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CRIME

Fear is cited in rise in gunfire
Experts: Shootings of strangers, neighbors due to mixture of factors
By DANIELLE PAQUETTE, JOHN D. HARDEN and SCOTT CLEMENT
The Washington Post
Steve Bridges had just parked his pickup at the Texas Boot Factory when he saw a man — white, maybe 55 or 60 — step out of the car beside him and slip a gun under his belt.

It was a Friday afternoon, three days after two cheerleaders opened the wrong car door in a supermarket parking lot nearby and were shot. Bridges, a 63-year-old contractor, had tried to picture how that could happen in Elgin, where eruptions of violence are rare.

“It all goes back to the fear,” he said. “Why are cheerleaders getting shot for opening the wrong door? Why is a grown man scared to go into a boot store without carrying his weapon? Why are these people so afraid?”


Across the country last month, at least four men opened fire on someone who’d stumbled upon their space, resulting in one death, two injuries and a car pocked with bullet holes. The apparent acts of snap-aggression have reinvigorated the debate around the prevalence of stand-your-ground laws in the United States and a pressing question: Why are people so quick to pull the trigger on strangers?

Why did a 65-year-old man kill a 20-year-old woman who had accidentally pulled into his upstate New York driveway? Why did an 84-year-old man fire two bullets into a 16-year-old boy who had mistakenly knocked on his door in Kansas City, Mo.? Why did a 43-year-old man in South Florida allegedly shoot at a 19-year-old Instacart delivery driver and his 18-year-old girlfriend who had arrived at the wrong address?

Experts blame a cocktail of factors: the easy availability of guns, misconceptions around stand-your-ground laws, the marketing of firearms for self-defense — and a growing sense among Americans, particularly Republicans, that safety in their backyard is deteriorating.

Since 2020, the share of Republicans who say crime is rising in their community has jumped from 38% to 73%, according to the latest Gallup numbers from last fall. Among Democrats, that same concern rose only 5 percentage points to 42%, marking the widest partisan perception gap since the polling firm first asked the question a half-century ago.

What data shows

Reality is more complicated. A Washington Post crime analysis of 80 major police departments’ records found that reported violence across the country in 2022 was lower than the five-year average.

And over the longer term, the National Criminal Victimization Survey showed the number of people reporting sexual assault, robbery and other physical attacks is overall much lower now than in the 1990s and has not increased in recent years.

Homicides and thefts, however, rose during the pandemic, according to Centers for Disease Control and Prevention data — though not to the levels of the 1990s.

A Post analysis, meanwhile, found that states with stand-your-ground laws had a 55% higher homicide-by-firearm rate in the last two years than the states that didn’t have these laws, which remove the duty to retreat from an attacker before responding with potentially deadly force.

The perception that life is getting more dangerous has spread on the right as GOP leaders and pundits repeatedly argued, without evidence, that immigrants and protesters are jeopardizing American peace. Conservative news channels have devoted more airtime to violence than their center- and left-leaning competitors. Over the last three years, for instance, Fox News anchors and guests spotlighted crime 79% more often than those on MSNBC and twice as much as voices on CNN, according to a Washington Post analysis of closed captioning provided by the GDELT AI Television Explorer and the Internet Archive.

Fear, paranoia and misunderstandings of the laws governing self-defense and use of force is a recipe for tragedy, said Geoffrey Corn, chair of criminal law at Texas Tech University Law School.

“We don’t demand any education for people who own firearms,” he said. “I was a soldier, and we couldn’t touch a live round without completing weeks of basic training.”

Paranoia and fear

In Bastrop County, Bridges, the chair of the local Democratic Party, said the tension has been climbing for years.

Crime in the Central Texas county has ticked up in recent years, though less so than the national average. In 2021, according to the most recent data available, the small city of Elgin reported 13 violent offenses, up from 10 in 2020.

Bridges kept his pistol at home and his door unlocked. Did crime seem worse to him? No.

Did it seem worse to the head of the local Republican Party?

“Crime has gotten worse,” said Curtis Courtney, a retired publisher. “It probably has. We have more illegals up here. We have a lot of people coming from Austin.”

Courtney, 70, said he didn’t know why that man had shot the cheerleaders. It was either a grave human error or a criminal act, or both, he figured. But it did not shake his belief that Americans should arm themselves wherever they saw fit.

“You have demonstrations in Portland and Chicago getting out of control,” he said.

