i want to add - if you need to arm yourself but for some reason cannot have a gun, there are non-lethal weapons and guns out there. not perfect, but definitely better than going completely unarmed. if you are able to workout, that helps too. if you’re unarmed and a fast runner or a good fighter, that again is better than nothing at all.
this is exactly the situation. if everyone gets guns to protect from other guns then every thing turns into a gun battle and we all end up blind. and dead.
well if all it takes for that not to happen is the homophobes to treat the lgbtq+ community with some respect, for whatever reason, than maybe homophobes should show the lgbtq+ community some respect and leave them alone.
Except most of them are cowards who want easy targets. These fascist LARPers don’t want an epic shootout where they’d be even slightly at risk.
Though I admit that will become less true as current trends escalate. So it’s not a solution, more of a shitty workaround for a conflict that seems unsolvable and unavoidable.
I mean people used to be armed all the time and there wasn’t a daily massacre.
people like saying this, what could possibly go wrong? but really, what could really go wrong?
this kkk dude would have be dead for pulling a gun in front of an armed group, maybe he kills one but this should level out at some point. the crazies will cull themselves out.
Every other 1st world nation without an armed populous= no regular gun violence/massacres
Us as a nation= regularly experienced gun violence and massacres
We even have a test group- Australia. Experienced one gigantic massacre, took guns away, no more gunviolence/massacres.
And if that doesn’t sway you in the least, I can’t believe you think everybody in this nation is competent enough to be armed?!? I don’t even think everybody is competent enough to have a driver’s license and be on the road operating a dangerous high speed vehicle, (not to mention you need both a license and insurance to legally operate a car). I mean, have you met the “average” American? And you think EVERYONE should be able to legally own firearms?? Just nuts.
Indeed, I suspect we'd see some movement on gun control if minorities and marginalized people would begin exercising their 2A rights. We all know the story of Reagan and the Black Panthers and how that played out, I suspect the same thing would happen again.
At any rate, I recommend all my LGBTQ/PoC friends arm yourself now, spend some time at a range, maybe get some basic first-aid training, and most importantly start meeting and networking with like-minded people in your area, start building networks of people who're on your side. Law enforcement will not protect us; if the rightwing has their way we'll be living A Handmaids Tale and a lot of us will be dead or forced into some form of slavery. Fuck that, this is America, we're not a Christian nation no matter how much a bunch of fundamentalists want us to be, we're the land of the free, and when they decide to fuck around they need to find out.
if you’re under the impression they won’t figure out some way to create one law for “good christian americans” and a separate law for “those people” you fundamentally misunderstand what conservatism is about
Or they’ll just do what they’re already doing and enforce the law one way for this kkk member brandishing a loaded gun at minorities that Republicans hate, and another way for people like Tamir Rice.
This already exists! Many states have a denial clause in their concealed carry weapons permitting that is 🙄 justified🙄 for, “good cause” or “good moral character”. Given the rate of mass shootings, and the disproportionate number of them being committed by white men, it’s not a jump to say without clear definitions “good cause”, and “good moral character” are just another codified excuse to justify systemic oppression.
Thankfully I have friends with a lot of land, but my local range is owned by an avid trump supporter. I’ve had serious conversation with my wife about owning a gun but she’d never pass a background check due to her mental health history.
There's a range here that requires an NRA membership to even join lol, I laughed in a ladies face when she told me that. I'm fortunate enough to live in a place with a few nice, public-access ranges that are run by/in cooperation with state parks and those are usually a little more welcoming places run by Rangemasters who take their job seriously.
Shooting can be a really fun hobby and a great way to bond with friends and family, it's a shame it's been so politicized and mischaracterized by people with questionable motivations.
Man with a gun fails to break up protest supporting human rights. More men with guns arrive and successfully disrupt the protest, sends peaceful protesters away under threats of violence.
It’s a good start, but educated individuals can still be criminals. Poverty is absolutely a contributing factor to crime, but not the only factor. I can see how this could lead to reduction of necessary police though.
Quick responses to violence. It will never be possible to achieve a 100% reduction of crime, and as long as violent crime is possible there must be a safeguard. In the event that an individual with access to a gun or even a knife suddenly chooses violence without precedent to have them hospitalized for mental health, there must be someone there to stop them from harming others.
Spending money on addressing criminogenic conditions instead of policing. It will be much less expensive in the long run, though you’ll probably still need a minimal police force. Getting there is tricky though, since there’s a significant time lag between implementing the change and reductions in crime. Although, a lot of current police budgets don’t really go towards helping anyone so maybe you could safely redirect money to long-term solutions without sacrificing short term security.
Some leftists believe in complete police abolition, but unless they’re an Anarchist or something (and not to be taken seriously) the goal is the re-foundation of a more ethical police system. Burn it down and rebuild it from the ground up, with some important stipulations:
De-militarization. Police do not need armored vehicles, or “riot gear” for that matter.
