Posted on 02/17/2017 9:51:26 AM PST by PROCON
The No More Black Targets campaign argues that shooting ranges and instructors should not use “menacing” black targets, and is petitioning to end the practice, citing trigger bias.
“Young black men are 3X more likely to be shot by trained shooters than their white peers,” notes the site for the campaign. “A disturbing potential correlation: The most popular target for shooters to learn to use their firearm is a black silhouette. Unconscious bias can be deadly.”
A Change.org petition by the group intends to call upon the International Association of Law Enforcement Firearms Instructors to end the use of black silhouette targets.
The group references a study by University of Illinois researchers that concluded shooters were more likely to fire at a black target.
One of the researhers in that study, Yara Mekawi, told National Public Radio in 2015 that people were “quicker to shoot black targets with a gun relative to white targets with a gun. And…people were more trigger-happy when shooting black targets compared to shooting white targets.”
It is not the first proposal of its kind. In 2015 a lawmaker sought to ban the use of human silhouette targets in Pennsylvania for all but law enforcement use, arguing they perpetuate violence.
The No More Black Targets petiton had 18 signatures as of Feb. 17.
The group has also created a number of alternative designs rather than the traditional dark silhouette through an art collective.
LOL, I remember that cartoon!
Lol
Is the true though? Are blacks really 3 times more likely to be shot than whites, by “trained shooters”?
There’s a lot that goes into a statistic like that, not the least being the definition of “trained shooter”.
For example, we would presume that all police are “trained shooters”, but we know that police to NOT shoot blacks at 3 times the rate of whites.
We know that 77% of whites who are killed by guns are suicides. I bet we have no idea how many of them were “trained shooters”. Doubt we should count them.
We know that a large number of blacks are shot by blacks, often gang violence. Are the black shooters “trained”? Do they go to ranges? Does it count as training if you have been shooting people for years?
BTW, white men are much more likely to be shot than black women or white women. So maybe we should pass a law that the human targets be female rather than male.
Oh, imagine the outrage if a shooting range did THAT.
Our rural (private) range has pistol berms oriented so that anyone driving by on the county road can see the targets if they look hard...
We actually had someone call the county sheriff and complain that we were “shooting at pictures of black people”...Sheriff sent a deputy out to see what was going on...”Pictures” were actually regulation silhouette targets much like those the sheriffs department uses for qualification...
The deputy face-palmed and just shook his head...The stupid abound...
Just remember that although “shooting bias” is real..there is not bias created by violent music or video games...lol
Hows about you try to figure out why the 18-24 black male demographic is hell bent on killing each other rather than inanimate pieces of paper? Ignorant asses. White people aren’t killing you, you’re killing each other, guys so figure it out and leave the pschosocial bullshit to the ivory tower crowd.
CC
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