Democrats who say crime isn’t getting worse, he said, “live on a river in Egypt. The de-Nile.”

That, he said, is why people carry a gun.

“We don’t have a problem,” he said. “The ones who try to bring it against us would have a problem.”

Andrew Lester, an 84-year-old white man, told officers he was “scared to death” last month when he shot Ralph Yarl, a 16-year-old Black boy who had been looking for his siblings and knocked on his door in Kansas City.

“It’s the paranoia and fear,” said Lester’s 28-year-old grandson, Klint Ludwig. “It was the 24-hour news cycle — Fox News, OAN, all that stuff — pushing the civil division. Everybody is just so scared all the time.”

‘A detrimental force’

Over the years, he said, his grandfather had become hooked on those channels, echoing talking points that Ludwig, who describes himself as “left-leaning,” found disturbing. He recalled Lester describing migrant children detained at the border as a threat to national security.

“Minority groups get scapegoated,” Ludwig said. “The propaganda we see all day, every day was a detrimental force in his life.”

The Clay County, Mo., sheriff’s office reported that, according to the latest data, both violent and property offenses in the area dipped from 2017 to 2021. Jerry Nolte, 67, the Republican presiding commissioner of the county and a lifelong Kansas City resident, said he couldn’t tell if crime was up or down — only that people seemed more sensitive to it.

“Anybody who watches the news and sees nationwide the kind of crime stories reported are naturally going to be affected by that,” he said.

In rural Hebron, N.Y., where Kevin Monahan gunned down Kaylin Gillis last month after she and her friends accidentally pulled into his driveway, residents of the dairy town had gathered in shock.

“I blame all this crap on TV,” said George Flint, 70, a Republican councilman. “The fact that you think you can chase somebody off your property like that in this day and age — when you don’t even know who they are — is absurd.”

Especially in Washington County, where, from 2019 to 2021, authorities reported just one homicide and four robberies.

“My client was involved in a series of tragic mistakes, made by more than one person, that resulted in the death of a young lady,” Monahan’s lawyer told reporters. “He feels terrible that a life was lost.”

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I have told this story before, but when in Florida visiting my parents my brother comes over with his family and he immediately walks in and pulls out the holster with the loaded pistol, and places it on a cabinet.  My parents and sister act like this is normal.  I ask him about it, and he explains it is for protection.  From what? Well, apparently there are roving bands of gangs like in a Cormac McCarthy book that is on the lookout for a piece of shit, decade+ minivans with 200k miles on it, and faded paint, and crushed seats. 
You should unload it, and hide it next time.
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22 minutes ago, TexPx said:

CRIME

Fear is cited in rise in gunfire
Experts: Shootings of strangers, neighbors due to mixture of factors
By DANIELLE PAQUETTE, JOHN D. HARDEN and SCOTT CLEMENT
The Washington Post
Steve Bridges had just parked his pickup at the Texas Boot Factory when he saw a man — white, maybe 55 or 60 — step out of the car beside him and slip a gun under his belt.

It was a Friday afternoon, three days after two cheerleaders opened the wrong car door in a supermarket parking lot nearby and were shot. Bridges, a 63-year-old contractor, had tried to picture how that could happen in Elgin, where eruptions of violence are rare.

“It all goes back to the fear,” he said. “Why are cheerleaders getting shot for opening the wrong door? Why is a grown man scared to go into a boot store without carrying his weapon? Why are these people so afraid?”


Across the country last month, at least four men opened fire on someone who’d stumbled upon their space, resulting in one death, two injuries and a car pocked with bullet holes. The apparent acts of snap-aggression have reinvigorated the debate around the prevalence of stand-your-ground laws in the United States and a pressing question: Why are people so quick to pull the trigger on strangers?

Why did a 65-year-old man kill a 20-year-old woman who had accidentally pulled into his upstate New York driveway? Why did an 84-year-old man fire two bullets into a 16-year-old boy who had mistakenly knocked on his door in Kansas City, Mo.? Why did a 43-year-old man in South Florida allegedly shoot at a 19-year-old Instacart delivery driver and his 18-year-old girlfriend who had arrived at the wrong address?

Experts blame a cocktail of factors: the easy availability of guns, misconceptions around stand-your-ground laws, the marketing of firearms for self-defense — and a growing sense among Americans, particularly Republicans, that safety in their backyard is deteriorating.

