One of the more infuriating and confounding aspects of incidents like Roger Fortson's shooting is how police insist that their "specialized training and experience" gives them unimpeachable credibility when enforcing the law, but when they f*ck up they say "hey, cops are only human" and get qualified immunity. It can't be both. As JVL points out...this deputy doesn't appear to have followed the most basic of procedures for this incident. But the police union will back him because the only thing a cop can do to get on the wrong side of a police union is to rat out another cop.
Lots of folks are commenting below, suggesting the problem is really a police training problem (or similar). And, no doubt, that's a key. (As another commenter pointed out, police fatality rates are overblow - turns out cops aren't even in the top 10 of deadliest professions.)
But, here's the thing. As JVL points out "Our societal inability to make hard political choices has resulted in the worst of all worlds. And in the worst of all worlds, the game theory answer is that you should shoot first and deal with the possible legal fallout second."
This is the world we live in. Often left out of the gun debate is "gun culture". It's what's driving things. It's what's given us the worst of all worlds. There are lots of countries with high gun ownership rates, but they don't have nearly our firearms injury/death rates. How many Swiss gov't officials sent Christmas cards with their families posing with arsenals?
And, cops are not immune to this. So even if the hard data doesn't support them being trigger happy, gun culture does. With the emphasis on stand-your-ground laws thrown into the mix (and several court cases to back it up), it's no wonder people (including cops) shoot first and ask questions later.
I had not thought about what it must be like to be a LEO in gun culture. No excuses for police who are poorly trained, trigger happy, not accountable because of unions, or otherwise not doing the job. But to go to work every day knowing that you’re at risk of being in the line of fire of some idiot who yells “Second Amendment” as he shoots first…how do you create responsible police for that? Militarization of the police is inevitable when the Second Amendment creates war zones.
Cops pull triggers because they're scared. What you call militarization of the police often amounts to gear to make them safer. Example: the armored cars, which people derivisvely refer to as tanks. Cops protected by those vehicle are less likely to panic and pull triggers.
I dont think this is it, Tom. Yes, the militarization of police is some of the gear. But also the mindset of us against them, warrior vs guardian, and that they are in a war zone. I dont think you'll find any evidence the armored cars make these cops less likely to panic — my guess is these cops are more likely to be aggressive, as they are protected and, well, in a tank.
I agree. Yet let's us not forget that this type of behavior is not new. Police have been able to operate with impunity basically since founding..which was an outgrowth of the posses organized to find run away slaves and fugitives.
It speaks to the power of marketing that this history is forgotten and when folks think of police they think of the Rockwell painti ng
No municipality with fewer than 250,000 residents INSIDE CITY LIMITS, not in the metro area, should be allowed to have SWAT units or armored vehicles. Smaller cities and towns CAN'T AFFORD the training needed to make such units effective in true emergencies. Alternatively, REQUIRE a minimum annual aggregate training budget for such units which only departments with 500 or more sworn officers could afford.
The problem with Uvalde was that the least qualified cop around fell into being the incident commander, with predictable results. Where I live, the armored car is part of a mutual assistance arrangement involving multiple jurisdictions.
Since there are usually STATE police in most parts of most states, I'd prefer state police to run such units and keep and maintain all such equipment. Local police could be trained and certified to join such paramilitary units, but leadership would be at state police level where there's sufficient budget and (God help us!) sufficiently frequent need for paramilitary police to keep tactical skills fresh.
A town with 25K people just isn't able to man and equip a TRAINED paramilitary police unit. Sadly, Texans would never acknowledge that.
If you were married to a cop, you would worry every day whether he (or she) is coming home that night alive or in a box.
You can't blame the average cop for the programming he/she has acquired from the culture they live in, which anger and fear justifies itself by the response it generates when it acts on duty.
Maybe I'm overreacting, but I figure the real problem with US policing is in the sergeants, lieutenants, captains and higher WHO DIDN'T GET CAUGHT earlier in their careers but are just as rotten apples as any patrol officers they've had to fire.
I always appreciate your perspective on some of these matters. You are one-thousand percent correct. There is a training and culture issue with the police, but the overall gun culture is the primary driver.
One of the things that's always struck me in the gun debate is (I'm generalizing, of course), the anti-gun side focuses on the guns. The pro-gun side focuses on "mental health" (or some such). Both manage to miss the root cause.
But stand-your-ground would apply here to Mr. Fortson, not the policeman. In the end this appears, typically, to come down to skin color, whoever holds the gun.. Gov. Abbott is merely rubbing our faces in it, since he can, with impunity.
The problem, as I see it, is that it applies to everyone in such a situation. Racism may or may not have been a factor in the policeman's quick shooting. (Also worth bearing in mind: any such racism could be explicit or implicit.)
A separate problem is the law and its interpretation. The pattern I'm seeing is "whoever shoots first wins". It seems all that's required is for the shooter to mumble 'I feared for my life'.
Finally, while these are two separate issues, certainly the former can influence (and change the outcome of) the latter.
"I feared for my life" is permitted only to white people, particularly when a cop is being defended against. I submit this is the consequence of intentionally created racism.
It is undestandable that police fear the populace, given the now multi-decade multi-pronged campaigns to create and exacerbate racial animus and resentment, and implant ineradicable pre-cognitive subconscious associations in white minds of [minorities<==> crime<==>violence<==>existential menace]. Given the inevitable effect this program has had on the overall culture, it is even more understandable that the populace (the non-white populace) justly fear the police.
It is in the interest of those who drive this antagonism to maximize its emotional effect and suppress as much as possible of what Kahneman calls System II cognitive processing that could mitigate it. The goal does not differ in essence from the goals of the wannabe rulers in Yugoslavia after Tito's passing opened up paths of advancement the compromise post-war regime closed off. When people are at one another's throats, they can be readily led by the nose. At first.
This is not accidental, although of course these campaigns take on lives of their own; and their provocateurs generally don't set out to bring down their entire civilization, but merely to rearrange the parts to their benefit. In their folly, they always seem to imagine, as the otherwise forgettable Leroy Pope Walker famously said, that all the blood spilled will be manageably collected with a handkerchief or two.
And of course sometimes the instigators really are psychopathic monsters... Robespierres, Pol Pots, Stalins, Hitlers. But mostly they are just blinded by personal hubris. In Charlie Sykes' brilliant analogy, they breed little alligators... and fail to recognize the day the reptile has grown past the point of manageability. In their blindness and folly they keep feeding it... and come only far too late (if ever) to "oh my god what have I done".
You can't fix this with police training. Once the entire culture has been poisoned, its momentum and an energy generates its own fuel.
What is most disgusting about this is how petty and miserable the immediate objectives of the perpetrators really are. The NRA abandoned its gun safety mission and turned to preaching a cult of firearm worship ... because its leadership found doing so brought in a stream of boodle to spend on themselves... and the weapons industry wanted to goose up demand. The racism was just an instrumentality so that fearful white people would want ten guns where before they only owned two. And of course politicians found that the race terror helped them obtain political office and turn those offices from elective positions into de facto sinecures -- in which, once installed, they could aggrandize themselves with graft and privileges. Vide Duncan Hunter -- committing multiple felonies and what he got out of it were souvenirs from Disney world... and some adulterous ski trips.
At bottom one has to say it is pathetic and sadly stupid and small. It's not even dignifiable, as the John Goodman character says of National Socialism in the Big Lebowski, as a malign ideology. It's just fuck-dumb petty assholery and tiny minded greed. Which in the end results in a stupid war of all against all for no reason whatsovever.
Those of us fighting this may see ourselves as Horatii on the bridge, or doomed Leonidases holding a pass without hope against a magnificent foe; but what we really are up against is a horde of cheap three card monte tricksters and high-BMI split pants bullies whose highest aspirations reach to the level of looking up pornography on the internet.
It has been justly said that one may be judged by the measure of one's foes. In which case, big disappointment...
I'm fairly ignorant on Tito (just the basics), so I'll skip that bit.
Re: systemic racism, pretty much yep. Re: "pre-cognitive subconscious", I often think this aspect is overlooked. One of my phil profs had a term he liked: racialist. The idea of implicit, often inchoate racism. There are plenty of folks that, if asked directly, would claim they aren't racist. And, in most ways, they don't appear to be. Representative of a particular segment, "White resentment" is a phrase we've heard a bit recently. Anyhow, I agree with you, the point being the incident under discussion doesn't require loud-mouthed belligerent (stereotyped) racists.
"You can't fix this with police training." - agreed, yet you gotta start somewhere. And/or, try to tactically address the manifestations of the deeper issue where you can.
"It's just fuck-dumb petty assholery and tiny minded greed." - yeah, this is the sad, but big, take-away for me. ("what we really are up against is a horde of cheap three card monte tricksters and high-BMI split pants bullies whose highest aspirations reach to the level of looking up pornography on the internet" - ha, OK, 5 pts for that; very funny! You may not like this, but that struck me as something KDW at the Dispatch would write.) We often imagine Lex Luthor as our evil enemy, but instead it's someone like Trump.
Throw in the uphill asymmetry we face (it turns out "rape and pillage" is easier than nation building) and, well, here we are. On the flip side, I guess we should be happy and impressed that we've managed to create so much for the barbarians to destroy! ;-)
I am trying to understand and anticipate what a future Thucydides (my ideal ancient historian) would write of us and our age. I am not coming up with an encouraging narrative.
He was no democrat. I think today he would say “I told you so”.
Now go look at the death rates by firearms. Even more gun culture on display. (That was the point re: Switzerland.)
Also, the high per-capita ownership rate actually supports the "gun culture" idea in an odd way. While that number is 4 times higher than Switzerland, what's interesting is the number of households with guns. It's something like 2x. What this tells us is that people that own guns in the US own several guns.
Well, I wasn't equating the US to Switzerland. Rather, using the Swiss as an example of a country with (relative to the world broadly) high gun ownership rates and yet a very low firearm casualty rate. That just happened to be the example that popped up. One could also look at Canada, for instance.
The point being that having a lot of guns doesn't necessarily lead to what we experience in the US. The guns may be a necessary, but not sufficient, condition.
Oh good grief. I never said you were equating the US and Switzerland. No country has "lots of guns" in any way that compares to the US. A better comparison might be the US when the NRA was a gun safety organization rather than a gun culture organization. There was a time when the NRA membership was almost completely hunters and sportsmen. These days the NRA is openly courting civilian right-wing political militia types.
| you should shoot first and deal with the possible legal fallout second.
Absolutely the most glaringly obvious rule for those living in the US today. Not just police. Consider Perry in Texas. Had his victim fired 1st, he may still be alive AND not in prison.
Welcome to the US, where everyone is hair-trigger. Woe to those who consider that metaphorical.
| There are lots of countries with high gun ownership rates, but they don't have
| nearly our firearms injury/death rates.
May need to consider the possibility that the US represents a unique combination of violent tendencies and adulation of ignorance. In simple terms, we're generally too stupid to realize how dangerous we are.
"In simple terms, we're generally too stupid to realize how dangerous we are." - heh, that's my general take on humans. Applied across the board.
"May need to consider the possibility that the US represents a unique combination..." - that could well be, but I'd still like to understand what it is and how it works. If we're ever going to address it, step 1: understand the problem. OK, maybe step 1 is admit you have a problem. :-)
Maybe applicable to all humans, but when it comes to imperiling each others' lives, it's NECESSARY to acknowledge true American exceptionalism.
As for understanding it, American children grow up steeped in the romantic heroism of the armed citizenry defeating the Hessians at Trenton and the Red Coats at Saratoga and Yorktown. [Tangent: too few know about Cowpens.] Then there's the Wild West (extending to WW1 thanks to Pershing's incursion into Mexico), the heroic Sgt York in WW1, then gangsters in the 1920s, and all of those cemented into the American psyche thanks to B movies from the 1930s on. We Americans REVERE the armed renegade ready, willing and eager to shoot others.
Correcting that would require bankrupting Hollywood. Good luck with that. To be clearer, there's BIG $$$$ in Americans being and remaining as violent as we are.
"Florida Sheriff's Deputy," just a continuation of the ignorant white trash redneck scum usually associated with "Southern Just Us." We have to get rid of the "warrior cop" in American policing. Kicking down doors at midnight in Baghdad has to stop being an "experience qualification."
The irony is that former soldiers who kicked down doors in Baghdad and are now cops all say how they had much clear, more humane rules of engagement, discipline and accountability than police in the US.
Police are essential, but there is a lot of planned messaging that makes them superheroes rather than human beings who can fuck up and end a life. Or a person with severe biases or psychological deficiencies must be examined.
I come from a family of cops. My Dad, brother, several uncles all uniformed police. I get the need. It is just infuriating to know that, in all likelihood, the cop who killed this young airman will not suffer consequences.
There is a difference between backing a bogus story--not ratting out another cop--and the police union doing their job, part of which is to defend members accused of misconduct.
