He should be charged with reckless endangerment, his behaviour could have endangered lives as they tried to shoot him and miss, panic and injury people in a stampede, cause someone to have a heart attack etc.
4 Likes
I understand the reluctance to accept “power coming from the barrel of a gun.” And, sure we do need “other solutions.”
But here’s the history: The BPP kicked off their gun use by loading up in a car and driving behind a police patrol car. Their initial “copwatching” move was provocative, but it was a response to unchecked, racist police violence.
The school breakfast programs, the neighborhood watch programs, those things also happened. Those are facts, not bias. I suspect with “the first time” you’re talking about 1967. But that’s more than a year into the BPP’s existence.
Political violence and appeals to violence have etiologies. It’s deeply problematic to equate uses of violence because they are both forms of violence. In some contexts, it’s deeply offensive because it participates in a narrative supporting oppression. We all have bias. We have to be aware of our biases, and of how they implicate and involve us.
What I’m saying: It’s acceptable to be biased toward the BPP and to understand, if not agree with, their deployment of firearms. It is not reasonable or ethical to flatten distinctions between them and other groups simply because “guns.” That is the logical of the oppressor, the logic of these open carry d-bags.
Edit: realized I could dispense with some 2nd-person pronouns.
13 Likes
From reafing a book by Huey Newtin decades ago, they first appeared in public with guns either escorting Betty Dhabbazz, Malcolm X’s widow, or at the California state capitol. It brought tge police and there was a standoff. But they also payrolled in cars with guns and copies if the legal code.
Something is bothering me, and the best I can figure is that guns are involved. That flattens the differences.
Betty Shabazz. In 1967. Quite some time after the copwatching started.
3 Likes
This is perhaps related to the fact that the best indicator that someone is going to become a mass shooter isn’t mental illness (people with mental illnesses are less likely than the population as a whole to commit violence), nor even politics (although those that are politically motivated are overwhelmingly from authoritarian preferring people). The best indicator is a history of domestic violence.
14 Likes
Open carrying is a implicit threat to the public.
You have to question whether someone who chooses to do so is mature enough to own a firearm.
Those, exactly those ^^^^^^ a thousand times.
10 Likes
Hello from Austin, Texas.
https://www.austinchronicle.com/photos/open-carry-rally/2/
https://www.npr.org/2016/01/15/463184909/texas-new-open-carry-law-unpopular-among-some-gun-owners
7 Likes
Born there. Still have relatives there some lovely people, some crazy. Thank my parents for getting us out after every trip back. Wish I could unfriend the crazy relatives on facebook have to be content with just unfollowing them. Have not looked at what crazy as shit cousin will have posted on this - said cousin started opining on El Paso despite never having visited us while we lived there.
Yeah. Toxic masculinity, for sure.
10 Likes
No, no, no… it’s clearly games! /s
15 Likes
It’s terrifying how much of our government and other institutions function because of social norms, shame, and the desire of people to be respectable.
When that fails, because people don’t care about the norms, have no shame, and being respected doesn’t matter, we see everything fall apart.
I don’t think it’s in anticipation of triggering armed confrontation, more that it’s anticipation of a deadly confrontation occuring before the police show up. Waiting for the first victim to fall seems like it’s later than necessary to report the problem. Kind of like waiting for a drunk driver to hit someone before removing them from the car instead of preventing them from driving ahead of time.
The goal of reporting all of these these should be two fold. First, to get people out of harms way prior to bullets starting to fly and victims being created. Second, businesses impacted by continued loss of sales each time an event occurs, will change their policies to prevent those events from occurring.
5 Likes
I’d call this guy out and tell him he’s an asshole to his face. Ultimately pointless, but society needs to step out and start publicly shaming people for bad behavior.
My wife and I often talk about how glad we are to have left, and I’m glad you got out too.
At least you talked with them. In this episode of “Kids Explain” from HiHo Kids about school lockdowns, it is a) shocking, that this kind of drill is becoming the norm for a whole generation of students, and b) that most parents are only mildly aware that their children have these drills, and are mostly uninformed how they feel about the whole situation.
5 Likes
I’m convinced those drills are a major contributing factor in the rise in school shootings. It’s putting going-to-a-school-to-hurt-kids on the cultural menu of ways that people express anger.
6 Likes
Interesting photo.
Gun size inversely proportional to…
2 Likes
That is very much the next step. The current round of brutal roundups of immigrants is a warm up. Expect them to continue and ramp up leading into the election, because that cruelty and brutality excites the base.
Of he wins or steals the presidency again then I think you are pretty much done as a democratic country. Here in Canada we’ll start having to plan for how to prevent an Anschluss sort of situation.
6 Likes
Flip-side is NY (some might say), but NY is not NYC. Upstate is like the deep South.
TBH, I was thinking more “inconvenience” than “shame”, both for the gun-toter and for the community at large.
2 Likes
Inconveniencing people to get them to change their behaviour works if the person doesn’t ascribe any agency to the thing inconveniencing them. But if they think humans beings are behind it, then they probably respond by attempting with escalating retaliatory inconvenience, thinking, exactly as you do, that somehow they can stop others from doing what they are doing by inconveniencing them.
5 Likes
