Why Lynch, When You Can Just Shoot?

Between the shoot-first cops and the stand-my-ground assholes, is there any circumstance whatsoever under which a white person can be prosecuted for shooting and killing a black person in this country today?

Doktor Zoom at Wonkette:

This time out our Second Amendment Hero is Mr. Rodney Black of Barboursville, West Virginia, who protected himself from a home invasion by shooting two men dead because he thought they were on his property and breaking into his shed to steal all his worldly goods. And property, as we all know, is a sacred right in our Constitution.

Oh sure, there are a couple of teensy details that the gun-grabbers will inevitably fixate on, like the fact that the two men were not actually on Mr. Black’s property — in fact, one of the men, Garrick Hopkins, had just bought the land and was showing it to his brother Carl at 2:30 on a Saturday afternoon — and also, too, the shed was not actually Mr. Black’s either. And he shot them from about 50 yards away. But he really REALLY thought they were trying to rob him, so from his perspective and God’s, it was a clean kill. What part of “shall not be infringed” don’t you understand?

Mr. Black is white. Can you guess the race of his now-dead new neighbors?

Mychal Denzel Smith at The Nation:

In my (short, incomplete) list of ways to fight racism in 2014, the first thing I mentioned was reclaiming the definition of racism—from one primarily concerned with individual acts of bias or discrimination to a definition that understands the systemic nature of the problem. The good folks at Race Forward (formerly Applied Research Center) and Ill Doctrine vlogger Jay Smooth have wasted no time in doing just that. Last week, they released a new research paper, “Moving the Race Conversation Forward,” detailing the ways in which the media mishandle stories about race and racism. In the accompanying video, Jay Smooth lays out the differences between individual and systemic racism:

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This report and video arrived around the same time we found out a grand jury chose not to indict Randall Kerrick, the police officer responsible for shooting and killing 24-year-old unarmed black man Jonathan Ferrell in Charlotte, NC. We also learned that Darrin Manning, a 16-year-old Philadelphia high school student who was stopped and frisked so aggressively that one of his testicles was ruptured, would face charges for assaulting an officer, resisting arrest, and reckless endangerment.

This is what systemic racism looks like. Whether Kerrick or the officer who assaulted Manning have a personal animosity toward these young men as a result of their race doesn’t matter. What matters is the institutional mechanisms that degrade black life. Kerrick shot an unarmed Ferrell after receiving an emergency call that he was attempting to rob a home. Only he wasn’t. Ferrell had been in a bad car accident and was seeking help. Before he could explain that to the police who arrived on scene, he was shot dead. Nothing will happen to Kerrick. He will go free.

Manning and his friends ran from police because they were being stared down. Manning then stopped because he felt he had no reason to run. He hadn’t done anything wrong. For that, he received a ruptured testicle and a set of misdemeanor charges. In a racist country, Manning’s black body is guilty by virtue of existing. The officers responsible for his assault and injury are only doing what’s necessary. Her punishment, so far as this system is concerned, need not go beyond desk duty.

When these are the institutions that govern us, when black life is disposable, when black bodies are guilty before and after being proven innocent, when there is no recourse for injustice or even a belief that injustice has been done, when these institutions actively work to push inequality, we are dealing with something much more dangerous than a personal beef with blackness.

The control of black bodies is foundational to American democracy. It is a structural reality. Our institutions are built to protect that reality. White supremacy is our core identity. Ignoring this reality prevents us from building an alternate reality. Ignoring the reality of racism only makes us more racist.

Military Cops

If you're not a guntard who has to stockpile guns for his penis' sake, the only reason to acquire a non-hunting gun is because you don't feel safe.  Either you don't think the local cops can protect you - because of budget cuts or bigotry - or you're afraid of how a militarized SWAT team that thinks it's in Bagdad will react to a call about a prowler.

Chris Hayes on All In:


It's all part of what Charlie Pierce calls Vigilante Nation

We live now in a vigilante culture. Our police forces are militarized and increasingly prone to rogue operations in which innocent people get killed. (Radley Balko has written an extremely important book about this phenomenon, which shows no signs of slowing down. Why in hell does the Fargo P.D. need a fking tank, anyway? Are the prairie dogs getting bigger these days?) They are being encouraged to employ what can only be called vigilante tactics under the color of official authority. You want to push the definition of the word, and there's a helluva lot to our foreign policy that edges on vigilantism, too. The national legislature has broken down utterly because of the polite vigilantism of a political minority in the Senate -- The debt ceiling was "a hostage worth taking," said Mitch McConnell, and meant it -- and because of the legislative vigilantism of an obdurate House Of Representatives.