The issue with Fortson's murder isn't at all about guns--if you're not allowed to carry a gun *in your own damned home* then where *are* you able to carry them? The Foster/Perry situation *was* about guns and where/how we can carry them, but the Fortson killing was NOT about guns. It was about policing and how we train cops to be scared of guns being present *as part of their training*.
Every single academy class in every single department in the country is shown videos of cops being shot when doing routine traffic stops. Never mind that this is a fraction of a fraction of the 1% of traffic stops that happen, and that a good 99% of law enforcement officers will never have a traffic stop turn deadly at any point in their careers, the police trainers *still* pump fear into every single trainee that passes through every single academy class around the country with these videos. THAT is the reason that Fortson got killed for having a gun on him while in his own home. Because we refuse to tell police training departments to STOP pumping fear of an armed public into their trainees with these videos (AND the tactics that harp on the same fears). If we can't tone down the over-hyped fear in police training then we will inevitably see dozens of more Fortson-style killings in the next few years. If you want to see a really disturbing version of this dynamic, watch the body cam footage of the officer who killed Daniel Shaver in 2016. They literally had this unarmed (white) dude crawling on his stomach with his arms/hands extended at his sides while shouting contradictory commands and then executed him with an AR-15 while he was on his stomach when he didn't comply the way they liked (do not watch this video if you are at all squeamish).
Race still is absolutely part of the problem here as well. The racial side of this comes into play when you look at all the white mass shooters and people like Kyle Rittenhaus who are allowed to surrender while armed with AR-15s when cops are responding to *active shootings* while a black man answering a door of his own home while armed is immediately shot to death by a cop responding to a possible domestic disturbance call. White people who are armed and are actively killing people are allowed to surrender, black men who are simply armed and causing no visible harm are killed immediately (Philando Castile had the same thing happen to him). Ta'Kiya Young didn't even need to be armed, she only had to coast her vehicle in a confusing situation before a cop shot her and killed her and terminated her pregnancy (go watch THAT body cam footage is you wanna feel sick).
We refuse to address the training problem and we refuse to address the racial problem with police, and while police killings like this will inevitably continue in the face of our inability to address them, black people specifically will unfortunately bear the lion's share of the bloodshed in a disproportionate manner which is all kinds of fucked up. It's not about guns, it's about the cops and their shit-tier training folks.
The Daniel Shaver killing bodycam footage if you want to watch the most disturbing police murder I've seen (the part where Shaver is killed is edited out a second or so before his death):
Body cams aren't fixing this issue--all of these officers are wearing body cams when they kill citizens in unjustified manners, only *training* will fix this kind of issue. Maybe trainees should be shown *this* video in every academy class.
Complete pass, and like the other commenter said, he was called back to duty solely so he could retire on a 75 percent medical pension from the PTSD he "suffered" from the "trauma" of the shooting. I think the man he humiliated and then murdered--I continue to believe it was murder--might have more PTSD . . . oh, wait. He's dead.
Training is one step, the other is prosecution when the training standards are violated. An improved hiring process would help too, including at least basic screening for anti-social attitudes.
They already screen for anti-social attitudes via written and in-person psych evaluations. The problems happen *after* they've already hired people on via the culture of policing and the training. A lot of cops who do dirty shit are black themselves. Go look at the Baltimore gun trace task force that got rolled up in 2018. Most of those dudes weren't white.
I question how closely the screening is adhered to when a department is severely understaffed and confronted with politically 'out of control' crime rates. Being an a****** isn't a racial thing, you're right about that, and the increasing militarization of police departments isn't progress in a good direction.
They rejected me from the NYPD on a psych basis even after I passed the written MMPI exams. The only thing that was even remotely bad in my psych interview was that I had drank underage while in the Marines and the shrink pressed me on things like giving into peer pressure when it came up (I self-reported it during application). I didn't give any kind of aggressive response, but later received a DQ letter in the mail on the basis of psych disqual with no other explination. I went back into the military after that because my excellent FDNY score/application was tossed because courts had deemed the '07 entrance exam I took to be "racist." My take away from that whole experience was that we care more about racist exams than we do racist cops, and the cops specifically don't want veterans with x3 combat tours with proven shoot/no-shoot decision-making skills because unproven people with lower levels of training are better so long as they don't have a documented underaged drinking incident in their past. Looking back now, I'm glad they rejected me because I wouldn't want to serve in departments with those kinds of standards.
Rejection because of underage drinking?!? I'm in my late 30s and can attest to the reality that damn near EVERYBODY I know, drank before hitting 21 y/o. Those standards are so ridiculous that its basically incentivizing lying.
What the hell? I will google that story, but that is so distressing. The police officer was off his rocker. He is a sad sack loser that probably got an erection while being a sadist.
I've seen the full body cam footage before YouTube pulled the graphic ones, and you will not hear *any* off those officers say to the officer who shot Shaver "What the fuck did you just do??? What the fuck were you thinking???!!!" They were all pretty okay with how that scenario played itself out. If they weren't, you would have heard it on the audio from the body cam footage.
I've seen the Shaver video, or parts of it, before. It's one of the most bullshit things ever. They're literally screaming contradictory commands at him and then shoot him when he doesn't defy the laws of physics. How can the training be so bad? You're point about the instilling of fear in their training rings true though because in many of these bodycam videos you'd think the cop just saw an actual monster or something the way they're screaming and hyperventilating.
The pro "everyone should have multiple guns" crowd also doesn't seem to notice that cops are increasingly fearful of being "out-gunned". Look at Uvalde where a whole herd of Leo's just milled around for an hour because one untrained gangly teenager had an AR-15 and was thought to have body armor when it was really just an empty plate carrier vest (I think)...
They didn't seem to be fearful about being out-gunned in Kenosha or Buffalo. They gave both of those shooters the ability to surrender even while armed with AR-15s and having just shot people.
True, I suppose it depends a lot on the department/individuals involved. Plus Uvalde seems to have also been a case of really bad leadership breakdown and communication and coordination issues.
Edit: It also occurs to me now that those two shooters you picked were unique cases and also happened to be white and I assume surrendering to police (this might have been your point but it might have gone over my head. I need more coffee).
The first cop through the door at the Bolder supermarket shooting didn't have an issue confronting a mass shooter armed with an AR. He was survived by his wife and four daughters.
That's true bravery by that officer, no doubt. I'm just saying maybe it would make police less fearful (and potentially less deadly for them and others) if they didn't have to contend with perps firing AR-15s. (with regularity)
That cat is already out of the bag and it's too late. There are so many ARs in circulation that it's going to be impossible to get them out of circulation without risking a whole lot of Waco/Ruby Ridge-style incidents. Besides that, the gangs are always going to have AR/AK-style rifles so cops will continue to have to contend with that threat whether or not law-abiding citizens disarm en masse anyway. The time to do something about this was in 2004 when the national AWB was sunsetting and we had a chance to do a long-term ban. Guess which party largely tanked that vote? Now we're here.
ALL police departments are bad, just to varying degrees. I got caught up in the LAPD'S first police riot at Century City in June 1967, In the years since, there have been six new Chiefs, all promising "reform." There have been commissions on the latest outrage, declarations of more "reform," and the latest LAPD police riot was 5 years ago. Not to mention all the "bad shootings" of otherwise-innocent people. The Department was founded in 1869 to keep the Messkinz down, and that's been their job ever since. And it's the reason for the founding of every other department - keep them "pesky ones" down, whoever they are that are a problem to the local ruling class.
That situation infuriates me. Hundreds of officers outside while children are on 911 calls screaming for help...every last one of those cops should have been fired.
Very well written and well thought out. But I do have a dark thought and partial rebuttal. Your point only holds together if you believe as an institution police want to act well, and are shooting people in situations they should not be firing because of lack of training and discipline. I sometimes wonder if that's really the case, and that if some police departments just don't give a shit if they kill the people they're supposed to 'serve and protect'.
My experience was always after the fact, when things were shaping up for trial, but I saw a lot of police misconduct that was very intentional, very deliberate. I'm talking about things like lying to judges about what evidence is available to get search warrants without proper foundation level misconduct. I mean, yeah, I guess you can offer training courses in 'don't lie to judges about your evidence, even if you really, really want to catch this drug dealer', but somehow I doubt that you can cure that sort of rot by training, you need some kind of overhaul of the institutional culture.
This is before you talk about *some* cops having BB guns in their cars to plant on unarmed victims in the event of a bad shooting. Shit like that. "Drop weapons" they're called. This is also before you talk about a lot of internal affairs units being staffed with officers who couldn't find their own assholes if they were squatting over a mirror in the nude.
I've seen that, too (intentional police misconduct at the trial level) but you are contending with humans who want to get credit for their "busts" and advance their professional positions - this is entirely human nature and you can find it in every profession. Unfortunately. I don't know a way to "train" that out of someone unless morality and character is high on the professional expectations list. And let's face it, in this culture in this day and age, doing the right thing & knowing the consequences are probably not goin to be pretty for you is a high bar than many, many people fail to overcome. The Trump era and the "it's all about me" culture hasn't helped at all.
Just wait until you hear about this one in Houston from earlier this year. Cops mistake homeowner for burglar and shoot her when she approaches door armed. Very similar to what happened to Fortson but thankfully she lived:
Again, this is a police training problem, not a homeowner having guns problem. People want and have the right to own guns--literally via the constitution--to protect their families from criminals who are going to be armed regardless of what laws are passed. We shouldn't have to sacrifice our own safety and our family's safety and disarm just because the police can't figure out how to properly train their officers. A whole lot of mass shootings happen in "gun free zones." You think the criminals abide by the gun laws? They don't.
Yes, gun ownership is constitutional, but it’s not obligatory. You’re not less patriotic if you don’t have one. And, as in Jurassic Park’s recreation of dinosaurs, just because you can do a thing doesn’t mean you should.
If criminals are going to arm themselves then cops are always going to be worried about guns whether or not homeowners protecting themselves from criminals are armed or not. The criminals don't care about your Jurassic Park reference, and neither do the cops since the criminals don't care.
We have a culture where a law-abiding citizen feels compelled to open his door to a knock with a gun in hand. This inevitably creates an instant life-or-death split-second decision for the cop. Giving the armed stranger the benefit of the doubt may or may not cost the officer his/her life. That’s a very difficult decision to put any cop in.
1) The 2A gives us a Constitutional right to bear arms, and it’s not going away.
2) More and more guns don’t make us safer overall.
Yes, both of those things can be true, but the cops didn't seem to have any issue giving people like Rittenhaus or the Buffalo shooter the benefit of the doubt when they were responding to active shootings and came across white dudes armed with AR-15s who had just killed people. Why is it that a black dude with a pistol pointed at the ground in his own home needed to be shot immediately rather than be given the same opportunities that Kyle Rittenhaus and Payton Gendron were given? Like, if we're going to be cool with the cops shooting people whenever weapons are present, then can we at least have them shoot *everyone* whenever guns are present? Why the unequal treatment between encounters?
This is a no win situation primarily for the citizen. Especially an initiate citizen. There are COUNTLESS examples of legal/registered minority hun owners being killed by police while posing NO THREAT and exercising their Constitutional rights. It ain’t gonna get better. It’s gonna get worse.
Yup. Fortson could have answered the door with a cell phone in his hand and the cops probably would have been equally freaked out about "black dude with something metallic in his hand" and treated it much in the same way. You can't take the fear out of a cop's heart without training it out. That's the big difference between military and police training. The military does firearms training, yes, but they also focus on *eliminating fear* training via confidence-building exercises and a focus on the rules of engagement. The cops program fear into their recruits with videos of police being killed rather than trying to rid them of that fear. Two places that teach firearms instruction, two VERY different cultures around fear and tactics.
Great comment. The Daniel Shaver murder horrified me. That cop was so nasty, so condescending, so mixed in his commands that Shaver was doomed to die by rifle fire no matter what he did. That the state's attorney and police cleared Shaver was unpardonable. The Justice Department should have nailed Shaver on federal civil rights charges . . . but they did nothing either. Anyone who hasn't seen that video should search and watch. It will break your heart.
Kyle Rittenhouse wasn't treated incorrectly or correctly by law enforcement, nor did he have to surrender at the scene--Kenosha Police didn't arrive at that scene until long after shots were fired and Rittenhouse went home. Later on, he was treated correctly by the jury that returned the not guilty finding, because he hadn't done anything illegal.
The point with Rittenhaus is that he was armed with an AR-15 at the moment the police apprehended him in the streets *after* reports of shots fired. They didn't know at the time of apprehension whether or not it was a defensive shooting, they just knew there was a shooting and they came across an armed individual without the need to immediately kill him for some reason. It's a contrast comparison to what happened with Fortson where there were no reports of a shooting that had occurred and that he was openly armed in his own home rather than in the streets where a shooting had just taken place.
I don't believe police ever apprehended Rittenhouse, Travis. As I recalled, he tried to find cops to surrender to after the shootings, failed to find any, and finally gave up and returned home. He turned himself in the next morning.
