I’m incredibly surprised the officer on the driver side of the car fired his gun. He could have easily hit his partner.
I was actually really heartened when I saw that in the John Crawford case a bunch of open carry supporters had a protest in the Walmart where he was shot. At least some open carry supporters think it should apply to black men too - frankly “some” is more than I would have thought.
The crazy thing is that if the vigilante had shot his victim dead I doubt he would be charged with anything (and then it may turn into a national firestorm which would finally pressure police into charging him and then FOX News would be all on about how he was right to kill that guy and then he would be acquitted).
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Discussion topic: how would the media coverage have differed if a black man had put a white gun-carrier in a chokehold?
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Great, so irrational fear is a sound basis for dealing with people? What reason is there to assume that if a person is armed that they have any sort of conflict with you? If readily you jump to conclusions that somebody possessing a thing implies a personal relationship with you, this would be dismissed as delusional in any other non-emotionally-hyped debate. How do I know she wasn’t going to stick a carrot peeler in my eye? How do I know he wasn’t going to steal my coffee? Lots of bad things happen to people in real life, but assuming that they will with no personal or situational context is in no way reasonable.
Believe it or not, my town actually pays people to wander around with guns and look for trouble! I don’t agree with this, but so long as they don’t cause trouble, I don’t bother them.
[quote]By taking a page from the right wing’s playbook, they’ve unintentionally
exposed the monumental hypocrisy and racism of conservatives. [/quote]
I’m not sure why the writer assumed that this was unintentional!
The story would be about a dead black man.
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I don’t even think it would be a story. White man shoots unarmed black man in the back is a controversy. White man shoots black man who was actively attacking him only makes the news if FOX needs an example.
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Dear Guns & Ammo…
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I don’t know it’s irrational to be nervous about someone walking around with a device designed to efficiently kill people at a distance. Especially when the only requirement for getting one of these devices is having enough money to buy one. I’d also be nervous if some guy was walking around with a claymore mine, or a grenade, or a bottle of cyanide. Fortunately for those three things, you must prove you have a reason to posses them as well as a license showing you at least have the training to safely handle them. Not so much with a firearm.
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Number of people killed in a Walmart in the last six months, either because they had a gun or because cops thought they had a gun: 2.
Number of people killed by a carrot peeler: 0.
Using Walmart only because that’s where @crenquis’s story took place. If you want to research the number of people killed with guns in other stores, vs the number of people killed by some means other than a gun, be my guest.
(A quick search of headlines (searching “killed in store”) for the last few months finds >20 cases killed by guns, and 0 by some other means, so my guess is the numbers aren’t going to get much better for you if we expand the search to the past year…)
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If you saw a stranger and they had a condom, would you assume that they intend to use it with you? If you saw a stranger with food, would you assume that they intend to feed it to you? If you saw a stranger with a car, would you assume that it was their intention to drive you around?
The common factor here as I understand it is, whatever their things may have been designed to do, that there is no reason whatsoever to assume that their possession or use of a thing has anything to do with you. It is not even good risk assessment. When a nervous person calls for help and makes a scene in fear that somebody is about to hurt them, simply because they imagine it is possible, without any further personal or situational knowledge - they are making a real problem where none existed, and probably increasing the chances of somebody coming to harm by minding other people’s business. It seems strangely passive-aggressive to me.
Are you honestly saying that if you saw someone with one of these:
on their shoulder, your curiosity wouldn’t be piqued? You’d expect that it’s completely safe for someone to even have an RPG in public?
I’m advocating vigilance and awareness, not vigilantism. What the guy did here with the chokehold was wrong. But I argue that it’s not unreasonable to recognize that firearms are deadly weapons, and that the only regularly enforced barrier to possessing a firearm is about $150 at the cheapest.
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It could be safe, or unsafe. Without knowing any specifics, all I could do is guess. A pragmatic question would probably be “Safe for whom?”. For all I know, if something went down, they might be my strongest allies in the area. The implications for me - or for any hypothetical group or person around - could be good, bad, or indifferent.
Would I be curious? Sure, I usually am. Would I jump to any conclusions? No, that would cause problems.
I guess, I don’t take money seriously. Weapons are easy to make, if not very interesting. And “enforced barriers” sounds a bit authoritarian to me. What else are these hypocrites going to use to enforce their barriers… deadly weapons, I suppose?
