At least 6 dead in Mass Shooting du Jour

[Derec]

… and Derec successfully derails yet another thread to feed his hobbyhorse.

FFS, it was an example. As legitimate an example as drugs, and yet you do not think that's anybody's "hobbyhorse".
The only person that is derailing is you, by constantly harping on a mere example I mentioned casually.

 

[Derec]

I'd go with what the term mass shooting has historically been used for the most. Such as shooter(s) deliberately trying to kill as many innocent bystanders as possible. It's my preference.

Has the word really meant that "historically"?
In any case, it does not mean that now. It's about numbers. So this case qualifies. As does the NYC mass shooting by some black nationalist.

I'd love to get into the details of why black on black crime happens more than other race on race but I'm certain that the discussion between you and I would look something like this

I would love to read your take on this.

You seeing a human enjoying nature
Me seeing an asshole ruining a good hangout spot for the birds

So who are the birds in your analogy?

 

[Derec]

But since it correlates with race due to long term structural economic racism, it makes a great tool with which to claim, without lying, that black people commit disproportionate amounts of homicides, implying a race based proclivity for crime.

Black people do commit a disproportionate number of homicides. We can talk about the reasons, but the numbers do not lie.
For the record, I do not think there is an inherent "race based proclivity for crime". But neither is it all due to poverty. Blacks have a ~2x higher rate of poverty than whites, but ~5x the homicide rate. So trying to explain it away as just a proxy for poverty is too simplistic.
Besides, there are also plenty of people in poverty who do not resort to major crimes and many people who are not poor who do. Poverty is no excuse to rob or assault. It certainly is no excuse to kill.

Then they chant ‘lock em up’ as if that was a solution.

Murderers should be locked up, regardless of race.
Nobody is saying that we should lock up black people just because they are black. If you are trying to imply that, you are just erecting straw men.

 

[Derec]

Well, poor people are charged with more crimes. Also held pending trial, convicted and sentenced at higher rates than more wealthy people.

Do you think there is an underlying difference in crime rates by income? What about by race? Or do you believe all differences are due solely to higher chance of being charged and convicted?

 

[Derec]

They are certainly the weapon of choice of many mass murderers.

Well they are accessible, and there is the "cool" factor to how they look vs. say a hunting rifle. But without access to those, mass murderers would do quite well with a couple of Glock 19s or similar. They are much easier to conceal and handle as well.

There is simply no legitimate reason for people to use assault rifles or semiautomatic weapons.

Actual  assault rifles are highly regulated and not easy to get for a normal person. And most guns these days are semi-auto. A ban on those would not pass constitutional muster.

 

[Derec]

I do agree the list was compiled for deceptive purposes,

Why do you think the list was compiled for a deceptive purpose, and what do you think that purpose is?
I think the article that goes with the list is somewhat deceptive (but not in the way I suspect you think) but I see no issue with the chart itself.

but it does show something important anyway: Murder is concentrated in a small portion of the population. That's why many people don't get that upset at the murder rate--we know most of it is bad guys killing bad guys. The same pattern applies everywhere--murder is highly concentrated in the criminal subset of the population. In the US there is enough of a racial pattern that you can make a chart like this, but race is just a proxy for the true issue.

It's not that simple. What you say applies to a lot of murders - people in gangs killing each other and such. But there are also "civilians" harmed and they are also usually intraracial. A stray bullet from a drive by . A thug sticking up a store in the middle of the night and shooting the clerk. Domestic/family murders. They all follow a more intraracial pattern. It's not just thugs whacking each other.

 

[Derec]

Legalization ended the bootleggers shooting it out with each other.

But the criminals did not disappear. They moved to other ventures, such as gambling, and eventually drugs. Protection rackets were always popular.

It's good to fully legalize weed and decriminalize other drugs in the sense that people should not be prosecuted for merely using/possessing. But it's a bit much to expect that the corner dealer will apply for a job at the local dispensary after legalization.

 

[Derec]

And yet your hobbyhorse OP linked the two.

I used it as an example, analogous to weed. My point is that in the US discussions about "soft on crime" and "tough on crime" tend to lump everything together, when really we need to keep things separate. So legalize weed and sex work, but do not soften on things like gun crimes, be they robberies, assaults or murders.

 

[Derec]

So in the first paragraph above you are saying he is definitely a shooter but the link says he is a suspect and it is interesting because this is a continuation of a very well-documented trend where you call black male suspects definitely guilty

I do not see much reason for doubt here.

but when a white male is accused of raping a woman instead you scream how he is just a suspect or even innocent...

