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Fucking Guns

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  • RooKRooK Shipmate
    Simon Toad wrote: »
    I think I have misunderstood you.

    I think you misunderstand everything.
    Do either of you happen to own a gun?

    Amusingly, I left all my firearms in Canada when I moved to the US. Because the US isn't a safe place for such dangerous toys.
  • Golden KeyGolden Key Shipmate, Glory
    Unless one of them wants to try to take it through airport security, they're not in each other's shooting distance.
  • TwilightTwilight Shipmate
    Amanda B's well timed joke reminded me of a spot I heard on NPR a few months ago. Evidently police are being trained in de-escalation of situations and it's already saved quite a few lives from both homicide and suicide. Of course most cities aren't jumping up to purchase the training package -- it was designed by a woman and probably isn't as much fun as a day of target shooting.

    Just listening to the piece has helped me twice with -- er -- anger issues. Once when my brother and I were arguing politics and embarrassing our spouses and the second time in Kroger's parking lot when a woman and I were heatedly discussing her right to run me over.

    Scraggly young redneck woman shouting out her truck window as she swerved to keep from hitting me: "And if I'd hit you it would have been my fault!"

    Me: "Yes, pedestrians do have the right of way in parking lots."

    Scraggly: "Not when you jump out in front of me!"

    Me: Starting to hold up my cane and say that I hadn't jumped anywhere in years, but remembering that she probably had a gun and I should de-escalate. So I smiled and nodded and said nothing. Amazing.
  • Simon ToadSimon Toad Shipmate
    edited May 2018
    Here's the song I referred to in the post that started this shit.

    Bob Dylan: The Ballad of Hollis Brown

    It seems that the Grandfather murdered his wife, his daughter and his four grandchildren, then called 000 and told them what he'd done. Then he shot himself. The estranged husband and father of the children says that the Grandfather didn't cope well with the suicide of one of his sons, and that recently a second son has been diagnosed with a terminal illness. The estranged husband and father thinks that might have tipped the Grandfather over the edge, and that as he appears to have killed the children in their sleep his aim was to spare them, his wife, his daughter and himself the further pain of living.

    I didn't know this when I referred to The Ballad of Hollis Brown. I just had the line 'there's seven people dead on a South Dakota farm' running through my head in my heightened emotional state. Dylan's song is about crushing poverty driving a man to murder his family and then kill himself. Here, it seems to be about one man's unbearable emotional pain.

    The police have not concluded their inquiries.
  • TwilightTwilight Shipmate
    That's a great ballad pointing out how desperation, poverty and despair can lead to violence. Things we should be able to address on this thread, even in this section of the forum.

    I was in line at a restaurant last week with a nice looking family -- grandmother, father, mother and three children -- standing ahead of me. The father wore a shirt with "Defend your town" and a picture of a gun on the back. The teenage son wore a shirt with "Respect the Wesson," and a picture of a gun on the back.

    I would like to think the liberal anti-gun side could be allowed more nuance in its arguments and be able to say things that wont necessarily fit on a T-shirt.
  • RuthRuth Shipmate
    Maybe, but between the crap going on all the time and my scant ability to make sense of it, these days I could wear the same t-shirt every day to express myself - it would say "Fuck this shit."
  • Doc TorDoc Tor Admin Emeritus
    I wonder if the boy knows the difference between respect earned through love, and respect extracted through fear? Perhaps we should ask his dad.
  • Alan Cresswell Alan Cresswell Admin, 8th Day Host
    If you think his dad has a clue about that you may be in for an unpleasant surprise.
  • Doc TorDoc Tor Admin Emeritus
    Oh, I think I probably know the answer already.
  • This morning, I heard a Republican candidate described as "very pro-life, very pro-2nd Amendment". I don't think it's possible to ever make any sense of that since it is an established fact that legal abortions and fewer guns save lives. Maybe the problem is Republicans think the wrong lives would be saved?
  • lilbuddhalilbuddha Shipmate
    Twilight wrote: »
    What has become just so much noise is the endless repetition of phrases like, "They were arrested for sitting while black?" Which was clever the first time someone in the Black Lives Matter movement used it, but is now trite and often just plain wrong, particularly when they were actually arrested for refusing to obey the police.
    It is neither trite nor wrong. White people are not treated poorly for their actions with the same frequency as PoC, especially black people. "They should have responded better" ignores the fact that white people typically don't have to.

