Airman was in a Special Ops squadron, if I read the article right.
Fun fact, for every one person who graduates special ops training in the air force, something like 20 others fail and go on to do other jobs in the air force.
Even if he never saw action, he went through hell and back just in training. Just so he could be murdered in his own home by a florida cop.
Fortson was assigned to the 4th Special Operations Squadron as a special missions aviator, where one of his roles as a member of the squadron’s AC-130J Ghostrider aircrew was to load the gunship’s 30mm and 105mm cannons during missions.
He was aircrew, not one of the operators that go through the Selection Pipeline.
I’m a prior Special Operations Airman myself. Worked on a different version of the C-130 as a radio operator. It’s still almost a year of additional training after BMT and usually involves a stint at a general aviation school, then technical training for your specific role on the aircraft, then specific training on your assigned airframe, then a SERE school (survival, evasion, resistance, escape…basically how to not get caught after you’re shot down and how to handle being a POW if you are caught), then a bunch more training at your first unit. Still a pretty intense first year of service. What a fucking waste.
I believe he was on a video call with a woman, and her account is that someone knocked, didn’t respond when he asked who was there, and they hid themselves from the peep hole.
Then the police started pounding, still without announcing themselves, so he went and armed himself BECAUSE HE’S ABOUT HAVE HIS HOME INVADED.
Next thing, cops kick in door, see him, kill him, and blame him for making them murder him.
That version of events was in a different article covering this from a different Lemmy thread, not sure which one. Here’s another one that appears to align with those additional details:
The article below says the video shows them announcing themselves, and then he opened the door with a gun in his hand. Not trying to excuse anyone but I think that could convince a judge that the officer feared for their safety.
Also idk about you, but my first instinct when someone is banging on the door, my last line of defense, is definitely not to open it up and say hi. OR let anyone know that I’m inside either way.
He was killed by the police. Media uses passive voice like a mother fucker, because gods forbid we put in black and white that the police killed someone instead of “so and so was shot and died”.
He was in his apartment. There was a call to the police about an argument in the building. The officer went to an apartment that is said the be the wrong one, banged on the door and shouted to open up. Fortston answered the door with a piston in his hand, pointing at the floor. The officer shot him.
According to the media, Forston was on the phone with his girlfriend for a while by the time the police were called. It seems to me that, as far as the officer was aware, the only “crime” that occured was “an argument”, and it sounds like the officer also had the wrong apartment. Unless I can view the bodycam footage it’s hard to be certain but this definitely sounds like he was killed because he was black and had a gun.
Yes, researchers have stopped saying they kill for fun because it gives the wrong impression to people who can’t understand that words can have multiple meanings and connotations. However when an animal is not killing for food, or defense, or practice, or any other definable reason, “fun” would be an acceptable label. They do not have to shout HELL YEAH BROTHER and put on sunglasses while doing it to call it that. Would you be more comfortable calling it “killing for the hell of it”?
Again, the article you linked suggests that they typically overkill, which is to say they kill more than they need. Like a person putting too much food on their plate. Not for fun.
“Eyes bigger than their stomach” is not the only reason bears will kill more than they can eat. Bears have been recorded killing a fuckload of prey without consuming any of it, in a manner that was not fully explained by adaptive foraging models (academic.oup.com/beheco/article/30/1/202/5142956?…). If they don’t touch it, cache it, or come back for it later they didn’t kill for food; it’s prey, so they’re not killing in self-defense. Additionally, straight-up surplus killing like that was noted as a feature of some individual bears’ predation style. Or put another way, it was noted in “SOME bears”. Which happens to be the exact qualifier I used.
So again: if you don’t want to use “fun” as a synonym for “no practical reason”, give me an alternative word, but quit incorrecting me.
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