Alleged rape cases - especially ones that become big media cases like Duke Lacrosse or Jackie Coakley/UVA usually have little or no evidence - so there is a lot of reason for doubt. By the way, I took the side of black men who were falsely accused, for example Brian Banks or the five college students falsely accused in the Hofstra case.

I believe this was also the case with George Floyd's murderer where you also objected to the terminology of calling the white male a murderer when we could see him murdering Floyd on video.

That was a very politicized case. There was no intent to kill anybody, and the deceased had very high fentanyl and methamphetamine levels in his blood, as well as medical conditions such as cardiomegaly, which no doubt contributed to his death.
As such, haste was not advised.

On the other hand, the far left (including our Veep and a US Senator) still insists Michael Brown was "murdered" even though he clearly wasn't - the shooter was never even indicted, much less convicted.

 

[Derec]

I wonder how that stark-looking list would look if it included the racial breakout for the other top countries.

Most other countries are less racially diverse. But sure, it would be interesting to see how things break down in other countries with significant racial diversity. Care to start on that project?

What’s the rate for Lithuanian Blacks?

What? Both of them?

What’s the rate for ‘Murka overall?

It's on the graph. Have you even looked at it longer than 5 seconds?

Seems like the list was compiled to mislead.

How so? Not including info you would like to see does not make a graph ipso facto misleading, much less deliberately so.

 

[Elixir]

Countries (and States) that have decriminalised drug use

Your map shows all land area as blue.

Sorry the pretty picture of the world map misled you.
Get someone to read you the list.

We can talk about the reasons,

No, you can’t talk about the reason, because it’s a relic of slavery and you conservos don’t even acknowledge it.

 

[atrib]

Those ‘offenses’ were minor at any time and were supposed to be ignored during the time he was pulled over. No one is suggesting that Wright was a good guy. But he should never have been pulled over.

Given that he had no license, no insurance, and had a warrant, yes, he should have been pulled over.

None of which would have been known to the police at the time they initiated the stop. The police were instructed by policy to NOT pull over people for minor infractions during that time, and they disregarded their policy when it came to this stop. Mr Wright would still have been alive if the police had obeyed the instructions they had been given. Yes, Mr Wright would still have been free with a warrant in his name, but that is better than the alternative where Mr Wright is dead because the police disobeyed their policy. That is the part you don't understand, because you do not view black people as human beings whose lives are of immeasurable value, just as your life is to you. Even people like Mr Wright, with a warrant in his name.

 

[atrib]

If that's an excuse to stop and search, then the cops basically have the right to stop and search on a whim.

Not stop and search. Stop and ask for license and insurance, then run the license to see if the person has any warrants.
A search of the vehicle requires more than just a traffic stop.

I don't think you should be OK with the cavalier abandonment of the fourth amendment without so much as a debate.

I know you are Australian and all, but why do you think traffic stops are a violation of the 4th Amendment? Are you going "sovereign citizen" on us? "I wasn't driving, I was travelling"?

But it's your freedom. It's not my place to defend it.

True. How are they doing things in Australia? Are there traffic stops? What happens if you are stopped? Does the cop ask for license, registration and proof of insurance?

Asking a driver to display his license and registration is not a violation of the driver's rights, and that is not what Bilby was implying based on my reading of his posts. But, cops often use traffic stops to coerce people into consenting to searches, and sometimes even conduct searches without consent or probable cause. People who are not aware of their rights, and sometimes people who are, but choose not to exercise them in the hopes of avoiding retaliation in the form of citations, consent to such unjustified breaches of their privacy in the face of police intimidation. The police know this, and they know they are allowed to lie to the public, and they continue to abuse the system to do things they shouldn't be doing. And I have personal experience with this where I was detained on the side of the road for nearly two hours with no reasonable suspicion or probable cause so the fucking PD could bring a K-9 unit to sniff my car because I refused to consent to a search. I later received an apology from the Chief of Police of the little town in Virginia where this happened after I filed a formal complaint at the PD and a civil rights violation lawsuit against the town in Federal Court. Its amazing how nice the police get when faced with the prospect of telling the City Council that the town will be writing large checks to strangers for cause. Dashcams and cameras on phones are wonderful things, but there still aren't enough out there.

It is not technically illegal to run a warrant check on the radio, but here again, the police abuse the rights of drivers, a vast majority of whom are innocent of crimes and do not have warrants for their arrests. A simple moving violation, or a broken taillight or turn signal does not provide reasonable suspicion to the police that the driver has committed a crime or is wanted for a crime, but the fucking police run them for warrants anyway. And then they sometimes arrest the wrong person and keep his locked up for days and weeks, just because he has the same name as someone with a warrant.