    Regarding soundbites: If you are going to ignore what we say, we might as well not waste more time saying it.
  • TwilightTwilight Shipmate
    lilbuddha wrote: »
    Twilight wrote: »
    White people are not treated poorly for their actions with the same frequency as PoC, especially black people. "They should have responded better" ignores the fact that white people typically don't have to.

    Only in your imagination do white people get to ignore direct orders from the police. My husband and I have been asked to leave restaurants after we've purchased big, expensive meals, simply for lingering too long at the table. I've been pulled over by the police twice for no reason at all other than driving a little slower than average. (Typical of a marijuana user they said.) My son has been arrested for loitering. He has been stopped, arrested and done time in jail for erratic driving. Once he was stopped and question by the police for walking down a country road after a woman called and told them he caused her dogs to bark louder than usual. In all cases and in every state of mind, we obeyed the police. When they told me to get out of the car, I got out of the car. When they told my son to put his hands behind his back to be cuffed, he did so. Anyone of any color who thinks they can argue with the police, refuse direct orders, or actually resist and struggle with the police and not have consequences is dangerously naïve.
  • CrœsosCrœsos Shipmate
    edited May 2018
    Twilight wrote: »
    lilbuddha wrote: »
    White people are not treated poorly for their actions with the same frequency as PoC, especially black people. "They should have responded better" ignores the fact that white people typically don't have to.

    Only in your imagination do white people get to ignore direct orders from the police. My husband and I have been asked to leave restaurants after we've purchased big, expensive meals, simply for lingering too long at the table. I've been pulled over by the police twice for no reason at all other than driving a little slower than average.

    "Twice" you say? How remarkable!
    When Philando Castile saw the flashing lights in his rearview mirror the night he got shot, it wasn’t unusual. He had been pulled over at least 52 times in recent years in and around the Twin Cities and given citations for minor offenses including speeding, driving without a muffler and not wearing a seat belt.

    He was assessed at least $6,588 in fines and fees, although more than half of the total 86 violations were dismissed, court records show.

    I don't think we need a spoiler alert about how Mr. Castile's 53rd traffic stop turned out.
  • edited May 2018
    A previous poster wrote:
    My husband and I have been asked to leave restaurants after we've purchased big, expensive meals, simply for lingering too long at the table. I've been pulled over by the police twice for no reason at all other than driving a little slower than average. . . . My son . . . was stopped and question by the police for walking down a country road after a woman called and told them he caused her dogs to bark louder than usual.

    Good Lord! Where do you live? I'm surprised that anyone chooses to stay there.
  • lilbuddhalilbuddha Shipmate
    lilbuddha wrote: »
    My husband and I have been asked to leave restaurants after we've purchased big, expensive meals, simply for lingering too long at the table. I've been pulled over by the police twice for no reason at all other than driving a little slower than average. . . . My son . . . was stopped and question by the police for walking down a country road after a woman called and told them he caused her dogs to bark louder than usual.

    Good Lord! Where do you live? I'm surprised that anyone chooses to stay there.
    Probably just a coding error, but I most certainly did not write that.
  • CrœsosCrœsos Shipmate
    I think that was Twilight. I made what I think are the right coding corrections in my response here.
  • Just going by what I read two posts up. I fixed it to read "A previous poster" since I guess we'll never know for sure who said it.

    If I had to guess, I'd say the locale in question was Singapore. Although I don't think even there they shoot you for making dogs bark louder than usual. Flog you, maybe.
  • lilbuddhalilbuddha Shipmate
    Just going by what I read two posts up. I fixed it to read "A previous poster" since I guess we'll never know for sure who said it.
    We know for sure Twilight said it. To be fair, she messed up the coding first.
  • TwilightTwilight Shipmate
    Yes, I was trying to respond to Lilbuddha, after she said,
    "They should have responded better" ignores the fact that white people typically don't have to. "

    I quoted her post and then replied. I don't know what I did wrong to mess up the coding like that.

    It was my son who was stopped by the police while walking in Ohio. I went to see the woman who called the cops on him and asked her why, and she actually told me that her dogs were barking louder than usual as he went by.

    I was just observing that white people do have to respond to police sometimes.

    At no time was I comparing myself to Philando Castille, but then I doubt that anyone but Croesus would make that leap.
  • lilbuddhalilbuddha Shipmate
    Twilight wrote: »
    I was just observing that white people do have to respond to police sometimes.
    It is not that white people never have to respond to the police, but that they do not generally have to be as careful. Not are they harassed for simply being white.
    The, beloved by politicians and police, "Stop and Frisk" resulted in a significantly greater number of black people being stopped. This despite a greater number of white people stopped being found to have drugs in their possession.