By coincidence, when I was 13, I didn’t have an air rifle. I built for myself - a shoulder-mounted rocket launcher system! I had it for a few years. And no, there wasn’t anybody ever hurt with it.
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I agree with your general point in the first paragraph.
Your idealism doesn’t play into what happens in reality. Whether or not you take money seriously doesn’t make a difference to the fact that in our current reality anyone can come to possess a reliable firearm by exchanging money. Your philosophy and opinion about authoritarianism doesn’t change the fact that firearms are exquisitely efficient tools for killing animals and people. I’d rather assume that any stranger who has one has never been required to prove they can use it safely, thus I would remove myself from that situation.
I don’t assume people necessarily want to hurt me. Just that the universe is indifferent to my survival and I’m better off if I leave situations where apes I know nothing about have access to such high quality purpose-built devices of death.
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I wasn’t aware that I was outlining any of my ideals there, it was all praxis. It has worked well enough to get me where I am today, and hopefully the people and places I have left behind are better for it.
They can be, if used efficiently for that purpose. Although this typically doesn’t happen. I think that ballistic weapons are quite primitive, really, and not even very effective for armed conflict.
Why assume that they can’t use them safely? And to whom would they be required to prove themselves? Credentials are just a circle jerk when some stranger gets approved by yet another stranger, authorized by yet another stranger. Is there any way for me personally to evaluate any of these people, or do they just assume that I am very trusting? I don’t trust anyone who I don’t know to make decisions to get me through my day safely. That’s not hyperbole or philosophy, it’s just my working method.
Not unlike human carnivore culture, I acknowledge that weapons appear to be in part symptomatic of societies who accept a lot of strife and death in the world as being inevitable. I don’t agree with this, for a number of reasons. Deciding that life is cheap is a much easier, lazy way out than living compassionately, and actively trying to reduce suffering and unnecessary hardship. I accept the existence of weapons with a similar ambivalence to the horrors of how humans treat other animals. The trouble exists despite me knowing that there are better ways to go about things.
I see humans violent motivations as the real problem, with weapons being only a symptom. Life is fragile, and there are countless ways for those who are determined to disrupt it. My work is against tribal identification of classism, of applying some arbitrary criteria - race, gender, money, etc - to project onto an other which perpetuates endless cycles of senseless us-vs-them conflict. Causing both selfishness as well as blind obedience. And one of the most difficult class differentials to reconcile is the idea of powerful, versus powerless. The notion that free people need somebody put in charge of them to answer to is fundamentally violent, and I think deeper and more damaging than the presence of weapons.
You know that I mostly agree with you in principle. I’m just not spending the time to care about why someone may be carrying a weapon in day to day life. My more important concern is that carrying a weapon is an act of intimidation and threatening whether or not it’s meant to be perceived that way. It’s distinct from other actions.
For instance, someone driving a car is roughly twice as dangerous to me and others, but it’s not an outright threat because motor vehicles are designed to keep people both outside and inside the vehicle safe, or at least reduce risk. A gun on the other hand is specifically designed to lodge metal in an animal’s body. And nearly all handguns are optimized to be most effective doing it to humans. That’s their purpose. Whether or not their wielded with the intent to protect the innocent, their presence in a public situation is an act of intimidation and coercion.
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This is the bit that I think makes the fear irrational. If you don’t care why somebody is doing something, how can you then go and decide why they are doing it? Threats and/or intimidation are acts which do very much depend upon one’s intent. As they are usually understood, they are acts which are directed at someone. A person isn’t entitled to decide what anothers motivations are simply because they feel insecure.
In ethics and in law, intention tends to be a primary consideration with most actions. Intimidation itself is not described by whatever actions are employed, but by the intention itself. Also, coercion is generally used to mean forcing a person to do something. A person who simply happens to be carrying a weapon is not, by this action, forcing you to do anything. That you may feel overcome by fear is unfortunate, to say the least. But to take the leap from this to the notion that the reason why people in this world have and use weapons is to personally induce this fear in you, is the bit I am skeptical of. Projecting your emotions onto other people’s actions seems unlikely to help either of you to make better decisions.
Okay, when the tiger is stalking the mall, you stop and rationally evaluate what might be going on in the tiger’s head - I mean, is the tiger even hungry right now? That should give the rest of us time to get to safety.
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Do you not know how survival instinct works? “I’m going to throw you into a pit with 5 bears, but don’t be scared, they’ve just eaten.”
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