 

[Toni]

.

Well, poor people are charged with more crimes. Also held pending trial, convicted and sentenced at higher rates than more wealthy people.

Do you think there is an underlying difference in crime rates by income? What about by race? Or do you believe all differences are due solely to higher chance of being charged and convicted?

In the US, since the Emancipation Proclamation, we've had a very long and ugly history of criminalizing black people for being black. In parts of the US, we made it illegal for them to drink from certain water fountains, sit in certain seats on a bus, in a movie theater, in a diner. We effectively kept them out of schools through poverty when the labor of 12 year olds was necessary for family survival and segregated schools until 70 years ago, to keep them from getting a good education. while making education a necessary component in order to get a decent paying job. We kept them out of white hospitals, redlined them into less desirable neighborhoods and then took their homes and land through imminent domain when we wanted to build a new highway. When too many of them managed to succeed and build a decent, prosperous life for themselves, we burned that down.

Over and over, we created policies that targeted black people. Oh, don't get me wrong: we targeted plenty of other people as well, especially if their skin was darker or they were born somewhere else or if they were Native, be it American Indians, Native Hawaiians, or indigenous peoples of Alaska. Why haven't we made Puerto Rico a state yet? We set immigration quotas that heavily favored immigrants from western Europe.

But no one was targeted more than black people. I guess we were so ashamed of having enslaved them, that we had to keep proving that they weren't really fully people and we decided to prove it through all sorts of laws and policies. And when the voting rights act was enacted and when schools were desegregated and 'mixed' marriages were legalized, we had to do something else:

The Shocking Story Behind Richard Nixon's 'War on Drugs' That Targeted Blacks and Anti-war Activists

This Sunday, June 17 will mark the 47th anniversary of a shameful day in US history — it’s when President Richard Nixon’s declared what has been the US government’s longest and costliest war — the epic failure known as the War on Drugs. At a press conference on that day in 1971, Nixon identified...

www.aei.org

“You want to know what this was really all about?” he asked with the bluntness of a man who, after public disgrace and a stretch in federal prison, had little left to protect. “The Nixon campaign in 1968, and the Nixon White House after that, had two enemies: the antiwar left and black people. You understand what I’m saying? We knew we couldn’t make it illegal to be either against the war or blacks, but by getting the public to associate the hippies with marijuana and blacks with heroin, and then criminalizing both heavily, we could disrupt those communities. We could arrest their leaders, raid their homes, break up their meetings, and vilify them night after night on the evening news. Did we know we were lying about the drugs? Of course we did.”

 

[atrib]

There was no intent to kill anybody,

How the fuck could you possibly know that? The evidence speaks against your claim. Chauvin asphyxiated Floyd for over 9 minutes, for a significant duration of which he knew that Floyd was not breathing. He actively disregarded another officer's recommendation to roll Floyd on his side to allow him to breathe. And he had to be physically stopped from continuing his assualt on Floyd's dead body by a paramedic so they could render first aid. How the fuck do you conclude that he did not intend to kill him or cause him harm? Your racist apologetics make me sick.

 

[laughing dog]

And yet your hobbyhorse OP linked the two.

I used it as an example, analogous to weed. My point is that in the US discussions about "soft on crime" and "tough on crime" tend to lump everything together, when really we need to keep things separate. So legalize weed and sex work, but do not soften on things like gun crimes, be they robberies, assaults or murders.

You made the OP. You made the link. You could have made your point about being soft on gun crimes without using your typical example of black shooters killing people. Your OP does not acknowledge the fact that CA prisons are over-crowded. I believe the state is under court order to alleviate the over-crowding. If my belief is accurate, then the releases are due to the people of California's unwillingness to allocate the resources to house more violent criminals for longer periods of time - which has nothing whatsoever to do with going on soft on crime but either being cheap ass or having different priorities than you.

 

[bilby]

If that's an excuse to stop and search, then the cops basically have the right to stop and search on a whim.

Not stop and search. Stop and ask for license and insurance, then run the license to see if the person has any warrants.
A search of the vehicle requires more than just a traffic stop.

I don't think you should be OK with the cavalier abandonment of the fourth amendment without so much as a debate.

I know you are Australian and all, but why do you think traffic stops are a violation of the 4th Amendment? Are you going "sovereign citizen" on us? "I wasn't driving, I was travelling"?