Liberalization. Police should be required to go through a values test to weed out those with fascistic tendencies.
Mandatory local recruitment. Police need to actually live in the neighborhoods they police. Just owning/renting some property there is not enough.
Dependent funding. Police should not get to keep income from fines and seizures, so they are not incentivized to give out as many fines and confiscate as much property as possible.
No, but it’s a silly demand to say that you can’t point out something wrong without having a solution.
In my opinion, we need to start over and rethink the whole thing. We can have people that do this job, but they don’t need to be trained the way they’re trained, or be allowed to get away with what they get away with. Other countries have much different police forces - we can start by looking there.
But we can’t just shut this discussion down. It needs to be had.
That’s a good opinion. I think I misunderstood what you meant by “throw away the bunch” - you meant the current standards of policing, not the concept of police.
I would strongly recomend listening to 99% invisible Freedom House episode. This has happened before. In the past we didnt have ambulances services and cops would often throw a dying person in a paddy wagon and then take them to the hospital...hopefully i don't have to explain why this is bad. When the first ambulance service was being organized the cops through a fucking fit about their "jobs being stolen". There have been a number of programs trying to take off like the Denver Star program that do similar things. They take on wellfare cases. There have also been things proposed for other types of issues that cops do. A exercise is to start thinking of cops as "murder squad". Do you need the murder squad to take care of X? Do you need them for tickets? Hell sometimes if the answer may seem yes, but the way they do things as reckless and bloody as possible has shown that it is often not effective. High speed chases down packed streets? Shoot outs they start in heavily crowded areas? A kid who shoplifted candy and surrendered and got murdered anyway? (Know one of those). We have got to deprogram ourselves in thinking we know what police do, because what we were sold is no where centered in reality.
That’s what defund the police is all about, it’s not to take money away to punish the police, that would be stupid, it’s to move that money to other departments that would be better trained to handle mental health or domestic issues
As I recall when asked by a black person what he would do for black people he literally said they weren’t black…
After a quick bit of googling I don’t even think he ever said anything positive about BLM and after being elected had one meeting with it’s representative that disappointed BLM… So yeah.
The barrel itself is rotten. Replace all the apples with good ones, they’ll rot too. We need to build a new barrel, with significantly more accountability.
I just don’t understand our societies lax take on gun control.
In Boston, there was a restaurant owner that got mad at a guy so he rode up to him on his bike and tried to shoot him in the street! He’s only being charged with assault!
Motherfucker tried to commit murder and shot into a busy restaurant and no one seems to really care.
Any modern culture that pushes weaponry to its centre is a culture that plays its hand more openly with its manipulation of fear. It’s like flags; some countries are flag crazy, they represent a lot of violence and pressure to fall in line, but they seem benign and they are surrounded by tales of heroism and hard-obtained “freedom” from a spooky other.
I believe weaponry fetishism takes this one step stupider and cuts out all the implications and supposedly says, “I will fucking shoot your whole family if you mess with me and mine!” But even that is a lie, it actually just tells people to fall in line with the accepted norms or be constantly threatened with execution.
It is a huge pressure to put on any group of people and can only lead to various modes of destruction. Ultimately it does not at all seem to be an actual facet of any so-called “cultural” reality (as with most elements of any group of people’s accepted norms), but it seems to connect to the maintaining of control over the economic movements of those living within a set of controlled borders.
Everything always leads back to finding ways to control the largest amount of people most effectively to continue the wealth of the most wealthy elements of that group. I believe any culture that heavily relies on nationalism and religion is actually a culture of violence, and plays on fear and foments cowardice to maintain control.
Weaponry is just the dumbest, shittiest end of that stick; the US, on the whole, seems like a very shitty-handed idiot who is also constantly soiling themselves because they are so scared, waving their hands around, smearing shit on everything they touch.
Europeans are not so different, they just pretend the shit on their hand isn’t shit, but some sort of a traditional chocolate mousse, and pretend their trousers are also not brimming with faeces, but, hey, at least they don’t have guns! (I’m not even sure if that was sarcasm or not).
I guess I believe everyone is just as fucked as everyone else under this global economic system until our wealth and value mindset is shifted towards the current lies of egalitarianism told inside any modern Western education system. Make those lies a reality!
When Officer William Stewart arrived on the scene of a pro-LGBTQ rally on June 3 in Corbin, Ky., he found a self-identified Ku Klux Klan member menacing rally-goers with a loaded handgun.
“Take your gun off!” Stewart said to 43-year-old KKK member Clayton Segebart, who puts his handgun on the ground.
“He’s got a gun! He’s been trying to f------ shoot someone!” a protester yelled at the officer.
But the dramatic scene, captured in a 15-minute police bodycam video obtained by Raw Story through a Kentucky Open Records Act request, didn’t result in any arrests.
