Posted on 12/17/2014 12:32:00 AM PST by 2ndDivisionVet
In the wake of a New York grand jury deciding not to indict police officer Daniel Pantaleo for the chokehold death of Eric Garner, racially diverse protests instantly erupted across the nation.
White faces could be seen in swelling crowds from NYC and D.C., to Chicago, Boston, Philadelphia, Detroit and Denver. Their mouths covered with masking tape with the words "I can't breathe" scrawled over it. The righteousness of racial solidarity burning in their eyes as they joined in chanting, "Black lives matter! Black lives matter! Black lives matter!"
This is not to say that there were not White allies protesting over the Aug. 9 shooting death of 18-year-old Michael Brown. They were there shutting down the St. Louis Symphony with a haunting "Requiem for Mike Brown." They were there disrupting a St. Louis Rams football game back in October.
There were even scattered throughout the crowd during the fiery protests that ensued after a grand jury declined to indict former Ferguson, Missouri, police officer Darren Wilson in Brown's death. Allowing Wilson, who had just killed a teenager, to leave the scene, go wash Brown's blood off of his hands and place his own gun into evidence is almost farcical -- something one would expect from Shonda Rhimes' How To Get Away With Murder, not the streets of America....
(Excerpt) Read more at huffingtonpost.com ...
I guess a thief who robs a store and fights with a cop should be allowed to just get away (while telling the cop he is too much of a p.... to shoot him)?
May I assume you live nowhere near any “Michael Browns”?
The witnesses alone cleared the cop; do you find fault with their testimony?
White privilege, white supremacy......this stuff is getting really old.
Time for the whitewash.
Wax on... wax off. Wax on... wax off.
All I’m trying to say is that the presence of a gun has both positive and negative effects.
For the Left a gun is always Bad.
For many on the Right it appears a gun is always Good.
Seems to me, like almost everything else in life, guns have both Good and Bad effects. The question is not whether both exist, it’s whether the Good outweighs the Bad.
Which a gun in the hands of a law-abiding and properly trained citizen or cop usually does. But that doesn’t mean the Bad vanishes, that sometimes the Bad outweighs the Good in a particular situation, or that the presence of a gun doesn’t drastically alter the ways a confrontation might play out.
My comment on the HuffPo thread:
Michael Brown WAS a thug. What else do you call a man who uses his giant size against a tiny shop owner in a strong arm robbery? What else do you call a strong-arm thief who walks down the middle of a busy road with his stolen cigars, stolen to be used for to make big spliffs, since regular rolling papers are just too small? A strong-arm robber who, when asked to get out of the street, attacks a cop and fights for his gun? Michael Brown was a THUG. Got it? A THUG. I don’t care if he was white, yellow or green. His actions made him a THUG.
Don’t feed the trolls. You just make them grin.
Is everybody on this thread reading comprehension challenged?
All I said is that statements that Wilson “had no choice” but to shoot Brown are quite simply untrue.
He had a whole bunch of choices. Quite possibly he made the right one. As I specifically said, I’m not saying he made the wrong choice, only that he DID have other options.
We will never know whether both Brown and Wilson would have survived had he made one of those other choices. Perhaps today Wilson would be dead and Brown in prison on a capital murder charge. And nobody would have heard of either, outside of St. Louis.
Where to begin with the BS in this article?
“That belief exempts them from examining a system that privileges Whiteness over Blackness.”
- There is no such thing as white privilege, only functional cultures and dysfunctional ones. Blacks mistake the benefits earned by accomplishment for privilege. Purposely embracing a dysfunctional culture leads to poor outcomes, you have only yourselves to blame.
- There was NO CHOKEHOLD DEATH. The “choke” put on Eric Garner was applied for a few seconds and is NOT what killed him according to the M.E. The particular “choke” applied was also NOT banned. Please get your facts straight black people. Living in a fantasy world of victimhood is part of the dysfunctional culture mentioned above.
“Let’s be clear: It does not matter if Mike Brown smoked weed. His life mattered. It doesn’t matter if he listened to gangsta rap. His life mattered. It does not matter that he was suspected of stealing cigarillos. His life mattered.”
- It mattered up until he tried to murder a cop. Dysfunctional cultures dont accept that actions have consequences and therefore dont learn responsibility.
Bottom line, making all this fuss about a thug like Brown only validates the stereotypes many people have about blacks and reinforces their negative opinions.
If you use a taser and miss you’ve then got to dump the taser to draw your pistol and you may not have enough time. If I didn’t have backup I wouldn’t risk playing with a taser.
Officer Wilson had no Taser with him.
When the thug attacked him in his car, his nightstick was at his back, and he'd have had to use the hand with which he was struggling with the thug to get at it. As well, in quarters that close, I'm not sure the nightstick would have been effective.
In any case, the thug had already reached for the weapon, evidence of which is when the officer fired the first shot at Brown, the thug actually got powder on his hands from the discharge. The grand jury report indicated that the thug's hands were no more than a few inches from the barrel of the gun.
Once outside, the thug insisted on coming at the officer, even after he was already shot. By this point, the thug had already bashed the officer upside the head a couple of times, had already tried to take his gun, was already known to be a dangerous aggressor, no longer deserving of any benefit of the doubt.
This isn't a case where a cop was so risk-averse that he wound up killing an innocent person who had perhaps made some sort of ambiguous movement, or possibly not even that.
This was a case of defending against someone who had already inflicted physical harm on the officer, and had shown the capacity to further harm, or even kill the officer, should they come to blows again.
The exclamation mark on all this is that the thug kept moving toward the officer even after being shot and wounded, refusing to surrender. The absolute last place the officer wanted to be - or was morally required to be - was within the reach of the thug for another physical altercation.
