They Paid the Price
Michael Brown
Walter Scott
Freddie Gray
Tamir Rice
Philandro Castile
Dylan Noble
And hundreds more like them. Here's a link to the hundred or so known unarmed blacks killed by police in this country last year.
Five Dallas Policemen, innocent of any crimes, have paid with their lives, so that the perpetrators of the above murders could escape without punishment, or with symbolic sentences which make a mockery of human decency and the rule of law.
42 police were killed in the line of duty last year; well over 1,000 civilians were killed by police, with unarmed blacks being victimized at a rate five times that of unarmed whites.
If you do not understand how, in this nation of three hundred million people, this is inevitably going to drive someone over the bend, someone whom our government has carefully taught to kill, you are a soulless fool. And if you think that this sort of thing has nothing to do with the fact that there are more guns than people in this country, you are in deep denial.
Deliberately creating an armed, enraged populace, and then licensing the police, in response, to shoot whichever sort of person they choose (you know what I mean) is a recipe for disaster. And one party allowing its number one representative to stoke the violence and hatred every single day is unbelievably reprehensible.
Have no fear- the right wing haters, sooner or later, are going to get what they deserve. The problem is that the rest of us are going to get it too.
Comments
And that was by design.
The RNC is coming up and it seems reasonable to postulate that something might, I say MIGHT, happen as an exclamation mark for Right wing insanity.
Recently I happened to be reading a novel set against the backdrop of the FBI focus on black activist groups in the 60s, during the period Hoover still ran it as a personal fiefdom with which to pursue his own idea of what was or wasn’t good for the country. That’s long ago now, but curled up in bed with this book, trying to forget about work, it felt oddly resonant.
All due caveats and respect to the fact that the FBI certainly does worthwhile activity against legitimate targets as well, I’d just like to know what they are doing amid this present pile of accelerant-doused political kindling.
And yes it comes back to gun culture.
Yes it does, yes it does.
It started with a man who routinely carried a gun for self-defence (an obscenely counter-intuitive notion in much of the rest of the civilised world), who happens to get shot by a cop in panic (I’d be less than comfortable too being a cop if every person I pulled over for a faulty car part might be armed), thereby setting a train of reaction that leads to 5 innocent cops getting murdered while they are protecting their fellow citizens, of all colours.
THIS is how carrying a gun makes you safer? Oh what? you need it in case the government becomes a tyranny? because it’s secretly run by Satanist lizard people or the NWO or whatever, and having your gun will – somehow - protect you from Apache attack ‘copters and Delta Force? When all they’d have to do is turn off your electricity and water.
What does it take to make people understand? More guns is more death. And no the Jews were not murdered by the Nazis because they didn’t try hard enough to defend themselves with guns. That particular insinuation-as-rationalisation for gun ownership is particularly common, puerile and really pisses me off. The notion, from wherever it originates, that you need to carry a gun in your daily life of working, going to the supermarket, picking up the kids, going to the game... is not something shared by most people in other parts of the world with comparable standards of living. That is a fucked up way to live.