"Video of the armed 17-year-old walking toward armored police vehicles and Moretti’s police cruiser without being stopped went viral and was held up by many as an example of white privilege and racial bias in policing."
"Moretti said Rittenhouse alternated between touching his weapon and raising his hands as he walked toward the squad car so they “weren’t quite sure” what Rittenhouse was doing. They yelled at him to “get out of the road” because he was blocking their way."
"When Rittenhouse wouldn’t move out of the way, Moretti said, he removed his own gun and his partner shot pepper spray at the teen."
Again, this dude was approached by police while armed with the AR-15 *after* reports of shots fired. They even drew their firearms and *OC'd* this kid rather than shooting him. The fact that he wasn't apprehended at the time of the encounter with police is *further* evidence of racial bias. If you're responding to an active shooting and come across a kid armed with an AR-15 who is not complying with orders then you should *at a minimum* zip-tie his ass and hold him as a potential suspect. Plenty of PC there. Teenagers do mass-shootings all the time nowadays.
Oh, OK, now I know what you're talking about, thanks for the link. We're both correct. Kenosha Police never apprehended him; they sprayed OC at him solely to get him out of the path of the squad car so they could respond to the "active shooter down the street." A lot of people white and black were carrying long guns that night and they weren't arrested either; as the cop explained, they didn't think he was the suspect because he wasn't acting in any way that murder suspects normally do while surrendering. So I don't think there was a racial motive.
That said, they knew there was an active shooter and here's a kid with a rifle jogging up to their patrol car, acting weird. I would have zip-tied him even if I didn't think him a suspect in a mass shooting, put his rifle in my trunk and him in the back seat, and proceeded to the scene. But that's just me.
Yea, that's the kind of response that would have made sense. Same with anyone else who was visibly armed at the time of response regardless of race, age, type of weapon, etc. Zip-tie immediately, then figure out the who dunnit part after.
Yes, that's how I remember it. I didn't see the officer in the car pepper-spraying him, though maybe since he backed away abruptly it missed him.
FWIT, were I those cops in that situation, if I saw a kid with a rifle walking up to me hands up and then touching his gun and coming straight for my window, I would have been out of the car, guns up, putting him on the ground just in case he meant business. They'd just gotten reports of a mass shooting and here's this kid jogging directly toward the patrol car? That's a million red flags for me.
There's a gun culture problem on both sides of the badge. Yes, we have gun culture problems in the civilian world--and that deserves its own convo on the side, but gun culture issues also exist within police departments as well. That assessment is coming from my military experience as a dude who had countless life-or-death scenarios in actual warzones between the ages of 19-21 against a foreign populace that had more rights via our rules of engagement than Americans have domestically via the rules of engagement that cops abide by. I wasn't allowed to blast a civvie just because I feared for my life when they had weapons--AK-47s in most instances--they were allowed to own in hand. I once had a section of an Iraqi army patrol in front of me come around the corner and the first thing that I saw was an RPG-7 poking around the corner. We had to have the interpreter yell at them in Arabic and tell them to never put the RPG-7 guy as their point man when turning a corner. Scared the absolute fuck out of us but we ID'd the "threat" before (not) firing and didn't start a Marine-on-Iraqi-Army gunfight because of it.
Wow, good story. Yeah, I can see bringing an extra pair of undershorts along. ;-)
"...but gun culture issues also exist within police departments as well." Question: are they different?
I mean, I can obviously see some differences in the details, but what I'm really wondering is if they derive from something different. Not obvious (to me) that they do. Cops are exposed to all the same Rambo crap the rest of us are exposed to.
To be sure, I get the training/professionalism/etc. angle here. And agree. However, per my comment elsewhere, I see gun culture permeating our (US) society. And, that includes cops.
It's kind of like Trump versus the political rot that led to his election/nomination in the first place. The guns are a problem, yes, but the American paranoia about safety is the disease that gives rise to the gun problem to begin with. The gun culture comes after that. You can trace that kind of gun culture all the way back to the revolution and frontier culture vis-a-vis colonists versus the Native American tribes in the Ohio river valley and westward. Back then the British and the founders wanted to limit territorial acquisition whereas frontiersman wanted expansion for the lucrative fur trade--even at the risk of the danger posed by the Native American tribes who definitely did *not* want the frontiersman encroaching further into their territories. And thus, American gun culture was born via frontierism and revolution against the monarchy. It only got worse from there.
I have to add a lot of context to this, JVL, because you're wrong about that last bit. We've known about this a LOT longer than 2016.
Here's a question for you: when were national gun laws first introduced, and why? The answer is that in the 1960s, the Black Panther party began to open carry firearms, which was entirely legal. This idea, that black men tired of being murdered by white people might then actually, you know, use their right to own guns, would then use them on white people. The threat of dangerous black men with guns is what spurred the first gun laws to come into effect.
The NRA however, does not talk about this. It does not talk about the fact that the first gun laws were put into place in order to stop black men from exercising their 2nd Amendment rights. You and I may disagree on what that right is, but if we assume the position that the NRA takes, that all Americans have the right to open carry a gun without any restriction, then logically they should take offense to this idea that gun laws were implemented to stop Americans from owning and carrying guns.
But they don't. Because we're talking about black people. And the NRA is a right wing, white American institution that doesn't so much believe that all people should be carrying guns, it believes that white men should be allowed to carry guns, and it believes that they should be allowed to use those guns on anyone who they don't like, which includes black people.
We cannot overstate the ways in which racism has permeated every part of our culture when we talk about things like guns and police. You don't have to be a really left wing hippie to know that law and order has always meant 'repressing black people.' Nixon's southern strategy was literally 'absorb racist democrats who were against the civil rights act.' His appeal to 'law and order' meant putting down unrest in cities. And police were and are the blunt implement that they use.
We can say #NotAllCops but it comes off the same way people go #NotAllMen which is a bit like saying #AllLivesMatter when we talk about BLM. The issue with policing and how it works is systemic. The issue comes from the fact that since at least Nixon, police have been trained and conditioned to view black and brown people as inherently more dangerous than anyone else, and this permeates every part of the culture.
In the 1980s there was a sudden rush of movies that basically all depicted the same thing, including movies like Mad Max and Death Wish. The trope is so worn that we barely notice it: 'dammit, you might break all the rules but you're a damn fine cop.' The message is: the system does not protect people, and you need people with guns to go and shoot people who are bad. You need a white man to go into black neighborhoods and shoot them, like Charles Bronson, because police using the system and the law are only helping criminals. You need a 'good guy with a gun.' And that 'good guy' needs to kill the 'right people' who are always brown and black and live in cities.
It doesn't matter that living in rural areas in modern America is almost more dangerous than living in modern cities; the image people have of cities is that they are violent hellholes where the worst scum and villainy live, and that is reinforced by white flight out of them. 'Good' people live in suburbs, untouched by crime. 'Bad' people live in cities. And it just so happens that those people are segregated, intentionally or not.
Furthermore, cops are trained with this ethos. They are trained not to be people whose job is to protect and serve, but as citizen soldiers who need to be prepared to put down insurgents. The flood of military weapons into police forces has accelerated this, but you can see it in police training videos. The internet has made a lot of fun out of 'surviving edged weapons' which has lots of over the top depictions of cops being stabbed, but the reality is that it's a real training video where cops are told that they should shoot first and ask questions later.
From this flows the idea that cops should be above the law. If they seize property they had a good reason. If they killed someone, they must have thought it was needed. They are held to a lesser standard because the idea is that their job is so dangerous that standards are only hinderances to keeping people safe. Which of course, is not something that you apply to any other person or industry. Imagine if we said to soldiers 'the rules of war are well and good, but you should absolutely torture and kill civilians if you think it's important to do so.'
The reality of the situation is that all of these things are interconnected. The NRA thinks that every white man needs guns because it understands that guns confer power. The American right 'backs the blue' in the face of BLM because it understands that the police are the best way to keep Black people in line. And these groups work together because they understand that if Black people used their second amendment rights in the way the NRA says they should be allowed to, that their project of white male empowerment would fall apart.
All of this has been true for decades. You simply didn't look at it like this. But it's been true. Rodney King in 1992 was beaten excessively by cops, on camera, and the jury acquitted them. The FBI was trying to undermine MLK because they actively opposed his ideas and his messages.
The reality of the situation is that you're learning these things JVL, because as you move further away from the protected class of white male conservatives, you interact more with the people on the other side of the fence. You experience what they do, consume the world the way they do, and increasingly, see the world the way they see it.
These things have always been true. They did not suddenly become apparent in 2016.
Let's also remember that the first public gun control laws were in California in response to the Panthers showing up at the State Capitol, and that noted Second Amendment fanboy Governor Sainted Ray Gun was the guy who promoted them and got them passed.
I once wrote a list of all the rotten things Reagan did to America, and was surprised at how long it was. And I forgot he was among the first to push gun bans on the public, beaten only by the Inquisitors in New York City and their Sullivan Act.
In many ways, the senior managers of the NRA are the plantation owners of the Old South, happily defending white use of guns on "bad guys" but falling deaf, dumb, and blind when non-whites do the same.
My thought when reading about Big Sky is that once autonomous humanoid robots are perfected, the oligarchy can acquire and achieve exclusive enjoyment of the West without the expense and unpleasantness of having to share the mountain air with those ungrateful lower classes.
There is a similar new resort in the Catskills in Windham. It advertised its “rarified air” as a selling point. After an outcry from the peasant class, the ad was pulled.
Something similar happened to me, with some obvious differences, most importantly that I am here telling you about it, but it is my specific actions the guaranteed I would be here.
Shortest possible version: I received a phone call from the local police, they said a number a from my house at called a Veteran's Help Line "Threating to kill everybody in the house and then myself." I said, nope, nothing like that going on here. My wife and I are just home watching TV. After some back and forth and guessing, the officer, "Well, could you come outside just so we can clear this up." Note: police get to lie and misrepresent to citizens all day, every day, citizens do enjoy the same privilege.
So, I step outside, and I realize (a bit late) the severity and danger of my situation. The road is blocked, a police office in cover has an assault rifle pointed directly at me from about 75 yards way; to my right, 3 officers are walking up to me. I immediately put my hands out of in front me, and I make no sudden movements. I exclaim, "Why does that cop have a gun on me." The lead officer from the right, "Don't worry about him, talk to me." Notice my immediate understanding of the situation, hands are in pockets, no aggressive moves, and we start to talk, with everybody remaining calm. Most importantly, I didn't come to the door or step outside with a firearm in my hand.
Now, it turns the guy 2 house to my south HAD made that call, and they figured out (after I told them, hey, I don't think I'm being swatted, but law enforcement has visited THAT house a couple of times). They took him into custody without incident.
I have a concealed carry permit, but I almost never carry. Any guesses as to why? It is far more dangerous to have that gun on my person than it is not have that gun on my person (IMO, I guess, I could probably back this up with stats, but this is just my feeling).
This is why maximalist/absolutist type opinions are always wrong, they don't account for the tensions between various views/right, the 2nd, 4th and 5th amendments are very much tension, especially as interpreted by our current courts and police.
Years ago, I got pulled over while driving a crappy little car with a broken manual window crank on the driver's door. I had improvised a handle with locking pliers, which worked not quite as well as a real handle, so opening the driver's window took a little longer, with a less natural motion.
As a law-abiding white person, I had no reflexive fear of a police encounter, so I didn't even fully process until it was over that he'd had his hand on his gun while he watched me open the window, and had taken a look down the inside of the car door when he got close enough.
He had been alert, wary of my weird fumbling, with my hands out of sight as he approached - but not afraid. I realized that, had I been black and done the same, it would easily have met the "reaching for object" standard that has justified more than a few police shootings of unarmed men.
I'm not so sure about this. There have been studies that show that on a *per-incident basis*, black people aren't actually more likely to be shot. This is consistent with the fact that black people are more likely to live in poor areas with higher crime, and thus more likely to come in contact with police than white people, which does a lot to explain why they are disproportionately shot by police.
Regardless, I think that the bigger factor in John's case is that he wasn't brandishing a weapon.
The sad reality of our nation's gun obsession can have a terrifying effect on the lives of children in schools, minorities under attack by Americans who otherize them, and the general safety of our society. As we approach another tumultuous election with a Republican-sponsored candidate who already tried violence once before, we must reflect on the recipe for disaster that is brewing in our midst. The proliferation of guns is a key ingredient. My grandfather was a WWII vet and was still pulled over by police too often for driving a nicer Buick. It is why the Double V campaign is so crucial and must not be written out of our history. American fascism is real and is experienced by Black Americans. Thus, the GOP's turn away from us during the Southern Strategy and its current flirtation with fascism is not as much of a surprise in our experience. Though its not all gun owners, many of whom like them for sport, guns are a major part of a culture war for people who feel they need them for protection against a multicultural society that they perceive will not favor them. Race baiting and playing on grievance shouldn't have become a mainstay for one of our major political parties but it did. Now an entire ecosystem from segregation academies to the eugenics wing of pro-lifers exist around Republican electoral politics, thus perverting the party that once lionized Lincoln and the Bull Moose (before he challenged it).