Since 2020, the share of Republicans who say crime is rising in their community has jumped from 38% to 73%, according to the latest Gallup numbers from last fall. Among Democrats, that same concern rose only 5 percentage points to 42%, marking the widest partisan perception gap since the polling firm first asked the question a half-century ago.

What data shows

Reality is more complicated. A Washington Post crime analysis of 80 major police departments’ records found that reported violence across the country in 2022 was lower than the five-year average.

And over the longer term, the National Criminal Victimization Survey showed the number of people reporting sexual assault, robbery and other physical attacks is overall much lower now than in the 1990s and has not increased in recent years.

Homicides and thefts, however, rose during the pandemic, according to Centers for Disease Control and Prevention data — though not to the levels of the 1990s.

A Post analysis, meanwhile, found that states with stand-your-ground laws had a 55% higher homicide-by-firearm rate in the last two years than the states that didn’t have these laws, which remove the duty to retreat from an attacker before responding with potentially deadly force.

The perception that life is getting more dangerous has spread on the right as GOP leaders and pundits repeatedly argued, without evidence, that immigrants and protesters are jeopardizing American peace. Conservative news channels have devoted more airtime to violence than their center- and left-leaning competitors. Over the last three years, for instance, Fox News anchors and guests spotlighted crime 79% more often than those on MSNBC and twice as much as voices on CNN, according to a Washington Post analysis of closed captioning provided by the GDELT AI Television Explorer and the Internet Archive.

Fear, paranoia and misunderstandings of the laws governing self-defense and use of force is a recipe for tragedy, said Geoffrey Corn, chair of criminal law at Texas Tech University Law School.

“We don’t demand any education for people who own firearms,” he said. “I was a soldier, and we couldn’t touch a live round without completing weeks of basic training.”

Paranoia and fear

In Bastrop County, Bridges, the chair of the local Democratic Party, said the tension has been climbing for years.

Crime in the Central Texas county has ticked up in recent years, though less so than the national average. In 2021, according to the most recent data available, the small city of Elgin reported 13 violent offenses, up from 10 in 2020.

Bridges kept his pistol at home and his door unlocked. Did crime seem worse to him? No.

Did it seem worse to the head of the local Republican Party?

“Crime has gotten worse,” said Curtis Courtney, a retired publisher. “It probably has. We have more illegals up here. We have a lot of people coming from Austin.”

Courtney, 70, said he didn’t know why that man had shot the cheerleaders. It was either a grave human error or a criminal act, or both, he figured. But it did not shake his belief that Americans should arm themselves wherever they saw fit.

“You have demonstrations in Portland and Chicago getting out of control,” he said.

Democrats who say crime isn’t getting worse, he said, “live on a river in Egypt. The de-Nile.”

That, he said, is why people carry a gun.

“We don’t have a problem,” he said. “The ones who try to bring it against us would have a problem.”

Andrew Lester, an 84-year-old white man, told officers he was “scared to death” last month when he shot Ralph Yarl, a 16-year-old Black boy who had been looking for his siblings and knocked on his door in Kansas City.

“It’s the paranoia and fear,” said Lester’s 28-year-old grandson, Klint Ludwig. “It was the 24-hour news cycle — Fox News, OAN, all that stuff — pushing the civil division. Everybody is just so scared all the time.”

‘A detrimental force’

Over the years, he said, his grandfather had become hooked on those channels, echoing talking points that Ludwig, who describes himself as “left-leaning,” found disturbing. He recalled Lester describing migrant children detained at the border as a threat to national security.

“Minority groups get scapegoated,” Ludwig said. “The propaganda we see all day, every day was a detrimental force in his life.”

The Clay County, Mo., sheriff’s office reported that, according to the latest data, both violent and property offenses in the area dipped from 2017 to 2021. Jerry Nolte, 67, the Republican presiding commissioner of the county and a lifelong Kansas City resident, said he couldn’t tell if crime was up or down — only that people seemed more sensitive to it.

“Anybody who watches the news and sees nationwide the kind of crime stories reported are naturally going to be affected by that,” he said.

In rural Hebron, N.Y., where Kevin Monahan gunned down Kaylin Gillis last month after she and her friends accidentally pulled into his driveway, residents of the dairy town had gathered in shock.

“I blame all this crap on TV,” said George Flint, 70, a Republican councilman. “The fact that you think you can chase somebody off your property like that in this day and age — when you don’t even know who they are — is absurd.”