  • RooKRooK Shipmate
    I doubt that Croesus was intending to suggest you were comparing yourself to an oppressed minority. Rather, I feel that his point was that there is a relentlessness to the systematic discrimination - that perhaps it possible for even law-abiding citizens to get frustrated. And it's worrisome that a citizen that is justifiably frustrated with a public servant can be killed for it. Because the ready access to firearms magnifies a slight squeeze of racism into a sufficient trigger pull.
  • CrœsosCrœsos Shipmate
    edited May 2018
    RooK wrote: »
    I doubt that Crœsos was intending to suggest you were comparing yourself to an oppressed minority. Rather, I feel that his point was that there is a relentlessness to the systematic discrimination - that perhaps it possible for even law-abiding citizens to get frustrated.

    Actually I was making both points. This was in response to Twilight's (latest) assertion that black Americans who voice concerns over the way they are selectively targeted by police are just whiny liars. This has been a bugaboo of hers for a while, insisting that black Americans' accounts of their own lived experience with American policing are invalid or false. By way of illustrating that black Americans are treated in the exact same manner as white Americans by American police she offered her own experiences as anecdata in response to lilbuddha's claim that "White people are not treated poorly for their actions with the same frequency as PoC, especially black people", clearly trying to make the point that her experiences are dispositive proof that white Americans are just as frequently the target of police harassment as Americans of any other race or ethnicity. Hence my sarcasm about a lifetime total of two traffic stops being evidence of racially unbiased American policing.
  • mousethiefmousethief Shipmate
    I got it, Crœsos.
  • TwilightTwilight Shipmate
    Actually the link Croesos shows in red was me talking to Mousethief who I think has overused the, "walking while black" phrases a bit. I was saying that it was cleverly put by the Black Lives movement, but probably not meant to be used by anyone and everyone each time a black person is stopped by the police, because there are sometimes other reasons.

    So I wasn't talking to black Americans at all, (Mousethief being white) much less calling black people whiny liars. The only whiny liar I know is Croesos himself who has no scruples over making up huge falsehoods like the ones in his post above.
  • Golden KeyGolden Key Shipmate, Glory
    Phrases like "driving while black/brown" were around long before BLM--and the problems go back at least a couple of hundred years in the US.
  • romanlionromanlion Shipmate
    I don't think it's possible to ever make any sense of that since it is an established fact that legal abortions and fewer guns save lives.

    Considering that we in the US abort about a million (mostly minority) babies each year and have roughly 40K gun deaths (mostly suicides) each year, I would like to see the data that support this "established fact". Sounds like some Sanger bullshit to me.

  • Simon ToadSimon Toad Shipmate
    welcome back romanlion :). I've missed not having you to spar with.
  • lilbuddhalilbuddha Shipmate
    Simon Toad wrote: »
    welcome back romanlion :). I've missed not having you to spar with.
    That is like missing a gangrenous lesion to test one's immune system.
  • romanlion wrote: »
    I don't think it's possible to ever make any sense of that since it is an established fact that legal abortions and fewer guns save lives.

    Considering that we in the US abort about a million (mostly minority) babies each year and have roughly 40K gun deaths (mostly suicides) each year, I would like to see the data that support this "established fact". Sounds like some Sanger bullshit to me.

    The sentence you quote here was written by Soror Magna a few posts ago. Not by me.
  • RooKRooK Shipmate
    romanlion wrote: »
    I don't think it's possible to ever make any sense of that since it is an established fact that legal abortions and fewer guns save lives.

    Considering that we in the US abort about a million (mostly minority) babies each year and have roughly 40K gun deaths (mostly suicides) each year, I would like to see the data that support this "established fact". Sounds like some Sanger bullshit to me.

    The two life-saving aspects are not directly connected, so should be considered separately.

    The simpler is the fewer guns leading to fewer gun deaths. This seems, well, too obvious even for romanlion to question. So we can assume that questioning it is pure trollish rhetorical flourish.

    Trickier is the access to legal abortions saving lives. In terms of the lives of pregnant humans, legalized abortions clearly save lives due to not having to risk black-market procedures. With respect to lives of proto-humans, statistics for abortion rates are happily now actually below the era of when Roe-V-Wade was enacted. Cheers for women's health medicine.
  • In the news this morning, Police chiefs discuss officers routinely carrying guns in the UK. It's supposed to address the terrorist threat, but I suspect it will just escalate violence and gun ownership in the UK too, so no thanks. Really. Not that I'll get a vote on this.