And, proliferation of guns is not a key ingredient in our murder rate with guns. Americans own an estimated five million guns and a trillion rounds of ammunition. Contrast that with 20,000 annual murders performed by guns. If proliferation was a key element, we'd all be dead. Other issues drive murder rates; the tool used is immaterial.
Almost all of this is wrong? And you’re conveniently ignoring research that’s shows access to firearms is associated with increased suicide risk. The tool is not immaterial, that’s why we have invented better tools for almost everything throughout our entire history. We can’t fix our problems with guns if we can’t even agree that they are dangerous and better tools for killing things than the alternatives.
I'm not ignoring anything, Michael, conveniently or otherwise. I'm simply choosing to not re-argue The Gun Wars for two reasons:
--The tremendous amount of nuance that discussion requires is way too much work for me to handle today.
--The issue is too emotional for logic and data to penetrate, so when I make my arguments I get called a "gun fetishist" and "ammosexual" who "likes to warm his cold hands over the bodies of shot-up babies." (All actual quotes.) I'll pass.
The logic here is really hard to follow. Because we aren’t all dead that means gun proliferation is neither positive or negative although countries that have stricter gun control have less death by guns.
I mean this logic can be used on literally anything. Why take vaccines or why try to police the border or police our communities. It’s not like people aren’t dying now.
Too much light switch logic here. Something (gun proliferation) can have a negative effect AND have a diminishing returns mechanism. The cause and effect need not be linear in nature.
Gun nuance on social media? I've done that, but it takes all day and neither of us have the energy to write and read such important minutiae :-)
Long story short, yes, gun proliferation creates social harm. But it also creates social positives and also a huge neutral core--i.e., literally 99.995 percent of guns owned by Americans have never been used to harm anyone. A sober society would weigh all three to find effective ways to reduce that 0.005 percent--20,000 annual gun homicides--by a reasonable amount. "Nobody should own guns so just ban them" is not one of those effective ways.
Agreed. Too bad we don't have a sober society. And for what it is worth, the recent going off the deep end by the right seems to have convinced way too many that the left doesn't have its share of inebriated thinking.
If you see the NRA as an organization meant to promote gun rights, you might think that they'd be concerned about Roger Fortson's death. That it would be the sort of thing that they would, at the very least, want to make as rare as possible, and even if they did 'support the police' - whatever that means when the police act badly - they'd want to make sure that the police didn't find themselves in this position and try to come up with ways to de-escalate the situation so that both gun owners and the police could be safer. If, however, you see the NRA as an organization meant to make it as easy to kill and intimidate liberals as possible, you'd expect them to be as completely fine with Roger Fortson's death as they were with Philando Castile's death, and you'd expect them to regard this as gun laws working exactly as intended - a black man is dead and the police officer who did it is exonerated, which is a win for them if they had these goals.
The second explanation for what the NRA is predicts their behavior far better than the first explanation. Under normal circumstances, that'd seem to indicate that it was true.
Occam's Razor would suggest it's just about money. They don't care about anybody's rights (neither 2nd Amendment nor civil) and they don't care about cops either. Damn depressing.
Multiple people, multiple motives getting served in a system that's evolved to serve gun manufacturers, the GOP, and a specific population segment.
Gun manufacturers get richer every time there's a big mass shooting. GOP pols get a reliable voting block. Delusional and insecure types get a sense of empowerment and community from handling dangerous weapons.
I was at a pool party when the Trayvon Martin decision was released and the camo hat wearing group there cheered. Whatever you think happened in that case, a kid died because some idiot with no authority decided to confront him. No one should be cheering.
I agree, I think it’s clear that certain voters are perfectly fine with violence directed at out groups, whether those groups are defined racially, politically, etc.
The NRA (full disclosure: I'm a firearms owner and I was a member before the *jack-booted Nazi* rhetoric started the better part of a lifetime ago) is not concerned about gunowners' rights or those gunowners' or the public's safety. The NRA is a shill for the gun industry pure and simple, run by a small cabal of greedy extremists whose only interest is themselves and the power and / or money that accrues to their positions. All the 2A crap is nothing but window dressing and an excuse for their continued existence.
I am as appalled and angered as anyone at the death of Roger Forston, and similarly at the release of Daniel Perry. Perry should have stayed in jail and the sheriff's deputy who shot that young Airman dead should be headed there. Bad policing doesn't even begin to cover the circumstances of Forston's death, and complete and unmitigated bad faith on the part of Gregg Abbot is the sole reason for Perry's release.
But as long as policing standards and training regarding the use of deadly force as basically an unrestricted first resort in any situation that might endanger an officer's safety remain the same, along with the apparent inability of police recruiters to screen out candidates psychologically and morally unsuited to the responsibilities of the job, the blood of unnecessary and unjustifiable killings will continue to flow unabated.
We as a country *should* be better than this. But sadly, I see no convincing evidence that we are. Or that we will be.
As a career prosecutor I have worked with hundreds of LEO's at all levels from game wardens to Federal (DEA, ATF, FBI) It is a sad reality that because of the incredible proliferation in private firearm ownership (over 400 million barrels vs 330 million people) and the increasingly lax concealed and open carry laws, cops are all trained to assume that EVERYONE they encounter is armed. Given that situation I don't think that is at all an unreasonable assumption to make. Wearing those god-awfully uncomfortable kevlar vests and carrying a gun and (often) a Taser all day only serves to remind them of that risk.
I am no in any way excusing the shooting of Mr. Fortson. It sounds like the LEO ignored the use-of-force and threat assessment training cops all go through. But our society has gotten extremely stupid about guns, gun ownership and use of guns and I think stupid incidents like this are only going to become more frequent.
As for the NRA's silence on both killings, I would strongly disagree that it may be the result of some sort of pressure from police unions. It is because the NRA-- and especially its leadership-- long ago became a lobbying arm of the firearms industry. Anything that might even hint of gun regulation, however mild, or criticism of gun ownership is bad for the gun industry and therefore bad for those who run the NRA. The NRA leadership sees its mission as promoting the purchase of firearms and ammo.
And it is also very much a culture wars issue. Guns are a tool. A potentially very dangerous tool, but still just a tool. Yet the NRA and the firearms industry have helped fetishize them, especially auto and semi-auto guns. Look at the US flags waved by the mob on Jan. 6 on which the silhouette of an AR-15 was superimposed.
That these murders are perversion of the Second Amendment is bad enough; that the murders were racist is worse; but what is worst still is the Governmental corruption and fraud that attended both of these murders. Florida says it is conducting an investigation which will make the Texas Ranger's investigation at Uvalde look honest. And Texans have been taught that you can "stand your ground " on a public street so long as you are trying to bust up a peaceful protest and only kill minorities in the process
Totally sick society that will fight for a right specifically as a check on state power which will then excuse away all excesses of that state power anytime it actually comes into conflict with that right.
Regarding: guns. Yep, it is another culture war issue filled with negative partisanship. Massive gun ownership, coal rolling, and other stuff have become tribal markers for rural white Trumpist America.
Not really, DBR. I'm a liberal who's owned guns all my life. Gun ownership is very across the board in America, not limited to the coal-roller yahoos in Trumplandia.
Ownership may be broad, but it's extremely clear whom the "marketing" is for. Ask yourself this: how many Democratic Congresscritters sent out Christmas cards with their families posing with an arsenal?
That Republicans use strange and creepy gimmicks like posing the family with guns is political marketing, not gun marketing. Nothing says "Merry Christmas" like Jesus with a Nine!
The politicians doing this understand their constituencies, their own "brands", and the world we live in. Having an intermediary step doesn't nullify the point.
It is 2017, but I don't think those who lean left have made up a more than two to one imbalance in seven short years.
Also, with regards to the culture aspect, my neighbor and I both own guns. He has more of them, wears clothing with firearms all over them, and has stated that if his house was on fire, they'd be the first thing he'd grab. I have a few, own no clothing using AR's to make up an American Flag, and would go for the photo albums, since State Farm won't be cutting me a check for their replacement.
I feel ya. You're me in Arizona, where I would save the photo albums and Charlie down the street would load the monster truck with Barretts and cases of BMG . . .
I'd never wear anything that whispered "gun." It only makes you stand out when criminals are trying to decide who to rob.
Also, polling has its limitations. Right-wingers are proud to brag about the guns to strangers who call asking nosy questions. Me, I'd hang up or lie . . . "oh, no, sir, I'd never own a gun. Why do you ask?" My liberal self believes it's nobody's business what I own or don't. That tends to skew polls to the right, methinks, so the Pew gun gap may be narrower than we think.
That said, I believe you're correct, knowtok; more righties than lefties own guns.
You bring up a good point, but I think there's a good chunk of the right that share's your view on not answering gun questions. My neighbor sees everything through the lens of a lefty government coming to take his guns. You'd think he wouldn't dress the way he does, but I can very much see him telling a pollster that he doesn't own guns too.
Interesting! I figure it's nobody's business unless I choose to tell them, and part of that is not wearing those dumbass "I Don't Call 911" shirts.
As for the lefties coming for my guns, I just laugh and carry on. Lefties can't organize a one-car funeral; they argue too much about the paint color, the route, and which cemetery has the lightest carbon footprint to actual get Poor Ol' Henry properly planted. Righties are too busy beating up women and The Queers, Jesus Save Them From a Burning Hell. This country will still be arguing about guns when all the steel melts from climate change.
I don't disagree at all, but from his perspective, the lefties are only about two short steps from Stalinist Soviet Union. To be somewhat fair, he doesn't think the right can't get to Nazi Germany, he just for some reason thinks it is down the block and around the corner.
With the Rittenhouse case and Abbott’s pardon from last week, I see an echo to Reconstruction era militias terrorizing formerly enslaved people with impunity.
Preservation of the power of an historically dominant group is what the NRA works to perpetuate.
One of the more infuriating and confounding aspects of incidents like Roger Fortson's shooting is how police insist that their "specialized training and experience" gives them unimpeachable credibility when enforcing the law, but when they f*ck up they say "hey, cops are only human" and get qualified immunity. It can't be both. As JVL points out...this deputy doesn't appear to have followed the most basic of procedures for this incident. But the police union will back him because the only thing a cop can do to get on the wrong side of a police union is to rat out another cop.
Excellent point.
Lots of folks are commenting below, suggesting the problem is really a police training problem (or similar). And, no doubt, that's a key. (As another commenter pointed out, police fatality rates are overblow - turns out cops aren't even in the top 10 of deadliest professions.)
But, here's the thing. As JVL points out "Our societal inability to make hard political choices has resulted in the worst of all worlds. And in the worst of all worlds, the game theory answer is that you should shoot first and deal with the possible legal fallout second."
This is the world we live in. Often left out of the gun debate is "gun culture". It's what's driving things. It's what's given us the worst of all worlds. There are lots of countries with high gun ownership rates, but they don't have nearly our firearms injury/death rates. How many Swiss gov't officials sent Christmas cards with their families posing with arsenals?
And, cops are not immune to this. So even if the hard data doesn't support them being trigger happy, gun culture does. With the emphasis on stand-your-ground laws thrown into the mix (and several court cases to back it up), it's no wonder people (including cops) shoot first and ask questions later.
I had not thought about what it must be like to be a LEO in gun culture. No excuses for police who are poorly trained, trigger happy, not accountable because of unions, or otherwise not doing the job. But to go to work every day knowing that you’re at risk of being in the line of fire of some idiot who yells “Second Amendment” as he shoots first…how do you create responsible police for that? Militarization of the police is inevitable when the Second Amendment creates war zones.
Exactly. A race to the bottom. Just what the NRA was hoping for.
Cops pull triggers because they're scared. What you call militarization of the police often amounts to gear to make them safer. Example: the armored cars, which people derivisvely refer to as tanks. Cops protected by those vehicle are less likely to panic and pull triggers.
I dont think this is it, Tom. Yes, the militarization of police is some of the gear. But also the mindset of us against them, warrior vs guardian, and that they are in a war zone. I dont think you'll find any evidence the armored cars make these cops less likely to panic — my guess is these cops are more likely to be aggressive, as they are protected and, well, in a tank.
Warrior Cop training
https://slate.com/news-and-politics/2020/08/warrior-cop-class-dave-grossman-killology.html
I agree. Yet let's us not forget that this type of behavior is not new. Police have been able to operate with impunity basically since founding..which was an outgrowth of the posses organized to find run away slaves and fugitives.
It speaks to the power of marketing that this history is forgotten and when folks think of police they think of the Rockwell painti ng
| when folks think of police they think of the Rockwell painting
Or the Keystone Cops. Or Shield these days.
Consider Uvalde, TX.
