives so fragile that they need the state to prop it up, to tell us how to pray and think? Is that what they stand for? Is that their America?

Conservatism plays on fear and thrives on lies and dishonesty. I grew up with honest, decent conservatives and those people have been replaced by the party of greed. It is one thing to want less government interference and smaller, fiscally responsible government. It is another thing entirely to be a corporate whore, selling out to the highest bidder because the CEO fattens your campaign chest. They are building an America which cannot be sustained. One based on the benefit of the few at the cost of the many. The indifferent boss who hires too few people and works them to death or until they break down sick. Cheap labor capitalism has replaced common sense. “Globalism” which is really guise for exploitation, replaced fair trade, which is nothing like fair for the trapped semi-slaves of the maquliadoras. In the Texas border towns, hundreds of these women have been used as sex slaves and then apparently killed,the FBI powerless to do anything as the criminals sit in Mexico untouched by law.

For the better part of a decade, the conservatives made liberal a dirty word. Well, it isn’t. It represents the best and most noble nature of what America stands for: equitable government services, old age pensions, health care, education, fair trials and humane imprisonment. It is the heart and soul of what made American different and better than other countries. Not only an escape from oppression, but the opportunity to thrive in land free of tradition and the repression that can bring. We offered a democracy which didn’t enshrine the rich and made them feel they had an obligation to their workers.

Bush and the people around him disdain that. They think, by accident of birth and circumstance, they were meant to rule the world and those who did not agree would suffer.

Liberal does not and has not meant weak until the conservatives said it did. Was Martin Luther King weak? Bobby Kennedy? Gene McCarthy? It was the liberals who remade this country and ended legal segregation and legal sexism. Not the conservatives, who wanted to hold on to the old ways.

It’s time to regain the sprit of FDR and Truman and the people around them. People who believed in the public good over private gain. It is time to stop apologizing for being a liberal and be proud to fight for your beliefs. No more shying away or being defined by other people. Liberals believe in a strong defense and punishment for crime. But not preemption and pointless jail sentences. We believe no American should be turned away from a hospital because they are too poor or lack a proper legal defense. We believe that people should make enough from one job to live on, to spend time on raising their family. We believe that individuals and not the state should dictate who gets married and why. The best way to defend marriage is to expand, not restrict it.

It was the liberals who opposed the Nazis while the conservatives were plotting to get their brown shirts or fund Hitler. It was the liberals who warned about Spain and fought there, who joined the RAF to fight the Germans, who brought democracy to Germany and Japan. Let us not forget it was the conservatives who opposed defending America until the Germans sank our ships. They would have done nothing as Britain came under Nazi control. It was they who supported Joe McCarthy and his baseless, drink fueled claims.

Without liberals, there would be no modern America, just a Nazi sattlelite state. Liberals weak on defense? Liberals created America’s defense. The conservatives only need vets at election time.

It is time to stop looking for an accomodation with the right. They want none for us. They want to win, at any price. So, you have a choice: be a fighting liberal or sit quietly. I know what I am, what are you?

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I’m sure that this guy would have qualified in most people’s minds. Retired? Check. Former Firefighter Captain? Check. Suburban? Check. But this wasn’t even his first gun violation.

The fallacy of the “responsible gun owner” is that, until they do something stupid, malevolent, or irresponsible, they fit into that category. All of a sudden, turds like Zeigler get thrown by the pro-gun propagandists out of that responsible group, often into an unjustified “mentally ill” group.

I know a lot of “responsible gun owners” because a lot of my friends are outdoorsmen. Here’s the thing: they’ve all made mistakes with guns. I hear the stories or even witness the irresponsible behavior. The only reason they haven’t caused harm is that they got lucky and nothing bad happened when they screwed up.

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The same can be said of drivers, babysitters and parents. “Responsible” is in the doing.

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And getting back on topic, the man in question was anything but “responsible”; he opened fire on a lost child, under the bs premise that he thought the child was a robber.

I’ll say it again; I’ve had my place robbed before, but never have I had a thief come politely knocking at my front door in broad daylight.

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And it’s a constant effort. When you’re dealing with objects or activities that are inherently dangerous, you can’t take 5 minutes off from being responsible while engaging with that object or activity.

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No argument at all, this was the definition of irresponsible. This was willful, racist asshole irresponsible. Aiming and firing at a child, who has done you no harm, who is running away cannot be defended, although I am sure some will try.

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Some already have, from what I understand.

True mental gymnasts, they are.

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Further upthread, there was a discussion of the semantics of “accidental” vs “negligent” in which I came down firmly on the negligent side. A loaded firearm must be treated like the deadly dangerous object that it is, at all times. There can be no “accidents”

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Heh, I currently live in a fairly well to do part of the people’s republic of California, so it’s probably not representative of more rural and well Texas… Even when I lived in a very rural part of the state, gun owners were more along the lines of "definitely rednecky, but responsible “salt of the earth” agricultural folks.

To cut my argument to the chase: I think the responsible gun owners, and people opposed to guns can both agree that the a-hole gun owner itching to shoot someone is an enormous problem. And… I’d go so far to argue that if change is going to be enacted, it’s going to need support from both sides of the coin. Alienating the “healthy” part of the gun ownership group by dismissing them/lumping in with all the assholes (however many there may be) is just as helpful as someone dismissing all democrats as “Librul commie pinkos” or republicans as “Rethuglican Nazis”. At some point if you want to fix the problem, you’re going to have to work with (and not against) the other group.

Or you could work to solve the problem by exterminating the other group in its entirety, but that’s historically proven to not be such a good thing.

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