By the way, while most gun homicides are committed by people with criminal records, they are not gang related, but begin as minor disputes, and then escalate. If we magically got rid of all firearms in our cities today, I could scarcely imagine those homicides being replaced by knife attacks in any significant way.

Why not? Murder is murder, right?

Your guess is at least as good as mine, but I would hypothesize that people are going to be more likely to shoot somebody out of emotion than to stab them, and also less likely to successfully kill them.

If the attack is premeditated, I wouldn't expect to see a difference, but most gun homicides are not premeditated (if I am not mistaken).

So the people who survive these encounters aren't necessarily the ones "in the right," just the ones who happen to be the biggest, strongest, and most able?

Yes; I will grant that guns are equalizers.

Magically eliminating all firearms is arguably the best first approximation which minimizes death. A second approximation would be to grant limited gun privileges to those qualified to have them--the bar for ownership very, very high--but still maintain the goal of drastically reducing the number of guns on the street.

As it stands, though, gun ownership is a constitutional right in the eyes of too many, which makes this level of restriction unlikely.

Furthermore, there is the problem of the existence of such a sheet number of unregulated guns out there (one per capita), two very large unregulated borders, etc.

The more I admit that wishing guns would disappear is not a practicable option, the more I am inclined to say that actually improving people's lives would do the most to decrease violence.

http://thegrio.com/2015/05/12/fbi-white-supremacists-law-enforcement/

Never heard of this before, does anyone know more about this?

Stop race baiting. They are heroes who risk their lives every day to protect the master race.

Yup, that's Facebook right now.

Another thing more dangerous than being a police officer is being a police officer's wife or girlfriend.

Despite the population still being overwhelmingly white and having no discernable race relation issues, Maine doesn't want to be left out of the fun.

http://www.wcsh6.com/mb/news/local/portland/police-arrest-18-at-friday-nights-black-lives-matter-protest/274715797

Unbelievable that something like this could happen in Maine.

Wait. Sorry, no. Sorry, I think I had Maine confused with some state whose governor hasn't recently promised to protect it from race mixing.

...and now, a second round of BLM-fueled hate crime against officers.

It's not the fact that there was a protest that I found funny, just the way they went about it. There have been peaceful events, gatherings held in honor of the victims. These people came along with little purpose other than stirring the pot, shouting things like "White people this is not for you! If you are white you need to leave!" despite an overwhelming majority of the crowd being white. People are right to be angry about what happened, but events like this one are not helping the cause.

Also yes, LePage is the worst. Even if some of his ideas weren't terrible, his crude, vulgar tactics turn off people who might otherwise agree with him.

There is such an unbelievable amount of ignorance and privilege behind calling these hate crimes, I don't even know where to begin. It's obvious why the police unions and government want to prosecute it as hate crime, but you, as a private citizen, should know better. How dare you equate the voluntary hazard of police work with the fear that keeps gay kids in the closet, with the fear of being beaten or killed just because of the immutable fact of who you are, and not the risks you choose to assume. You should be ashamed.

You are right, it was wrong for me to call it a hate crime. There is no reason that attacks against police should be prosecuted by hate crime laws.

On the other hand, I think that hyperbole coming out of BLM is hardly healthy for race relations, and the media is happy to stir things up, to the point that people are motivated to act out.

If I had a nickel for every time I read somebody's diagnosis of "the problem" with BLM, I'd have a couple dollars or something.

That's because there are lots of problems with BLM, and one of them is on TV right now.

I don't think very many people condone killing police.

Sorry, don't know how to play this video :(
https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=dj4ARsxrZh8

Do you really want to argue that this anger toward law enforcement isn't the direct result of the over the top rhetoric being fed to the media by BLM activists?

You know what's crazy? You're probably all over blaming the US Government for the worst of the Iraqi insurgence, for creating a regional power vacuum through carelessness and violence, and for giving Iraqis an out-group to blame for all of their problems.

But the same thing happens in black communities on American soil, and hey, it's not our government's fault people are angry, they're just bloodthirsty SJWs?

If you didn't want black people to view the police as an occupying force of a foreign culture, maybe you shouldn't have worked so hard to make the United States an apartheid state? ¯\_(ツ)_/¯

Yes.

My issue with Black Lives Matter is based on my conclusion that there are deeper problems facing black communities than those involving the police, and it is therefore dangerous and harmful for activists to foster a mentality so intensely focused on this single cause without rebuke. I will readily confess that I've been remiss in praising activists for raising awareness of obvious flaws in various police departments, but I will stand by my position that we'd be failing a much larger group of potential homicide victims if we didn't counter the constant cry of institutional racism with some more realistic proposals for reducing the crime plaguing black communities. I feel that although institutional racism clearly exists in police departments, it would nevertheless be difficult to completely eradicate it before violence within black communities is further reduced.

In my admittedly limited research, I've found that Cure Violence (previously known as Ceasefire), an organization which aims to treat violence as an epidemic disease, to be a solution worth promoting.

Black Lives Matter isn't only about police violence.

You are wrong, then. Black Lives Matter instigated the hysteria surrounding online videos of police shootings, even before all the details of the circumstances are released. The entire Ferguson situation was all based on a false narrative, whereas in the end it came out that the officer was completely in the right.

To a great extent, the breakneck pace of technology has made it difficult for humans to adapt social norms and individual psychology to online media. With a medium as new and different as the internet, you can be sure that the message will be as well.

I was responding to Jon.

The organization is disproportionately about police violence, insofar as their impact on online media is concerned, which is what we are discussing. Witness their own website, which begins straight away by recalling the death of Trayvon Martin (Zimmerman was not part of the police, but the narrative in this case is the same).

The Baton Rogue organization which released the shooting video of Alton Sterling, Stop The Killing, has some very noble aims that go far beyond what the ultimate effect of that video was:



The organization's founder has been an activist since before BLM existed, and in my mind, is far more credible a voice. It is unfortunate that the effect of the video was for a black separatist to retaliate by shooting several officers (including black ones), but as I alluded in a previous post, the Medium Is The Message, and BLM had already poisoned the well.

Feh. You don't have the first clue what it's like to live in those communities as a black person and neither do I. I'll give them the benefit of the doubt that they are acting in their best interest.

Black-on-black violence is mainly a problem because black communities factually cannot trust the police (edit: or any other authority) to help them. Instead, the only answer they have is to 'harden up' (i.e. cause more violence). You're correct that black communities face many problems, but almost all of them involve the police.

I can read, think critically, and listen to opposing viewpoints. What is your specific criticism of my argument, or are you saying that historians can't understand the Roman Empire because they weren't there?



Unbelievable.

I'm not sure I agree with this, if I've understood you correctly. Police usually show up to crime scenes after the crimes have been committed. If what you are saying is true, then that can only mean that police have failed to make neighborhoods safe, perhaps by failing to investigate crimes. I certainly think that the government should increase funding of police departments, although this certainly won't do much good if people don't trust the police enough to help with investigations.

To anybody who hasn't been already convinced that the BLM organization doesn't suffer from a victimization complex on par with campus feminism, enjoy this info-graphic proudly featured on their website:



Even granting all these oddly worded statements as true, the tone doesn't strike me as particularly pragmatic, to say the least.

What is campus feminism

What is punctuation?