No municipality with fewer than 250,000 residents INSIDE CITY LIMITS, not in the metro area, should be allowed to have SWAT units or armored vehicles. Smaller cities and towns CAN'T AFFORD the training needed to make such units effective in true emergencies. Alternatively, REQUIRE a minimum annual aggregate training budget for such units which only departments with 500 or more sworn officers could afford.
The problem with Uvalde was that the least qualified cop around fell into being the incident commander, with predictable results. Where I live, the armored car is part of a mutual assistance arrangement involving multiple jurisdictions.
Since there are usually STATE police in most parts of most states, I'd prefer state police to run such units and keep and maintain all such equipment. Local police could be trained and certified to join such paramilitary units, but leadership would be at state police level where there's sufficient budget and (God help us!) sufficiently frequent need for paramilitary police to keep tactical skills fresh.
A town with 25K people just isn't able to man and equip a TRAINED paramilitary police unit. Sadly, Texans would never acknowledge that.
LOL. Which situation in recent memory have you seen where it’s necessary for a police department to respond in APCs.
If you were married to a cop, you would worry every day whether he (or she) is coming home that night alive or in a box.
You can't blame the average cop for the programming he/she has acquired from the culture they live in, which anger and fear justifies itself by the response it generates when it acts on duty.
| No excuses for police who are poorly trained
Or the voters who allow them to be so poorly trained because those voters aren't willing to pay for adequate training?
See the training section in https://www.cfr.org/backgrounder/how-police-compare-different-democracies .
A fine example of US policing: https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=R3rjEKFmHzw&ab_channel=CBSTEXAS
Explain that as anything other than being African-American == being a target.
And if that seems extreme, more mundane: https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=j8zK4__9QhM&ab_channel=ABC10News
Maybe I'm overreacting, but I figure the real problem with US policing is in the sergeants, lieutenants, captains and higher WHO DIDN'T GET CAUGHT earlier in their careers but are just as rotten apples as any patrol officers they've had to fire.
I always appreciate your perspective on some of these matters. You are one-thousand percent correct. There is a training and culture issue with the police, but the overall gun culture is the primary driver.
Thanks!
One of the things that's always struck me in the gun debate is (I'm generalizing, of course), the anti-gun side focuses on the guns. The pro-gun side focuses on "mental health" (or some such). Both manage to miss the root cause.
One has to wonder about the mental health of those who ascribe to a culture of gun lust.
But stand-your-ground would apply here to Mr. Fortson, not the policeman. In the end this appears, typically, to come down to skin color, whoever holds the gun.. Gov. Abbott is merely rubbing our faces in it, since he can, with impunity.
The problem, as I see it, is that it applies to everyone in such a situation. Racism may or may not have been a factor in the policeman's quick shooting. (Also worth bearing in mind: any such racism could be explicit or implicit.)
A separate problem is the law and its interpretation. The pattern I'm seeing is "whoever shoots first wins". It seems all that's required is for the shooter to mumble 'I feared for my life'.
Finally, while these are two separate issues, certainly the former can influence (and change the outcome of) the latter.
"I feared for my life" is permitted only to white people, particularly when a cop is being defended against. I submit this is the consequence of intentionally created racism.
It is undestandable that police fear the populace, given the now multi-decade multi-pronged campaigns to create and exacerbate racial animus and resentment, and implant ineradicable pre-cognitive subconscious associations in white minds of [minorities<==> crime<==>violence<==>existential menace]. Given the inevitable effect this program has had on the overall culture, it is even more understandable that the populace (the non-white populace) justly fear the police.
It is in the interest of those who drive this antagonism to maximize its emotional effect and suppress as much as possible of what Kahneman calls System II cognitive processing that could mitigate it. The goal does not differ in essence from the goals of the wannabe rulers in Yugoslavia after Tito's passing opened up paths of advancement the compromise post-war regime closed off. When people are at one another's throats, they can be readily led by the nose. At first.
This is not accidental, although of course these campaigns take on lives of their own; and their provocateurs generally don't set out to bring down their entire civilization, but merely to rearrange the parts to their benefit. In their folly, they always seem to imagine, as the otherwise forgettable Leroy Pope Walker famously said, that all the blood spilled will be manageably collected with a handkerchief or two.
And of course sometimes the instigators really are psychopathic monsters... Robespierres, Pol Pots, Stalins, Hitlers. But mostly they are just blinded by personal hubris. In Charlie Sykes' brilliant analogy, they breed little alligators... and fail to recognize the day the reptile has grown past the point of manageability. In their blindness and folly they keep feeding it... and come only far too late (if ever) to "oh my god what have I done".
You can't fix this with police training. Once the entire culture has been poisoned, its momentum and an energy generates its own fuel.
What is most disgusting about this is how petty and miserable the immediate objectives of the perpetrators really are. The NRA abandoned its gun safety mission and turned to preaching a cult of firearm worship ... because its leadership found doing so brought in a stream of boodle to spend on themselves... and the weapons industry wanted to goose up demand. The racism was just an instrumentality so that fearful white people would want ten guns where before they only owned two. And of course politicians found that the race terror helped them obtain political office and turn those offices from elective positions into de facto sinecures -- in which, once installed, they could aggrandize themselves with graft and privileges. Vide Duncan Hunter -- committing multiple felonies and what he got out of it were souvenirs from Disney world... and some adulterous ski trips.
At bottom one has to say it is pathetic and sadly stupid and small. It's not even dignifiable, as the John Goodman character says of National Socialism in the Big Lebowski, as a malign ideology. It's just fuck-dumb petty assholery and tiny minded greed. Which in the end results in a stupid war of all against all for no reason whatsovever.
Those of us fighting this may see ourselves as Horatii on the bridge, or doomed Leonidases holding a pass without hope against a magnificent foe; but what we really are up against is a horde of cheap three card monte tricksters and high-BMI split pants bullies whose highest aspirations reach to the level of looking up pornography on the internet.
It has been justly said that one may be judged by the measure of one's foes. In which case, big disappointment...
Good comment, thanks. Lots to unpack.
I'm fairly ignorant on Tito (just the basics), so I'll skip that bit.
Re: systemic racism, pretty much yep. Re: "pre-cognitive subconscious", I often think this aspect is overlooked. One of my phil profs had a term he liked: racialist. The idea of implicit, often inchoate racism. There are plenty of folks that, if asked directly, would claim they aren't racist. And, in most ways, they don't appear to be. Representative of a particular segment, "White resentment" is a phrase we've heard a bit recently. Anyhow, I agree with you, the point being the incident under discussion doesn't require loud-mouthed belligerent (stereotyped) racists.
"You can't fix this with police training." - agreed, yet you gotta start somewhere. And/or, try to tactically address the manifestations of the deeper issue where you can.
"It's just fuck-dumb petty assholery and tiny minded greed." - yeah, this is the sad, but big, take-away for me. ("what we really are up against is a horde of cheap three card monte tricksters and high-BMI split pants bullies whose highest aspirations reach to the level of looking up pornography on the internet" - ha, OK, 5 pts for that; very funny! You may not like this, but that struck me as something KDW at the Dispatch would write.) We often imagine Lex Luthor as our evil enemy, but instead it's someone like Trump.
Throw in the uphill asymmetry we face (it turns out "rape and pillage" is easier than nation building) and, well, here we are. On the flip side, I guess we should be happy and impressed that we've managed to create so much for the barbarians to destroy! ;-)
I am trying to understand and anticipate what a future Thucydides (my ideal ancient historian) would write of us and our age. I am not coming up with an encouraging narrative.
He was no democrat. I think today he would say “I told you so”.
No country come close to the gun ownership rate of the US. The US rate is more than 4 times that of Switzerland, and twice the second highest country. https://worldpopulationreview.com/country-rankings/gun-ownership-by-country
Yep. Gun culture at work.
Now go look at the death rates by firearms. Even more gun culture on display. (That was the point re: Switzerland.)
Also, the high per-capita ownership rate actually supports the "gun culture" idea in an odd way. While that number is 4 times higher than Switzerland, what's interesting is the number of households with guns. It's something like 2x. What this tells us is that people that own guns in the US own several guns.
I am not denying America's hideous gun culture. I am only disputing putting the US in the same category as Switzerland. Los of data charts here: https://www.kdnuggets.com/2012/12/new-poll-gun-violence-vs-gun-ownership.html
There is no comparison. Anywhere that isn't an actual war zone. America has a serious gun culture/gun lust problem.
Right now in America, there have been more mass shootings this year than there are days. This happens nowhere else.
Ah.
Well, I wasn't equating the US to Switzerland. Rather, using the Swiss as an example of a country with (relative to the world broadly) high gun ownership rates and yet a very low firearm casualty rate. That just happened to be the example that popped up. One could also look at Canada, for instance.
The point being that having a lot of guns doesn't necessarily lead to what we experience in the US. The guns may be a necessary, but not sufficient, condition.
Oh good grief. I never said you were equating the US and Switzerland. No country has "lots of guns" in any way that compares to the US. A better comparison might be the US when the NRA was a gun safety organization rather than a gun culture organization. There was a time when the NRA membership was almost completely hunters and sportsmen. These days the NRA is openly courting civilian right-wing political militia types.
| you should shoot first and deal with the possible legal fallout second.
Absolutely the most glaringly obvious rule for those living in the US today. Not just police. Consider Perry in Texas. Had his victim fired 1st, he may still be alive AND not in prison.
Welcome to the US, where everyone is hair-trigger. Woe to those who consider that metaphorical.
| There are lots of countries with high gun ownership rates, but they don't have
| nearly our firearms injury/death rates.
May need to consider the possibility that the US represents a unique combination of violent tendencies and adulation of ignorance. In simple terms, we're generally too stupid to realize how dangerous we are.
"In simple terms, we're generally too stupid to realize how dangerous we are." - heh, that's my general take on humans. Applied across the board.
"May need to consider the possibility that the US represents a unique combination..." - that could well be, but I'd still like to understand what it is and how it works. If we're ever going to address it, step 1: understand the problem. OK, maybe step 1 is admit you have a problem. :-)
Maybe applicable to all humans, but when it comes to imperiling each others' lives, it's NECESSARY to acknowledge true American exceptionalism.
As for understanding it, American children grow up steeped in the romantic heroism of the armed citizenry defeating the Hessians at Trenton and the Red Coats at Saratoga and Yorktown. [Tangent: too few know about Cowpens.] Then there's the Wild West (extending to WW1 thanks to Pershing's incursion into Mexico), the heroic Sgt York in WW1, then gangsters in the 1920s, and all of those cemented into the American psyche thanks to B movies from the 1930s on. We Americans REVERE the armed renegade ready, willing and eager to shoot others.
Correcting that would require bankrupting Hollywood. Good luck with that. To be clearer, there's BIG $$$$ in Americans being and remaining as violent as we are.
"Florida Sheriff's Deputy," just a continuation of the ignorant white trash redneck scum usually associated with "Southern Just Us." We have to get rid of the "warrior cop" in American policing. Kicking down doors at midnight in Baghdad has to stop being an "experience qualification."
The irony is that former soldiers who kicked down doors in Baghdad and are now cops all say how they had much clear, more humane rules of engagement, discipline and accountability than police in the US.
Oh really? What about Falluja?
Police are essential, but there is a lot of planned messaging that makes them superheroes rather than human beings who can fuck up and end a life. Or a person with severe biases or psychological deficiencies must be examined.
I come from a family of cops. My Dad, brother, several uncles all uniformed police. I get the need. It is just infuriating to know that, in all likelihood, the cop who killed this young airman will not suffer consequences.
There is a difference between backing a bogus story--not ratting out another cop--and the police union doing their job, part of which is to defend members accused of misconduct.
It seems to me that is what their only job.
Qualified immunity needs to go the way of Republicans conceding electoral defeats.
The issue with Fortson's murder isn't at all about guns--if you're not allowed to carry a gun *in your own damned home* then where *are* you able to carry them? The Foster/Perry situation *was* about guns and where/how we can carry them, but the Fortson killing was NOT about guns. It was about policing and how we train cops to be scared of guns being present *as part of their training*.
Every single academy class in every single department in the country is shown videos of cops being shot when doing routine traffic stops. Never mind that this is a fraction of a fraction of the 1% of traffic stops that happen, and that a good 99% of law enforcement officers will never have a traffic stop turn deadly at any point in their careers, the police trainers *still* pump fear into every single trainee that passes through every single academy class around the country with these videos. THAT is the reason that Fortson got killed for having a gun on him while in his own home. Because we refuse to tell police training departments to STOP pumping fear of an armed public into their trainees with these videos (AND the tactics that harp on the same fears). If we can't tone down the over-hyped fear in police training then we will inevitably see dozens of more Fortson-style killings in the next few years. If you want to see a really disturbing version of this dynamic, watch the body cam footage of the officer who killed Daniel Shaver in 2016. They literally had this unarmed (white) dude crawling on his stomach with his arms/hands extended at his sides while shouting contradictory commands and then executed him with an AR-15 while he was on his stomach when he didn't comply the way they liked (do not watch this video if you are at all squeamish).