Instead, Stewart decided not press charges against Segebart or Kenneth Hutton — a former city employee who arrived on the scene at the same time and also displayed a KKK card — despite protesters showing the officer phone video of the volatile moments immediately preceding the officer’s arrival.
Corbin police seized firearms from two KKK members, emptied the bullets out of the chambers, and then returned the weapons. Video still courtesy Corbin Police Department
The bodycam video shows LGBTQ activists playing a cell phone recording of Segebart waving a KKK card in a protester’s face. He then spews violent and homophobic language and reaches for a handgun he had strapped to his waist.
The police bodycam video later shows Stewart speaking with James Hensley, the 21-year-old LGBTQ supporter who was the target of Segebart’s hate.
“All right, I’m watching the video,” Stewart told Hensley, before putting the onus of pressing charges on Hensley. “You are more than welcome to come down to the police department and fill out a warrant for him.”
Hensley then pointed out to the officer that Segebart had identified himself as a Ku Klux Klan member.
“He comes over here, says he’s talking about all these other murders of trans people and just trying to scare us, man,” Hensley told Stewart. “He’s Billy Badass, and he’s just looking for a way to kill someone, man. It sucks.”
Stewart, who the video depicts as de-escalating the situation as he speaks with numerous people on the scene, then explained to Hensley that if he wanted to pursue charges, he could come down to the police station and “swear out a criminal complaint.” If a judge issued a warrant or criminal summons, Stewart said, Segebart and Hensley would “both have to appear in court together.”
“I just got a lot in my life,” Hensley told Stewart.
Hensley told Raw Story that as a result of a car accident in April, he had to change jobs and now relies on rides from friends and family members to get to work. And he has been taking care of his ailing grandfather. Hensley said he decided that ultimately the hassle of going to court to see that justice is done just wasn’t worth it.
Corbin Police Detective Robbie Hodge told Raw Story that Segebart’s conduct toward Hensley meets the criteria for a harassment charge. Under Kentucky law, “a person is guilty of harassment when, with intent to intimidate, harass, annoy, or alarm another person, he or she … makes an offensively coarse utterance, gesture or display, or addresses abusive language to any person present.”
Harassment is a misdemeanor, and Hodge said for police to make an arrest on a misdemeanor charge — with only a few exceptions such as domestic violence and driving under the influence — the victim must sign a criminal complaint.
As shown in the police bodycam video, the police separately considered whether to charge Segebart for pulling a firearm, which took place after the altercation with Hensley. As Segebart and Hensley argued, an unidentified man came on the scene and told Segebart to leave. In response, Segebart pulled his gun and waved it in the man’s direction.
The police also opted to not charge Segebart with “wanton endangerment” in relation to his actions toward the unidentified man. Kentucky statutes define “wanton endangerment” as “wantonly” engaging “in conduct which creates a substantial danger of physical injury to another person.” The offense is a Class D felony “under circumstances manifesting extreme indifference to the value of human life.”
The bodycam video shows Stewart and an unidentified officer conferring. Stewart can be heard telling the other officer that Segebart and another man “come up, basically called them ‘f-----s,’ and then they’re getting in a heated argument.
“He pulls his weapon,” Stewart continued. “He doesn’t raise it at them, but he pulls it.”
“Did he have a reason to pull it?” the other officer asked.
“No,” Stewart responded.
“Well, why did he say he pulled it?” the other officer asked.
The video then shows Stewart walking over to Segebart and asking him. Segebart told the officer that the unidentified man “was approaching to me really fast, and I didn’t know if he was going to swing on me or not.”
Rather than “hit him and actually really escalate it, all I did was pull [the gun] out and step back,” Segebart said.
The unidentified man left the scene, and the police were unable to interview him.
Despite not charging Segebart, Stewart told Hensley: “I get it. You should never pull a weapon unless you absolutely have to. That’s not how we’re trained. That’s our last resource, and that should be his.”
When the police arrived on the scene, the body-cam video shows them seizing firearms from Segebart and Hutton. The police removed bullets from the chambers of the guns.
But within 14 minutes of arriving, they returned the weapons to the men and told them to leave, according to the video. They also told the LGBTQ supporters to leave the park after determining that they did not have a permit.
“I’m gonna give y’all’s firearms back, all right?” Stewart told Segebart and Hutton. “I’m gonna walk ’em up there with you, OK? Just — just leave, OK? They’re leaving, too. I’m making ’em leave, so you guys gotta leave, too. OK?”
how in the fuck can these fucksticks be released after officers discuss them committing a felony. these guys escalated a situation in hopes it would get physical and they "would fear for their lives."
But there’s the rub. The laws that made terrorism and conspiracy into crimes weren’t created to curtail the powerful or their dogs. They were created for the rest of us.
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