On the streets, we are being trained paradoxically to both submit to the authority of the police, and to take the law into our own hands, if necessary, because the police cannot possibly protect us from every danger. Stand Your Ground, though it played no role in the Zimmerman trial per se, is vigilantism hallowed by legislation. That's all it is. This does nothing but produce a national schizophrenia about crime and fear and weaponry that we inevitably act out. If there really were a national background check for mental stability before you could buy a gun, I'm not sure American Society could pass one.

Also this

He can drive around Sanford, Florida until he spots an asshole or a fucking punk and then he can get out of his SUV, his piece tucked into the back of his pants, and he can stalk the asshole or the fucking punk, the one who is in the wrong neighborhood, or who is dressed inappropriately, at least according to George Zimmerman, protector of peace. If the asshole, or the fucking punk, turns around and objects to being stalked -- or, worse, if the asshole, or the fucking punk, decides physically to confront the person stalking him -- then George Zimmerman can whip out the piece from the back of his pants and shoot the asshole, or the fucking punk, dead right there on the spot. This can happen tonight. That is now possible.

 Just a few weeks ago in south-central Kentucky, somebody set a trap on a highway to attract a local do-gooder.  When a Sheriff's Deputy going off duty stopped to clear the brush from the road, the trapper shot him dead.

Every cop in the Commonwealth is on hyper-alert these days.  I drive very carefully.

The Real Katrina Criminals: Vigilantes

A.C. Thompson and The Nation document yet another ignored post-Katrina outrage.

There was criminal violence in New Orleans after Katrina, all right, but it wasn't perpetrated by gang members, looters or the black underclass blamed by even Mayor Ray Nagin.

No, the worst violence, including cold-blooded murder, was committed by white vigilantes, who used the evacuation of poor blacks from flooded areas as an opportunity for some ethnic cleansing.

Over the course of an eighteen-month investigation, I tracked down figures on all sides of the gunfire, speaking with the shooters of Algiers Point, gunshot survivors and those who witnessed the bloodshed. I interviewed police officers, forensic pathologists, firefighters, historians, medical doctors and private citizens, and studied more than 800 autopsies and piles of state death records. What emerged was a disturbing picture of New Orleans in the days after the storm, when the city fractured along racial fault lines as its government collapsed.

Herrington, Collins and Alexander's experience fits into a broader pattern of violence in which, evidence indicates, at least eleven people were shot. In each case the targets were African-American men, while the shooters, it appears, were all white.

The new information should reframe our understanding of the catastrophe. Immediately after the storm, the media portrayed African-Americans as looters and thugs--Mayor Ray Nagin, for example, told Oprah Winfrey that "hundreds of gang members" were marauding through the Superdome. Now it's clear that some of the most serious crimes committed during that time were the work of gun-toting white males.

So far, their crimes have gone unpunished. No one was ever arrested for shooting Herrington, Alexander and Collins--in fact, there was never an investigation. I found this story repeated over and over during my days in New Orleans. As a reporter who has spent more than a decade covering crime, I was startled to meet so many people with so much detailed information about potentially serious offenses, none of whom had ever been interviewed by police detectives.

SNIP

Some of the gunmen prowling Algiers Point were out to wage a race war, says one woman whose uncle and two cousins joined the cause. A former New Orleanian, this source spoke to me anonymously because she fears her relatives could be prosecuted for their crimes. "My uncle was very excited that it was a free-for-all--white against black--that he could participate in," says the woman. "For him, the opportunity to hunt black people was a joy."

"They didn't want any of the 'ghetto niggers' coming over" from the east side of the river, she says, adding that her relatives viewed African-Americans who wandered into Algiers Point as "fair game." One of her cousins, a young man in his 20s, sent an e-mail to her and several other family members describing his adventures with the militia. He had attached a photo in which he posed next to an African-American man who'd been fatally shot. The tone of the e-mail, she says, was "gleeful"--her cousin was happy that "they were shooting niggers."

Read the whole thing.

Cross-posted at BlueGrassRoots.