Race still is absolutely part of the problem here as well. The racial side of this comes into play when you look at all the white mass shooters and people like Kyle Rittenhaus who are allowed to surrender while armed with AR-15s when cops are responding to *active shootings* while a black man answering a door of his own home while armed is immediately shot to death by a cop responding to a possible domestic disturbance call. White people who are armed and are actively killing people are allowed to surrender, black men who are simply armed and causing no visible harm are killed immediately (Philando Castile had the same thing happen to him). Ta'Kiya Young didn't even need to be armed, she only had to coast her vehicle in a confusing situation before a cop shot her and killed her and terminated her pregnancy (go watch THAT body cam footage is you wanna feel sick).
We refuse to address the training problem and we refuse to address the racial problem with police, and while police killings like this will inevitably continue in the face of our inability to address them, black people specifically will unfortunately bear the lion's share of the bloodshed in a disproportionate manner which is all kinds of fucked up. It's not about guns, it's about the cops and their shit-tier training folks.
The Daniel Shaver killing bodycam footage if you want to watch the most disturbing police murder I've seen (the part where Shaver is killed is edited out a second or so before his death):
https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=OflGwyWcft8
Body cams aren't fixing this issue--all of these officers are wearing body cams when they kill citizens in unjustified manners, only *training* will fix this kind of issue. Maybe trainees should be shown *this* video in every academy class.
That damn cop should have gotten thirty years. Instead, he got a pass.
WITH his full pension (or at least 75%) I believe as well.
Did he retire? I think so, I don't remember. What a horrendous shooting that was, the poor victim.
He was specifically rehired so that he could apply for and get his pension ($31k/year at the time):
https://www.bbc.com/news/world-us-canada-48969432
Whelp, now I'm pissed off again. Unbelievable.
Damn, like Joe below, that just pisses me off fresh. Thanks for the link
Can't say "like" but thx for the info.
You're welcome, sadly ...
What?!? I did not know that he got a pass. How? Why?!? That is seriously effed up.
Complete pass, and like the other commenter said, he was called back to duty solely so he could retire on a 75 percent medical pension from the PTSD he "suffered" from the "trauma" of the shooting. I think the man he humiliated and then murdered--I continue to believe it was murder--might have more PTSD . . . oh, wait. He's dead.
Welcome to America. There are few happy endings here.
Training is one step, the other is prosecution when the training standards are violated. An improved hiring process would help too, including at least basic screening for anti-social attitudes.
They already screen for anti-social attitudes via written and in-person psych evaluations. The problems happen *after* they've already hired people on via the culture of policing and the training. A lot of cops who do dirty shit are black themselves. Go look at the Baltimore gun trace task force that got rolled up in 2018. Most of those dudes weren't white.
Or the cop unit in Memphis that effectively was a street gang--a logo on cars, jackets ,etc.
Yup, another great example. I remember that one, but unlike Baltimore GTTF they didn't get their own mini-series haha.
I question how closely the screening is adhered to when a department is severely understaffed and confronted with politically 'out of control' crime rates. Being an a****** isn't a racial thing, you're right about that, and the increasing militarization of police departments isn't progress in a good direction.
They rejected me from the NYPD on a psych basis even after I passed the written MMPI exams. The only thing that was even remotely bad in my psych interview was that I had drank underage while in the Marines and the shrink pressed me on things like giving into peer pressure when it came up (I self-reported it during application). I didn't give any kind of aggressive response, but later received a DQ letter in the mail on the basis of psych disqual with no other explination. I went back into the military after that because my excellent FDNY score/application was tossed because courts had deemed the '07 entrance exam I took to be "racist." My take away from that whole experience was that we care more about racist exams than we do racist cops, and the cops specifically don't want veterans with x3 combat tours with proven shoot/no-shoot decision-making skills because unproven people with lower levels of training are better so long as they don't have a documented underaged drinking incident in their past. Looking back now, I'm glad they rejected me because I wouldn't want to serve in departments with those kinds of standards.
Rejection because of underage drinking?!? I'm in my late 30s and can attest to the reality that damn near EVERYBODY I know, drank before hitting 21 y/o. Those standards are so ridiculous that its basically incentivizing lying.
That's quite a story Travis, and I don't blame you for not wanting to be part of that crew.
What the hell? I will google that story, but that is so distressing. The police officer was off his rocker. He is a sad sack loser that probably got an erection while being a sadist.
Wait until you find out about that officer getting rehired so that he could apply for and get his pension.
I just read the Wikipedia account and discovered the shouter was another officer, not Brailsford. But hey....it's Maricopa County.
I've seen the full body cam footage before YouTube pulled the graphic ones, and you will not hear *any* off those officers say to the officer who shot Shaver "What the fuck did you just do??? What the fuck were you thinking???!!!" They were all pretty okay with how that scenario played itself out. If they weren't, you would have heard it on the audio from the body cam footage.
IIRC Shaver was an exterminator. The "weapon" the police were responding to was an air rifle or pistol.
I've seen the Shaver video, or parts of it, before. It's one of the most bullshit things ever. They're literally screaming contradictory commands at him and then shoot him when he doesn't defy the laws of physics. How can the training be so bad? You're point about the instilling of fear in their training rings true though because in many of these bodycam videos you'd think the cop just saw an actual monster or something the way they're screaming and hyperventilating.
The pro "everyone should have multiple guns" crowd also doesn't seem to notice that cops are increasingly fearful of being "out-gunned". Look at Uvalde where a whole herd of Leo's just milled around for an hour because one untrained gangly teenager had an AR-15 and was thought to have body armor when it was really just an empty plate carrier vest (I think)...
They didn't seem to be fearful about being out-gunned in Kenosha or Buffalo. They gave both of those shooters the ability to surrender even while armed with AR-15s and having just shot people.
True, I suppose it depends a lot on the department/individuals involved. Plus Uvalde seems to have also been a case of really bad leadership breakdown and communication and coordination issues.
Edit: It also occurs to me now that those two shooters you picked were unique cases and also happened to be white and I assume surrendering to police (this might have been your point but it might have gone over my head. I need more coffee).
The first cop through the door at the Bolder supermarket shooting didn't have an issue confronting a mass shooter armed with an AR. He was survived by his wife and four daughters.
That's true bravery by that officer, no doubt. I'm just saying maybe it would make police less fearful (and potentially less deadly for them and others) if they didn't have to contend with perps firing AR-15s. (with regularity)
That cat is already out of the bag and it's too late. There are so many ARs in circulation that it's going to be impossible to get them out of circulation without risking a whole lot of Waco/Ruby Ridge-style incidents. Besides that, the gangs are always going to have AR/AK-style rifles so cops will continue to have to contend with that threat whether or not law-abiding citizens disarm en masse anyway. The time to do something about this was in 2004 when the national AWB was sunsetting and we had a chance to do a long-term ban. Guess which party largely tanked that vote? Now we're here.
ALL police departments are bad, just to varying degrees. I got caught up in the LAPD'S first police riot at Century City in June 1967, In the years since, there have been six new Chiefs, all promising "reform." There have been commissions on the latest outrage, declarations of more "reform," and the latest LAPD police riot was 5 years ago. Not to mention all the "bad shootings" of otherwise-innocent people. The Department was founded in 1869 to keep the Messkinz down, and that's been their job ever since. And it's the reason for the founding of every other department - keep them "pesky ones" down, whoever they are that are a problem to the local ruling class.
That situation infuriates me. Hundreds of officers outside while children are on 911 calls screaming for help...every last one of those cops should have been fired.
Very well written and well thought out. But I do have a dark thought and partial rebuttal. Your point only holds together if you believe as an institution police want to act well, and are shooting people in situations they should not be firing because of lack of training and discipline. I sometimes wonder if that's really the case, and that if some police departments just don't give a shit if they kill the people they're supposed to 'serve and protect'.
My experience was always after the fact, when things were shaping up for trial, but I saw a lot of police misconduct that was very intentional, very deliberate. I'm talking about things like lying to judges about what evidence is available to get search warrants without proper foundation level misconduct. I mean, yeah, I guess you can offer training courses in 'don't lie to judges about your evidence, even if you really, really want to catch this drug dealer', but somehow I doubt that you can cure that sort of rot by training, you need some kind of overhaul of the institutional culture.
This is before you talk about *some* cops having BB guns in their cars to plant on unarmed victims in the event of a bad shooting. Shit like that. "Drop weapons" they're called. This is also before you talk about a lot of internal affairs units being staffed with officers who couldn't find their own assholes if they were squatting over a mirror in the nude.
I've seen that, too (intentional police misconduct at the trial level) but you are contending with humans who want to get credit for their "busts" and advance their professional positions - this is entirely human nature and you can find it in every profession. Unfortunately. I don't know a way to "train" that out of someone unless morality and character is high on the professional expectations list. And let's face it, in this culture in this day and age, doing the right thing & knowing the consequences are probably not goin to be pretty for you is a high bar than many, many people fail to overcome. The Trump era and the "it's all about me" culture hasn't helped at all.
I'm reminded of the cop in Dallas that killed the black guy in his apartment because she thought it was hers. That police training is amazing.
Just wait until you hear about this one in Houston from earlier this year. Cops mistake homeowner for burglar and shoot her when she approaches door armed. Very similar to what happened to Fortson but thankfully she lived:
https://abcnews.go.com/US/dramatic-body-camera-video-released-officers-shooting-woman/story?id=107171359
The settlements need to be for much more if they are going to act as deterrent.
And the more home ownership of guns is encouraged, the more often this kind of thing is going to happen.
Again, this is a police training problem, not a homeowner having guns problem. People want and have the right to own guns--literally via the constitution--to protect their families from criminals who are going to be armed regardless of what laws are passed. We shouldn't have to sacrifice our own safety and our family's safety and disarm just because the police can't figure out how to properly train their officers. A whole lot of mass shootings happen in "gun free zones." You think the criminals abide by the gun laws? They don't.
Yes, gun ownership is constitutional, but it’s not obligatory. You’re not less patriotic if you don’t have one. And, as in Jurassic Park’s recreation of dinosaurs, just because you can do a thing doesn’t mean you should.
If criminals are going to arm themselves then cops are always going to be worried about guns whether or not homeowners protecting themselves from criminals are armed or not. The criminals don't care about your Jurassic Park reference, and neither do the cops since the criminals don't care.
We have a culture where a law-abiding citizen feels compelled to open his door to a knock with a gun in hand. This inevitably creates an instant life-or-death split-second decision for the cop. Giving the armed stranger the benefit of the doubt may or may not cost the officer his/her life. That’s a very difficult decision to put any cop in.
1) The 2A gives us a Constitutional right to bear arms, and it’s not going away.
2) More and more guns don’t make us safer overall.
Both of these things can be true. Agree?
Yes, both of those things can be true, but the cops didn't seem to have any issue giving people like Rittenhaus or the Buffalo shooter the benefit of the doubt when they were responding to active shootings and came across white dudes armed with AR-15s who had just killed people. Why is it that a black dude with a pistol pointed at the ground in his own home needed to be shot immediately rather than be given the same opportunities that Kyle Rittenhaus and Payton Gendron were given? Like, if we're going to be cool with the cops shooting people whenever weapons are present, then can we at least have them shoot *everyone* whenever guns are present? Why the unequal treatment between encounters?
This is a no win situation primarily for the citizen. Especially an initiate citizen. There are COUNTLESS examples of legal/registered minority hun owners being killed by police while posing NO THREAT and exercising their Constitutional rights. It ain’t gonna get better. It’s gonna get worse.
Fortson could have been shot without having a visible gun, too. This is about bad police, bad police training, and racism.
Yup. Fortson could have answered the door with a cell phone in his hand and the cops probably would have been equally freaked out about "black dude with something metallic in his hand" and treated it much in the same way. You can't take the fear out of a cop's heart without training it out. That's the big difference between military and police training. The military does firearms training, yes, but they also focus on *eliminating fear* training via confidence-building exercises and a focus on the rules of engagement. The cops program fear into their recruits with videos of police being killed rather than trying to rid them of that fear. Two places that teach firearms instruction, two VERY different cultures around fear and tactics.
Great comment. The Daniel Shaver murder horrified me. That cop was so nasty, so condescending, so mixed in his commands that Shaver was doomed to die by rifle fire no matter what he did. That the state's attorney and police cleared Shaver was unpardonable. The Justice Department should have nailed Shaver on federal civil rights charges . . . but they did nothing either. Anyone who hasn't seen that video should search and watch. It will break your heart.
Kyle Rittenhouse wasn't treated incorrectly or correctly by law enforcement, nor did he have to surrender at the scene--Kenosha Police didn't arrive at that scene until long after shots were fired and Rittenhouse went home. Later on, he was treated correctly by the jury that returned the not guilty finding, because he hadn't done anything illegal.