    Following the London Bridge and Westminster terrorist attacks, we had armed police patrolling tourist areas in London, carrying pretty hefty guns obviously, which was not reassuring. We already have police in the City of London and Westminster carrying routinely - patrolling Paternoster Square, outside the Houses of Parliament and Downing Street. And gun crime in London is increasing.

    And driving while black and walking while black are issues in the UK. Black (and ethnic minority) parents are wise to teach their children how to be "properly submissive" in front of police officers, to be polite and offer ID and reasons for being where they are without being asked, because black people are 29 times more likely to be stopped and searched. We have had tutors trying to teach some of our BME students this too. This is despite the fact that for drugs offences it is more likely that the white guy is carrying drugs.
  • Golden KeyGolden Key Shipmate, Glory
    "BME"?

    Thx.
  • Penny SPenny S Shipmate
    edited May 2018
    Posted something - changed mind.
  • Simon ToadSimon Toad Shipmate
    Black and Minority Ethnic, apparently... That's new to me too.
  • TwilightTwilight Shipmate
    Golden Key wrote: »
    Phrases like "driving while black/brown" were around long before BLM--and the problems go back at least a couple of hundred years in the US.
    I know, and I'm not questioning that racial profiling is a huge problem. It's the knee jerk reaction of saying "Sitting while black," or "Driving while black," after every news worthy arrest that has become so prevalent recently, that was bothering me.

    Most recently it was the Starbucks event that had people and headlines saying that the two men were arrested for "sitting while black," when clearly they were arrested for refusing to obey the police. Inexplicably, these men thought they could just say no to the cops and the cops would slink away.
    The law gives store owners and their managers the right to ask people to leave their premises (just like homeowners.)
    If someone refuses to leave, and the police are called, then the police are duty bound to enforce the law for citizens.
    If someone refuses to obey the direct orders of the police, then they are put in a position of having to arrest the people who have put there authority into question.

    "Walking while black, " or "driving while black" has it's place in the vernacular, but it doesn't fit every case and it doesn't fit this one. There have been horrible, tragic cases of police shooting unarmed black men as a result of profiling, but it doesn't mean every arrest of a black person is unjustified or that "sitting while black," fit the latest scenario.

    That's all I was saying.
  • Doc TorDoc Tor Admin Emeritus
    Dude. The whole point is that black folk get the cops called on them for behaviour that gets a pass for white folk. That the black folk get to remonstrate with the cops and then arrested is the effect of "sitting while black", not the cause.

    If my pasty white arse can get this, pretty sure you've got no excuse.
  • Simon ToadSimon Toad Shipmate
    edited May 2018
    Are the cops really duty-bound to enforce a manager's order for customers to leave a shop?
    I'm not sure.

    I reckon the good move for a cop in that Starbucks situation is to sort out what's wrong and see if they can mediate a sensible solution. I reckon that a good move for a cop would be to avoid a situation where they HAD to arrest somebody by making sure they didn't give them an opportunity to transgress a law about behavior towards police. If the customers got stroppy, different story, but first option is to get everybody to calm the hell down, surely.

    Those two Starbucks guys seem like sensible types. Didn't they agree with the city to settle on the basis of funding for minorities who want to start a business from the city? I'm guessing they are getting a settlement from Starbucks on top of that, but to me they showed that they were two pretty selfless blokes.

    Plus wasn't that in Philly? I remember seeing pictures of people busting light poles there after the Gridiron. The cops seemed pretty happy in the footage, but I'm not sure they were watching the property damage.
  • Alan Cresswell Alan Cresswell Admin, 8th Day Host
    I'm seeing news of another school shooting, this time in Santa Fe (Texas, not New Mexico), but little info just now.
  • Gath fachGath fach Shipmate
    8 Dead https://theguardian.com/us-news/2018/may/18/texas-school-shooting-santa-fe-high.

    How many more people must be sacrificed to the US's love of guns ?
  • KarlLBKarlLB Shipmate
    edited May 2018
    NRA will call for more guns of course. In Texas. Where obviously a lack of guns or an armed culture is the problem.
  • latepaullatepaul Shipmate Posts: 12
    As news about Friday’s attack was still emerging, a local resident wearing a “Make America Great Again” hat arrived outside the school with an American flag and a handgun. He told reporters he was there to “offer support.”

    source
  • I'm suspecting that a generational shift might required before anything changes. Some old men need to die out and stop running things.