“But I am going to object to claims that Wilson had no choice, because they are objectively inaccurate.”
Certainly. He could have sacrificed his life for the thug's life. He could have had another fight with the thug, endangering his own life, long after it had been established that the thug was bent on killing him.
But the only reasonable choice was to keep shooting until the thug ceased advancing on him.
Cops shouldn't be so ready to shoot possibly-innocent folks in ambiguous circumstances. The "well, at least the cop got home safely" attitude is terrible. But cops aren't required to commit possible suicide against known perps who have already engaged them violently.
sitetest
I realize Wilson had no Taser.
That’s because he chose not to carry one because it was awkward and uncomfortable. Which I’m sure it was.
In the Zimmerman case, the evidence suggests that the perp wasn't aware of the presence of the gun until quite late in the altercation, long past the point where he'd begun to beat Zimmerman senseless, long after the point where Zimmerman's life was in serious jeopardy. The evidence is that the perp STOPPED beating Zimmerman, STOPPED beating Zimmerman's head into the concrete curb, once he figured out that Zimmerman had a weapon, and started to struggle for the weapon.
If not for the presence of the firearm, it is most probable that George Zimmerman would have been cold-bloodedly murdered by the perp via blunt force trauma. It is the presence of the firearm that evened the odds sufficiently so that Zimmerman could escape death.
As to the hint that the cop shouldn't have had a weapon, I can scarcely even countenance it. The presence of the weapon isn't what caused the altercation to become deadly. It is the presence of a determined, drugged-up thug that caused the altercation to become deadly. The presence of the weapon just ensured that the correct person wound up dead.
sitetest
All true. But it also matters that he punched and tried to wrestle a gun away from a police officer and then charged at him in a threatening manner. That's why he's dead.
Perfectly good reason not to carry it, then. As others have pointed out, Tasers are far from universally-effective, and frankly, if the Taser is bulky and difficult to deploy, the decision to forgo it (a decision made BEFORE the encounter with the thug) may be the right one.
If the circumstances had been different, if the situation had been more controlled, if backup had already arrived, and the thug's escape pretty much cut off by a deployment of armed officers, the use of the Taser might have been a good idea, as, failing that on the part of one or more officers, others could have then shot the bugger dead.
But once the thug aggressed against the officer, the officer was duty-bound to do his best to prevent the thug's escape back into the community, and thus gave chase. Unless you'd prefer a headline like: “Thug Escapes And Murders Innocents Because Cowardly Cop Doesn't Give Chase.” The thug was an immediate danger, not just to himself, but to the entire community. He'd already proven that in the convenience store BEFORE his encounter with the officer.
This is a case where the cop actually did the right thing - giving chase - at some risk to his own safety, but in protection of the rest of the public at large.
The only reasonable choice was to plug the thug.
sitetest
Why didn’t Brown make the choice to not rob the shopkeeper? Why didn’t Brown make the choice to not walk in the middle of a street, to avoid coming to the attention of Officer Wilson? Why didn’t Brown make the choice to not attack Officer Wilson in his vehicle? Why didn’t Brown make the choice to keep running away from Officer Wilson, after failing to acquire Officer Wilson’s firearm, instead of turning and charging him?
He had a whole bunch of choices. He DID have other options that would not have resulted in his death, or the possibility of the death of Officer Wilson.
“Unfortunately, there are those White people who consider themselves advocates for social justice who don’t recognize the grave injustice of Mike Brown’s death, yet cry over the killing of Eric Garner. And those White people don’t get. They don’t get that there is no separation. The extrajudicial killing of unarmed Black people is never acceptable and being a perfect victim should not be the price of the ticket.”
Black people dont get that:
- There IS a difference between the extrajudicial death of a violent thug in the process of attempting murder and the accidental death of a petty non-violent criminal.
- That the death of Brown was self defense and was PERFECTLY ACCEPTABLE except to race crazed fanatics.
- The death of Brown was justice, NOT injustice.
- Brown’s death was brought about by his own actions, not his race. If Brown was white he would still be dead.
“If you use a taser and miss you’ve then got to dump the taser to draw your pistol and you may not have enough time. If I didn’t have backup I wouldn’t risk playing with a taser.”
The police use the taser as a compliance tool, not a self defense weapon.
Race relations will never improve as long as these race agitators continue to blame whites for the criminal failings of the black culture.
Mike Brown’s life does NOT matter. How do I know that? Because his life obviously did not matter to himself, as he routinely (check his record) did things that put his life in jeopardy. If he didn’t care about his own life, I certainly don’t.
But I do value the lives of a businessman who was violently robbed, & a cop who was defending himself in the course of doing his job.
The lives of violent thugs don’t matter one whit to me, just as they don’t care about their victims. If I were king of this country I would execute the thugs in droves, & sleep well in knowing that there will be far fewer victims of their predatory acts.
To me, violent criminals are no better than ISIS, the Taleban, al-Qaeda, or Nazis - they are our sworn enemies. They all deserve the same swift, deadly response to their evil.
And, if you sympathize with our enemies, then you are our enemy, too. If you condone evil acts, then you are evil, too. The rioters, looters, & violent protesters have made that clear.
In what possible moral system is this wrong? No one is obligated to risk serious bodily harm from an attacker if they can stop it.
Attack someone, and be prepared to accept whatever consequences ensue, including your own imminent demise.
Was it Heinlein that said, "An armed society is a polite society"?
Then again, some people don't get out much and believe that nearly all of history began when they were born.
And for those who really don't know the past, here is what Edgar G. Robinson (Warner Bros. actor) looked like, the above dog was NOT a caricature of a black man.
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