The point with Rittenhaus is that he was armed with an AR-15 at the moment the police apprehended him in the streets *after* reports of shots fired. They didn't know at the time of apprehension whether or not it was a defensive shooting, they just knew there was a shooting and they came across an armed individual without the need to immediately kill him for some reason. It's a contrast comparison to what happened with Fortson where there were no reports of a shooting that had occurred and that he was openly armed in his own home rather than in the streets where a shooting had just taken place.
I don't believe police ever apprehended Rittenhouse, Travis. As I recalled, he tried to find cops to surrender to after the shootings, failed to find any, and finally gave up and returned home. He turned himself in the next morning.
"Video of the armed 17-year-old walking toward armored police vehicles and Moretti’s police cruiser without being stopped went viral and was held up by many as an example of white privilege and racial bias in policing."
"Moretti said Rittenhouse alternated between touching his weapon and raising his hands as he walked toward the squad car so they “weren’t quite sure” what Rittenhouse was doing. They yelled at him to “get out of the road” because he was blocking their way."
"When Rittenhouse wouldn’t move out of the way, Moretti said, he removed his own gun and his partner shot pepper spray at the teen."
Again, this dude was approached by police while armed with the AR-15 *after* reports of shots fired. They even drew their firearms and *OC'd* this kid rather than shooting him. The fact that he wasn't apprehended at the time of the encounter with police is *further* evidence of racial bias. If you're responding to an active shooting and come across a kid armed with an AR-15 who is not complying with orders then you should *at a minimum* zip-tie his ass and hold him as a potential suspect. Plenty of PC there. Teenagers do mass-shootings all the time nowadays.
https://www.police1.com/legal/articles/kenosha-cops-explain-why-they-didnt-immediately-arrest-rittenhouse-fqgjTjwtFwad6mSp/
Oh, OK, now I know what you're talking about, thanks for the link. We're both correct. Kenosha Police never apprehended him; they sprayed OC at him solely to get him out of the path of the squad car so they could respond to the "active shooter down the street." A lot of people white and black were carrying long guns that night and they weren't arrested either; as the cop explained, they didn't think he was the suspect because he wasn't acting in any way that murder suspects normally do while surrendering. So I don't think there was a racial motive.
That said, they knew there was an active shooter and here's a kid with a rifle jogging up to their patrol car, acting weird. I would have zip-tied him even if I didn't think him a suspect in a mass shooting, put his rifle in my trunk and him in the back seat, and proceeded to the scene. But that's just me.
Yea, that's the kind of response that would have made sense. Same with anyone else who was visibly armed at the time of response regardless of race, age, type of weapon, etc. Zip-tie immediately, then figure out the who dunnit part after.
If you want to actually see it:
https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=4stvfHLIgAQ
Yes, that's how I remember it. I didn't see the officer in the car pepper-spraying him, though maybe since he backed away abruptly it missed him.
FWIT, were I those cops in that situation, if I saw a kid with a rifle walking up to me hands up and then touching his gun and coming straight for my window, I would have been out of the car, guns up, putting him on the ground just in case he meant business. They'd just gotten reports of a mass shooting and here's this kid jogging directly toward the patrol car? That's a million red flags for me.
But nobody asked me that night!
It may not be a "gun problem", per se, but it's certainly a "gun culture problem".
Totally agree on the training aspect, but that's not the root cause.
There's a gun culture problem on both sides of the badge. Yes, we have gun culture problems in the civilian world--and that deserves its own convo on the side, but gun culture issues also exist within police departments as well. That assessment is coming from my military experience as a dude who had countless life-or-death scenarios in actual warzones between the ages of 19-21 against a foreign populace that had more rights via our rules of engagement than Americans have domestically via the rules of engagement that cops abide by. I wasn't allowed to blast a civvie just because I feared for my life when they had weapons--AK-47s in most instances--they were allowed to own in hand. I once had a section of an Iraqi army patrol in front of me come around the corner and the first thing that I saw was an RPG-7 poking around the corner. We had to have the interpreter yell at them in Arabic and tell them to never put the RPG-7 guy as their point man when turning a corner. Scared the absolute fuck out of us but we ID'd the "threat" before (not) firing and didn't start a Marine-on-Iraqi-Army gunfight because of it.
Wow, good story. Yeah, I can see bringing an extra pair of undershorts along. ;-)
"...but gun culture issues also exist within police departments as well." Question: are they different?
I mean, I can obviously see some differences in the details, but what I'm really wondering is if they derive from something different. Not obvious (to me) that they do. Cops are exposed to all the same Rambo crap the rest of us are exposed to.
To be sure, I get the training/professionalism/etc. angle here. And agree. However, per my comment elsewhere, I see gun culture permeating our (US) society. And, that includes cops.
It's kind of like Trump versus the political rot that led to his election/nomination in the first place. The guns are a problem, yes, but the American paranoia about safety is the disease that gives rise to the gun problem to begin with. The gun culture comes after that. You can trace that kind of gun culture all the way back to the revolution and frontier culture vis-a-vis colonists versus the Native American tribes in the Ohio river valley and westward. Back then the British and the founders wanted to limit territorial acquisition whereas frontiersman wanted expansion for the lucrative fur trade--even at the risk of the danger posed by the Native American tribes who definitely did *not* want the frontiersman encroaching further into their territories. And thus, American gun culture was born via frontierism and revolution against the monarchy. It only got worse from there.
Well said. Thank you. Heartbreaking and so disturbing.
I have to add a lot of context to this, JVL, because you're wrong about that last bit. We've known about this a LOT longer than 2016.
Here's a question for you: when were national gun laws first introduced, and why? The answer is that in the 1960s, the Black Panther party began to open carry firearms, which was entirely legal. This idea, that black men tired of being murdered by white people might then actually, you know, use their right to own guns, would then use them on white people. The threat of dangerous black men with guns is what spurred the first gun laws to come into effect.
The NRA however, does not talk about this. It does not talk about the fact that the first gun laws were put into place in order to stop black men from exercising their 2nd Amendment rights. You and I may disagree on what that right is, but if we assume the position that the NRA takes, that all Americans have the right to open carry a gun without any restriction, then logically they should take offense to this idea that gun laws were implemented to stop Americans from owning and carrying guns.
But they don't. Because we're talking about black people. And the NRA is a right wing, white American institution that doesn't so much believe that all people should be carrying guns, it believes that white men should be allowed to carry guns, and it believes that they should be allowed to use those guns on anyone who they don't like, which includes black people.
We cannot overstate the ways in which racism has permeated every part of our culture when we talk about things like guns and police. You don't have to be a really left wing hippie to know that law and order has always meant 'repressing black people.' Nixon's southern strategy was literally 'absorb racist democrats who were against the civil rights act.' His appeal to 'law and order' meant putting down unrest in cities. And police were and are the blunt implement that they use.
We can say #NotAllCops but it comes off the same way people go #NotAllMen which is a bit like saying #AllLivesMatter when we talk about BLM. The issue with policing and how it works is systemic. The issue comes from the fact that since at least Nixon, police have been trained and conditioned to view black and brown people as inherently more dangerous than anyone else, and this permeates every part of the culture.
In the 1980s there was a sudden rush of movies that basically all depicted the same thing, including movies like Mad Max and Death Wish. The trope is so worn that we barely notice it: 'dammit, you might break all the rules but you're a damn fine cop.' The message is: the system does not protect people, and you need people with guns to go and shoot people who are bad. You need a white man to go into black neighborhoods and shoot them, like Charles Bronson, because police using the system and the law are only helping criminals. You need a 'good guy with a gun.' And that 'good guy' needs to kill the 'right people' who are always brown and black and live in cities.
It doesn't matter that living in rural areas in modern America is almost more dangerous than living in modern cities; the image people have of cities is that they are violent hellholes where the worst scum and villainy live, and that is reinforced by white flight out of them. 'Good' people live in suburbs, untouched by crime. 'Bad' people live in cities. And it just so happens that those people are segregated, intentionally or not.
Furthermore, cops are trained with this ethos. They are trained not to be people whose job is to protect and serve, but as citizen soldiers who need to be prepared to put down insurgents. The flood of military weapons into police forces has accelerated this, but you can see it in police training videos. The internet has made a lot of fun out of 'surviving edged weapons' which has lots of over the top depictions of cops being stabbed, but the reality is that it's a real training video where cops are told that they should shoot first and ask questions later.
From this flows the idea that cops should be above the law. If they seize property they had a good reason. If they killed someone, they must have thought it was needed. They are held to a lesser standard because the idea is that their job is so dangerous that standards are only hinderances to keeping people safe. Which of course, is not something that you apply to any other person or industry. Imagine if we said to soldiers 'the rules of war are well and good, but you should absolutely torture and kill civilians if you think it's important to do so.'
The reality of the situation is that all of these things are interconnected. The NRA thinks that every white man needs guns because it understands that guns confer power. The American right 'backs the blue' in the face of BLM because it understands that the police are the best way to keep Black people in line. And these groups work together because they understand that if Black people used their second amendment rights in the way the NRA says they should be allowed to, that their project of white male empowerment would fall apart.
All of this has been true for decades. You simply didn't look at it like this. But it's been true. Rodney King in 1992 was beaten excessively by cops, on camera, and the jury acquitted them. The FBI was trying to undermine MLK because they actively opposed his ideas and his messages.
The reality of the situation is that you're learning these things JVL, because as you move further away from the protected class of white male conservatives, you interact more with the people on the other side of the fence. You experience what they do, consume the world the way they do, and increasingly, see the world the way they see it.
These things have always been true. They did not suddenly become apparent in 2016.
Let's also remember that the first public gun control laws were in California in response to the Panthers showing up at the State Capitol, and that noted Second Amendment fanboy Governor Sainted Ray Gun was the guy who promoted them and got them passed.
I once wrote a list of all the rotten things Reagan did to America, and was surprised at how long it was. And I forgot he was among the first to push gun bans on the public, beaten only by the Inquisitors in New York City and their Sullivan Act.
A brilliant analysis, thank you.
In many ways, the senior managers of the NRA are the plantation owners of the Old South, happily defending white use of guns on "bad guys" but falling deaf, dumb, and blind when non-whites do the same.
My thought when reading about Big Sky is that once autonomous humanoid robots are perfected, the oligarchy can acquire and achieve exclusive enjoyment of the West without the expense and unpleasantness of having to share the mountain air with those ungrateful lower classes.
Exactly.
Which will make it kind of okay when the robots rise up.
Count me in!
Will they rise up in revulsion over what they have done to the rest of us first?
Hoi polloi might rise up first.
Isn't this kind of the plot to Westworld? XD
I started to make that comment but saw yours first.
There is a similar new resort in the Catskills in Windham. It advertised its “rarified air” as a selling point. After an outcry from the peasant class, the ad was pulled.
Something similar happened to me, with some obvious differences, most importantly that I am here telling you about it, but it is my specific actions the guaranteed I would be here.
Shortest possible version: I received a phone call from the local police, they said a number a from my house at called a Veteran's Help Line "Threating to kill everybody in the house and then myself." I said, nope, nothing like that going on here. My wife and I are just home watching TV. After some back and forth and guessing, the officer, "Well, could you come outside just so we can clear this up." Note: police get to lie and misrepresent to citizens all day, every day, citizens do enjoy the same privilege.
So, I step outside, and I realize (a bit late) the severity and danger of my situation. The road is blocked, a police office in cover has an assault rifle pointed directly at me from about 75 yards way; to my right, 3 officers are walking up to me. I immediately put my hands out of in front me, and I make no sudden movements. I exclaim, "Why does that cop have a gun on me." The lead officer from the right, "Don't worry about him, talk to me." Notice my immediate understanding of the situation, hands are in pockets, no aggressive moves, and we start to talk, with everybody remaining calm. Most importantly, I didn't come to the door or step outside with a firearm in my hand.
Now, it turns the guy 2 house to my south HAD made that call, and they figured out (after I told them, hey, I don't think I'm being swatted, but law enforcement has visited THAT house a couple of times). They took him into custody without incident.
I have a concealed carry permit, but I almost never carry. Any guesses as to why? It is far more dangerous to have that gun on my person than it is not have that gun on my person (IMO, I guess, I could probably back this up with stats, but this is just my feeling).
This is why maximalist/absolutist type opinions are always wrong, they don't account for the tensions between various views/right, the 2nd, 4th and 5th amendments are very much tension, especially as interpreted by our current courts and police.
You did all the right things. And, judging from your profile photo, you are white, dramatically decreasing the police's urge to shoot on sight.
Hey, white privilege is totes real...
Years ago, I got pulled over while driving a crappy little car with a broken manual window crank on the driver's door. I had improvised a handle with locking pliers, which worked not quite as well as a real handle, so opening the driver's window took a little longer, with a less natural motion.
As a law-abiding white person, I had no reflexive fear of a police encounter, so I didn't even fully process until it was over that he'd had his hand on his gun while he watched me open the window, and had taken a look down the inside of the car door when he got close enough.
