188.9 - Proof (as if proof was needed) of our national shame

Proof (as if proof was needed) of our national shame

On Friday, December 26, the day after Christmas, a person with a gun terrorized a neighborhood of Chattanooga, Tennessee. They were wearing body armor and drove around pointing and firing their gun at people and cars. When the cops found the shooter at a church parking lot, the shooter took off, leading police on a chase to an intersection where the shooter pointed their gun at one of the cops.

You know what happens next: That's right, they were taken into custody without incident or injury.

Julia Shields

Why? Because the person in the picture on the left is who did it - or, if I'm going to be legally accurate, allegedly did it. She is Julia Shields, she is 45, and more importantly, she is white. She has been charged with multiple felony charges including attempted murder - but she is alive, despite actually having a gun, actually shooting at people (thereby proving the gun was actually loaded), and actually pointing the gun at a cop. She is still alive.

Can anyone out there seriously try to argue that had she been a black woman  - or even more, a black male - that in that case they would still be alive? That if a young black male had done the same thing, that the car would not have been ripped to shreds with bullets and their body along with it?

There is a group of mostly young twits in Texas who have taken to confronting cops on the streets, armed with video cameras and assault rifles, trying to provoke the cops in some way that, they claim, will demonstrate police brutality, the better, they say, to expose it and so stop it. They are, of course, all white.

Is anyone out there seriously going to try to argue that if an armed young black man got into a confrontation with a cop that the young man would be able to walk away with nothing worse than a cliched tongue-lashing about "respect" instead of winding up lying in a pool of his own blood?

Kory Watkins

Is there anyone out there who is going to claim that if the guy in the picture on the right - his name is Kory Watkins - that if he was African-American that the store where he is pushing around his cart would not be swarming with cops screaming "put the gun down" and maybe - if he was lucky - maybe giving him more than two seconds to comply before opening fire, time they did not give to John Crawford to put down the toy gun he was holding before they shot him down in the aisle of a Walmart in Ohio?

Yes, this guy is in Texas, which is an open-carry state, which means what he's doing is technically legal. Do you think that would have made a difference? If you do, you should know that Ohio is also an open-carry state. That did not help John Crawford.

You may think - some of you may think - that I have been going on too much about this of late. But frankly, as long as Kory Watkins can without fear walk around with an AK-47 on his shoulder while 12-year-old Tamir Rice can be shot down literally in less than two seconds because of a plastic toy and Rumain Brisbon can be shot and killed because a cop thought a pill bottle in his pocket was a gun, I say we haven't gone on about it nearly enough.

Sources cited in links:
http://www.dailymail.co.uk/news/article-2890342/Woman-45-dressed-body-armor-goes-shooting-spree-leads-police-chase-points-loaded-gun-officer-arrested-peacefully.html
http://www.dailymail.co.uk/news/article-2897638/The-Cop-Block-videos-Texas-gun-activists-confronting-officers-streets-strapped-handguns-assault-rifles.html
http://www.slate.com/articles/news_and_politics/politics/2014/09/ohio_police_won_t_be_punished_for_killing_john_crawford_police_are_virtually.html
http://www.huffingtonpost.com/2014/12/29/the-year-in-police-killings_n_6354696.html