  • AnnAnn Shipmate Posts: 45
    But there are still young people who think they need to carry guns.
  • RuthRuth Shipmate
    I looked it up on Duckduckgo (because fuck Google) and the first hit was the Body Modification Ezine. I trust that's exactly what you meant.
  • TwilightTwilight Shipmate
    Simon Toad wrote: »
    Are the cops really duty-bound to enforce a manager's order for customers to leave a shop?
    I'm not sure.

    I reckon the good move for a cop in that Starbucks situation is to sort out what's wrong and see if they can mediate a sensible solution. I reckon that a good move for a cop would be to avoid a situation where they HAD to arrest somebody by making sure they didn't give them an opportunity to transgress a law about behavior towards police. If the customers got stroppy, different story, but first option is to get everybody to calm the hell down, surely.

    Those two Starbucks guys seem like sensible types. Didn't they agree with the city to settle on the basis of funding for minorities who want to start a business from the city? I'm guessing they are getting a settlement from Starbucks on top of that, but to me they showed that they were two pretty selfless blokes.

    Plus wasn't that in Philly? I remember seeing pictures of people busting light poles there after the Gridiron. The cops seemed pretty happy in the footage, but I'm not sure they were watching the property damage.

    https://youtube.com/watch?v=gRHkAXiqfVQ
  • Ruth wrote: »
    I looked it up on Duckduckgo (because fuck Google) and the first hit was the Body Modification Ezine. I trust that's exactly what you meant.

    :lol:
    No one should use anything Google for anything. Super snooper.
  • Simon ToadSimon Toad Shipmate
    edited May 2018
    I watched the video up to 3:50 Twilight. I don't know whether it was made before or after the City settled a claim for damages against (presumably) the police for a civil wrong they allegedly committed against the two customers.

    I concede that the cops seem to have followed their policies and that no force was used. All I'm saying is that there might have been a better way to handle things other than enforcing a Starbucks policy (and consequently the law of trespass). My gut reaction from outside the culture is that it might have been possible for the police to act as mediators between the customers and the managers. Might the managers have been satisfied if the customers had bought a small drink? Or if one of the cops had bought a small drink for the customer? I understand that it is a very risky move to offer to buy someone a coffee from Starbucks. Their coffee is very very very very very bad. [coffee rant deleted]

    I guess I'm saying that seeking to enforce the letter of a law that, frankly, seems very minor (the revocation of a licence to remain leading to a technical trespass) is only one option available to police walking the beat. If this happened in Melbourne, where I am a cultural insider, I would condemn the police for failing to deescalate a situation that seems very easy to deescalate. That's what police are trained to do here as a first option. You don't see this in the headlines, but that is their primary role - getting everyone home to bed safe every night - them and the public.

    You don't do that by enforcing trespass law in a shop unless you really really have to. I can see other options in this situation that don't appear to have been tried. I mean, the way the Police Officer on the video explained things it seemed like the officers got the management side of the story, and then went up to the customers and just asked them to leave!!!!! That is NOT good police work in my opinion. It looks like the lawyers for the City had a similar view.

    I see there's another school shooting in America. Apparently the shooter was interested in Nazis and the superiority of the white race. It's weird for someone bought up around British racism to hear someone of Greek background think of themselves as white. Traditional racism where I'm from puts the Greeks well outside the definition of white, which is synonymous with fictive Anglo-Saxons and only grudgingly includes the Irish. And the good old White Australia policy excluded everyone who couldn't pass the language test chosen by the relevant immigration official. Greeks weren't allowed to pass that until after WW2.

  • PigletPiglet All Saints Host, Circus Host
    Ann wrote: »
    But there are still young people who think they need to carry guns.
    Sadly, yes. If she'd been any other colour than white and posed outside a school tooled up like that, she'd have been mown down by a "campus enforcement officer" before you could say "second amendment".

    Meanwhile, according to something that came up on Facebook, the latest atrocity in Texas brings the number of schoolchildren killed in America this year above the number of soldiers in the US military killed on active service in the same period.
  • Golden KeyGolden Key Shipmate, Glory
    I haven't followed the Starbuck's story closely. But I wonder if someone assumed the men were homeless? They aren't necessarily welcome in businesses here. And asking to use the restroom in a restaurant if you haven't bought something, or not been seated, isn't exactly acceptable, no matter who you are.
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