He had been alert, wary of my weird fumbling, with my hands out of sight as he approached - but not afraid. I realized that, had I been black and done the same, it would easily have met the "reaching for object" standard that has justified more than a few police shootings of unarmed men.
I'm not so sure about this. There have been studies that show that on a *per-incident basis*, black people aren't actually more likely to be shot. This is consistent with the fact that black people are more likely to live in poor areas with higher crime, and thus more likely to come in contact with police than white people, which does a lot to explain why they are disproportionately shot by police.
Regardless, I think that the bigger factor in John's case is that he wasn't brandishing a weapon.
The sad reality of our nation's gun obsession can have a terrifying effect on the lives of children in schools, minorities under attack by Americans who otherize them, and the general safety of our society. As we approach another tumultuous election with a Republican-sponsored candidate who already tried violence once before, we must reflect on the recipe for disaster that is brewing in our midst. The proliferation of guns is a key ingredient. My grandfather was a WWII vet and was still pulled over by police too often for driving a nicer Buick. It is why the Double V campaign is so crucial and must not be written out of our history. American fascism is real and is experienced by Black Americans. Thus, the GOP's turn away from us during the Southern Strategy and its current flirtation with fascism is not as much of a surprise in our experience. Though its not all gun owners, many of whom like them for sport, guns are a major part of a culture war for people who feel they need them for protection against a multicultural society that they perceive will not favor them. Race baiting and playing on grievance shouldn't have become a mainstay for one of our major political parties but it did. Now an entire ecosystem from segregation academies to the eugenics wing of pro-lifers exist around Republican electoral politics, thus perverting the party that once lionized Lincoln and the Bull Moose (before he challenged it).
What is the Double V campaign, may I ask?
And, proliferation of guns is not a key ingredient in our murder rate with guns. Americans own an estimated five million guns and a trillion rounds of ammunition. Contrast that with 20,000 annual murders performed by guns. If proliferation was a key element, we'd all be dead. Other issues drive murder rates; the tool used is immaterial.
Almost all of this is wrong? And you’re conveniently ignoring research that’s shows access to firearms is associated with increased suicide risk. The tool is not immaterial, that’s why we have invented better tools for almost everything throughout our entire history. We can’t fix our problems with guns if we can’t even agree that they are dangerous and better tools for killing things than the alternatives.
I'm not ignoring anything, Michael, conveniently or otherwise. I'm simply choosing to not re-argue The Gun Wars for two reasons:
--The tremendous amount of nuance that discussion requires is way too much work for me to handle today.
--The issue is too emotional for logic and data to penetrate, so when I make my arguments I get called a "gun fetishist" and "ammosexual" who "likes to warm his cold hands over the bodies of shot-up babies." (All actual quotes.) I'll pass.
Huh? Look at countries that have gun control. The murder rate of the US is closer Somalia than it is to the eu and Asia
My point remains, Migs: if proliferation of guns caused gun murders, we would all literally be dead. We are not.
We aren't all dead, but we certainly have a much higher death rate from firearms than other first world countries with stricter gun laws.
The logic here is really hard to follow. Because we aren’t all dead that means gun proliferation is neither positive or negative although countries that have stricter gun control have less death by guns.
I mean this logic can be used on literally anything. Why take vaccines or why try to police the border or police our communities. It’s not like people aren’t dying now.
Too much light switch logic here. Something (gun proliferation) can have a negative effect AND have a diminishing returns mechanism. The cause and effect need not be linear in nature.
Gun nuance on social media? I've done that, but it takes all day and neither of us have the energy to write and read such important minutiae :-)
Long story short, yes, gun proliferation creates social harm. But it also creates social positives and also a huge neutral core--i.e., literally 99.995 percent of guns owned by Americans have never been used to harm anyone. A sober society would weigh all three to find effective ways to reduce that 0.005 percent--20,000 annual gun homicides--by a reasonable amount. "Nobody should own guns so just ban them" is not one of those effective ways.
Agreed. Too bad we don't have a sober society. And for what it is worth, the recent going off the deep end by the right seems to have convinced way too many that the left doesn't have its share of inebriated thinking.
Come on man. This isn’t a serious argument when we know via data where guns used in crimes are purchased.
Both parties were armed. Is this the polite society we were promised?
Good guy with a gun kills good guy with a gun. That’s where we are.
"Of course, we’ve known all of this since the killing of Philando Castile in 2016."
We have known it for a lot longer than that JV, a lot longer.
The NRA knows what side they're on.
If you see the NRA as an organization meant to promote gun rights, you might think that they'd be concerned about Roger Fortson's death. That it would be the sort of thing that they would, at the very least, want to make as rare as possible, and even if they did 'support the police' - whatever that means when the police act badly - they'd want to make sure that the police didn't find themselves in this position and try to come up with ways to de-escalate the situation so that both gun owners and the police could be safer. If, however, you see the NRA as an organization meant to make it as easy to kill and intimidate liberals as possible, you'd expect them to be as completely fine with Roger Fortson's death as they were with Philando Castile's death, and you'd expect them to regard this as gun laws working exactly as intended - a black man is dead and the police officer who did it is exonerated, which is a win for them if they had these goals.
The second explanation for what the NRA is predicts their behavior far better than the first explanation. Under normal circumstances, that'd seem to indicate that it was true.
Occam's Razor would suggest it's just about money. They don't care about anybody's rights (neither 2nd Amendment nor civil) and they don't care about cops either. Damn depressing.
Multiple people, multiple motives getting served in a system that's evolved to serve gun manufacturers, the GOP, and a specific population segment.
Gun manufacturers get richer every time there's a big mass shooting. GOP pols get a reliable voting block. Delusional and insecure types get a sense of empowerment and community from handling dangerous weapons.
I'm more inclined to think that they are just the lobbying arm of the gun industry as well as a bunch of grifters lining their own pockets from it.
Exactly.
I was at a pool party when the Trayvon Martin decision was released and the camo hat wearing group there cheered. Whatever you think happened in that case, a kid died because some idiot with no authority decided to confront him. No one should be cheering.
On the contrary. If their goal was to intimidate and terrorize black people, especially young black males, then they should be cheering. And they did.
I simply propose that we acknowledge that's what they're doing.
I agree, I think it’s clear that certain voters are perfectly fine with violence directed at out groups, whether those groups are defined racially, politically, etc.
if...
The NRA (full disclosure: I'm a firearms owner and I was a member before the *jack-booted Nazi* rhetoric started the better part of a lifetime ago) is not concerned about gunowners' rights or those gunowners' or the public's safety. The NRA is a shill for the gun industry pure and simple, run by a small cabal of greedy extremists whose only interest is themselves and the power and / or money that accrues to their positions. All the 2A crap is nothing but window dressing and an excuse for their continued existence.
I am as appalled and angered as anyone at the death of Roger Forston, and similarly at the release of Daniel Perry. Perry should have stayed in jail and the sheriff's deputy who shot that young Airman dead should be headed there. Bad policing doesn't even begin to cover the circumstances of Forston's death, and complete and unmitigated bad faith on the part of Gregg Abbot is the sole reason for Perry's release.
But as long as policing standards and training regarding the use of deadly force as basically an unrestricted first resort in any situation that might endanger an officer's safety remain the same, along with the apparent inability of police recruiters to screen out candidates psychologically and morally unsuited to the responsibilities of the job, the blood of unnecessary and unjustifiable killings will continue to flow unabated.
We as a country *should* be better than this. But sadly, I see no convincing evidence that we are. Or that we will be.
As a career prosecutor I have worked with hundreds of LEO's at all levels from game wardens to Federal (DEA, ATF, FBI) It is a sad reality that because of the incredible proliferation in private firearm ownership (over 400 million barrels vs 330 million people) and the increasingly lax concealed and open carry laws, cops are all trained to assume that EVERYONE they encounter is armed. Given that situation I don't think that is at all an unreasonable assumption to make. Wearing those god-awfully uncomfortable kevlar vests and carrying a gun and (often) a Taser all day only serves to remind them of that risk.
I am no in any way excusing the shooting of Mr. Fortson. It sounds like the LEO ignored the use-of-force and threat assessment training cops all go through. But our society has gotten extremely stupid about guns, gun ownership and use of guns and I think stupid incidents like this are only going to become more frequent.
As for the NRA's silence on both killings, I would strongly disagree that it may be the result of some sort of pressure from police unions. It is because the NRA-- and especially its leadership-- long ago became a lobbying arm of the firearms industry. Anything that might even hint of gun regulation, however mild, or criticism of gun ownership is bad for the gun industry and therefore bad for those who run the NRA. The NRA leadership sees its mission as promoting the purchase of firearms and ammo.
And it is also very much a culture wars issue. Guns are a tool. A potentially very dangerous tool, but still just a tool. Yet the NRA and the firearms industry have helped fetishize them, especially auto and semi-auto guns. Look at the US flags waved by the mob on Jan. 6 on which the silhouette of an AR-15 was superimposed.
That these murders are perversion of the Second Amendment is bad enough; that the murders were racist is worse; but what is worst still is the Governmental corruption and fraud that attended both of these murders. Florida says it is conducting an investigation which will make the Texas Ranger's investigation at Uvalde look honest. And Texans have been taught that you can "stand your ground " on a public street so long as you are trying to bust up a peaceful protest and only kill minorities in the process
Florida investigates Florida, finds Florida did nothing wrong and everything right. Also Florida deserves a raise.
Thank you for #1 and #2, excellent even by your elevated standards
Totally sick society that will fight for a right specifically as a check on state power which will then excuse away all excesses of that state power anytime it actually comes into conflict with that right.
+100000 this.
“We must have firearms so that we can defend ourselves against government tyranny!”
[an actual government agent kills a person exercising their 2nd Amendment rights]
“Meh, nothing to see here, move along.”
Regarding: guns. Yep, it is another culture war issue filled with negative partisanship. Massive gun ownership, coal rolling, and other stuff have become tribal markers for rural white Trumpist America.
Not really, DBR. I'm a liberal who's owned guns all my life. Gun ownership is very across the board in America, not limited to the coal-roller yahoos in Trumplandia.
Yes, but also no.
Ownership may be broad, but it's extremely clear whom the "marketing" is for. Ask yourself this: how many Democratic Congresscritters sent out Christmas cards with their families posing with an arsenal?
That Republicans use strange and creepy gimmicks like posing the family with guns is political marketing, not gun marketing. Nothing says "Merry Christmas" like Jesus with a Nine!
Well, yes, it's political marketing...using guns.
The politicians doing this understand their constituencies, their own "brands", and the world we live in. Having an intermediary step doesn't nullify the point.
https://www.pewresearch.org/social-trends/2017/06/22/the-demographics-of-gun-ownership/
It is 2017, but I don't think those who lean left have made up a more than two to one imbalance in seven short years.
Also, with regards to the culture aspect, my neighbor and I both own guns. He has more of them, wears clothing with firearms all over them, and has stated that if his house was on fire, they'd be the first thing he'd grab. I have a few, own no clothing using AR's to make up an American Flag, and would go for the photo albums, since State Farm won't be cutting me a check for their replacement.
I feel ya. You're me in Arizona, where I would save the photo albums and Charlie down the street would load the monster truck with Barretts and cases of BMG . . .
I'd never wear anything that whispered "gun." It only makes you stand out when criminals are trying to decide who to rob.
Also, polling has its limitations. Right-wingers are proud to brag about the guns to strangers who call asking nosy questions. Me, I'd hang up or lie . . . "oh, no, sir, I'd never own a gun. Why do you ask?" My liberal self believes it's nobody's business what I own or don't. That tends to skew polls to the right, methinks, so the Pew gun gap may be narrower than we think.
That said, I believe you're correct, knowtok; more righties than lefties own guns.
You bring up a good point, but I think there's a good chunk of the right that share's your view on not answering gun questions. My neighbor sees everything through the lens of a lefty government coming to take his guns. You'd think he wouldn't dress the way he does, but I can very much see him telling a pollster that he doesn't own guns too.
Interesting! I figure it's nobody's business unless I choose to tell them, and part of that is not wearing those dumbass "I Don't Call 911" shirts.
As for the lefties coming for my guns, I just laugh and carry on. Lefties can't organize a one-car funeral; they argue too much about the paint color, the route, and which cemetery has the lightest carbon footprint to actual get Poor Ol' Henry properly planted. Righties are too busy beating up women and The Queers, Jesus Save Them From a Burning Hell. This country will still be arguing about guns when all the steel melts from climate change.
Always a pleasure talking with you here, k.
I don't disagree at all, but from his perspective, the lefties are only about two short steps from Stalinist Soviet Union. To be somewhat fair, he doesn't think the right can't get to Nazi Germany, he just for some reason thinks it is down the block and around the corner.
With the Rittenhouse case and Abbott’s pardon from last week, I see an echo to Reconstruction era militias terrorizing formerly enslaved people with impunity.
Preservation of the power of an historically dominant group is what the NRA works to perpetuate.