But it's your freedom. It's not my place to defend it.

True. How are they doing things in Australia? Are there traffic stops? What happens if you are stopped? Does the cop ask for license, registration and proof of insurance?

Australia is a prison colony that became a country. It's founded on the absence of freedom, and everything that's not prohibited by law is mandatory.

We resolve this by ignoring our oppressive laws (except when oppressing the indigenous population).

We make no claims nor pretence to being a free country, founded on and committed to freedom.

And despite this (or perhaps because of it), we have more freedom than Americans, and a far better grasp of the ways in which we risk losing that freedom.

 

[Toni]

If that's an excuse to stop and search, then the cops basically have the right to stop and search on a whim.

Not stop and search. Stop and ask for license and insurance, then run the license to see if the person has any warrants.
A search of the vehicle requires more than just a traffic stop.

I don't think you should be OK with the cavalier abandonment of the fourth amendment without so much as a debate.

I know you are Australian and all, but why do you think traffic stops are a violation of the 4th Amendment? Are you going "sovereign citizen" on us? "I wasn't driving, I was travelling"?

But it's your freedom. It's not my place to defend it.

True. How are they doing things in Australia? Are there traffic stops? What happens if you are stopped? Does the cop ask for license, registration and proof of insurance?

Australia is a prison colony that became a country. It's founded on the absence of freedom, and everything that's not prohibited by law is mandatory.

We resolve this by ignoring our oppressive laws (except when oppressing the indigenous population).

We make no claims nor pretence to being a free country, founded on and committed to freedom.

And despite this (or perhaps because of it), we have more freedom than Americans, and a far better grasp of the ways in which we risk losing that freedom.

I doubt that you have more freedom than Americans, based on what I’ve been told by Australians.

 

[bilby]

If that's an excuse to stop and search, then the cops basically have the right to stop and search on a whim.

Not stop and search. Stop and ask for license and insurance, then run the license to see if the person has any warrants.
A search of the vehicle requires more than just a traffic stop.

I don't think you should be OK with the cavalier abandonment of the fourth amendment without so much as a debate.

I know you are Australian and all, but why do you think traffic stops are a violation of the 4th Amendment? Are you going "sovereign citizen" on us? "I wasn't driving, I was travelling"?

But it's your freedom. It's not my place to defend it.

True. How are they doing things in Australia? Are there traffic stops? What happens if you are stopped? Does the cop ask for license, registration and proof of insurance?

Australia is a prison colony that became a country. It's founded on the absence of freedom, and everything that's not prohibited by law is mandatory.

We resolve this by ignoring our oppressive laws (except when oppressing the indigenous population).

We make no claims nor pretence to being a free country, founded on and committed to freedom.

And despite this (or perhaps because of it), we have more freedom than Americans, and a far better grasp of the ways in which we risk losing that freedom.

I doubt that you have more freedom than Americans, based on what I’ve been told by Australians.

I doubt that you have as much freedom as Australians, based on what I have seen of America, and on what I have been told by Americans (including many on these forums).

 

[Toni]

If that's an excuse to stop and search, then the cops basically have the right to stop and search on a whim.

Not stop and search. Stop and ask for license and insurance, then run the license to see if the person has any warrants.
A search of the vehicle requires more than just a traffic stop.

I don't think you should be OK with the cavalier abandonment of the fourth amendment without so much as a debate.

I know you are Australian and all, but why do you think traffic stops are a violation of the 4th Amendment? Are you going "sovereign citizen" on us? "I wasn't driving, I was travelling"?

But it's your freedom. It's not my place to defend it.

True. How are they doing things in Australia? Are there traffic stops? What happens if you are stopped? Does the cop ask for license, registration and proof of insurance?

Australia is a prison colony that became a country. It's founded on the absence of freedom, and everything that's not prohibited by law is mandatory.

We resolve this by ignoring our oppressive laws (except when oppressing the indigenous population).

We make no claims nor pretence to being a free country, founded on and committed to freedom.

And despite this (or perhaps because of it), we have more freedom than Americans, and a far better grasp of the ways in which we risk losing that freedom.

I doubt that you have more freedom than Americans, based on what I’ve been told by Australians.

I doubt that you have as much freedom as Australians, based on what I have seen of America, and on what I have been told by Americans (including many on these forums).

As far as I know, you’ve never actually been to the US. I’ve never been to Australia. What I have to base my opinion on is what Australians who are either visiting or who have immigrated have told me. I will confess that Rupert Murdoch and his progeny have made me think less well of both Australia and the US.