Especially in Washington County, where, from 2019 to 2021, authorities reported just one homicide and four robberies.

“My client was involved in a series of tragic mistakes, made by more than one person, that resulted in the death of a young lady,” Monahan’s lawyer told reporters. “He feels terrible that a life was lost.”

Jibes exactly with what I was thinking. Right wing propaganda combined with social media has created a large part of America that are reduced to sniveling little bitches who are afraid to stand eye to eye with children and teenage girls. 

America destroying itself from within. 

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4 minutes ago, Horn Dog said:

What does it matter?  “Shall not be infringed!!!”

Because if some asshole sold him that gun in a private sale, his or her ass needs to be behind bars. If he bought it from a store, that store needs to be shut down.

Edited by mdmost
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Actually if some asshole or store sold him that gun, then it is just like out founders intended.    If you stop anyone, felons, murders, crazies, from buying a gun then that is a slippery slope which will end with Biden taking away your right to own a BB gun! 

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What all you libtards fail to see is the omnipotent genius of our founding fathers.  Sure they put in that crap about well regulated militias into the 2A, but that was just to fool the 18th century woke libtards into agreeing to it.  They knew that future geniuses would use the concept of “originalism”, the idea that laws should be interpreted as written, to completely ignore what was written!   The important part was “will not be infringed”, and that is the part that they meant.  Why?  No it wasn’t for hunting or protection or to stand up to tyranny.  No they wanted us to kill each other as often as possible.  The real problem is that we haven’t taken it far enough.  When they said “shall not be infringed”, they meant all the way.  Machine guns, nucs, neuron bombs.  And no restrictions for felons, children, crazies, etc. Why?  Cause they knew about all of Americas future problems and that they can only be solved by mass kills.  Think about it.. poverty?  Solved by killing poors.   Social security insolvency? Solved by killing olds.   Housing/food shortages?  Solved by more mass killings. Climate change?  Again killing is the answer.  Poor math grades?  Solved by arming school children.   Racial issues?  Solved by killing all other races.   All of our problems solved by more guns and more killings!  They knew back in the 1700’s. We just need to listen.

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If anyone else has a better representation of the NRA/GOP/SC mindset then please share cause that is the best I can come up with when trying to understand their viewpoint of NO gun restrictions in light of repeated mass shooting events.  

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8 minutes ago, Red Five said:

They must have a shitty door situation at that hospital. 

True dat.  What kind of a fucking hospital has doors that just open automatically so as to accommodate people on gurneys, wheelchairs, walkers, and canes?  Fucking animals!  WHAT ABOUT CHICAGO/YEMEN HOSPITALS!?!?!?!?!?!?!?!?!?!?!?!?!?!?!?!??!?!

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If the sight of 8 year olds on your ring doorbell make you want to load your glock, how do you even Amazon Prime? Or do they get a pass? What if the child was wearing an Amazon vest? Is it the color blue that's soothing compared to whatever the kid was wearing? Are rainbows unnerving? Or is cardboard comforting?

I'm so confused.

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On 4/29/2023 at 6:41 PM, yoladu said:

that is how a society armed to the teeth is going to have to behave.

  • Don't dare talk to someone, good chance you could get shot.
  • Don't knock on someone's door, good chance you could get shot.
  • Don't drive up a driveway mistakenly, good chance you could get shot.
  • Don't look at someone funny, good chance you could get shot.
  • Don't play baseball out in the open, good chance you could get shot.
  • Don't go to your place of worship, good chance you could get shot.
  • Don't attend a school, good chance you could get shot.

this is all learned behavior. I have learned not do these things if i want to give myself a good chance of continuing to live to a ripe old age. And as a result it is turning us into a pretty shitty society where we just dont physically interactive with anyone anymore, It's a threat to one's own very existence.

avoid, avoid, avoid.. stop doing those things.. stop interacting with people, it could get you killed.

It is changing our society and how we live, make no doubt of that.

Don't go to a hospital, good chance you could get shot.

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19 hours ago, fattyflattie said:

Previously deported 4 fucking times. 

Yes, because the reason this happened is because he was here illegally not that he had access to (and repeatedly used in his front yard) an assault weapon.

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So I'm sitting in Thunderbird Bar & Grill on the Plaza in Santa Fe, enjoying a 7K IPA after a full day of walking & sightseeing. I pull up surly and see this thread as I get a push alert about the latest shooting.

Then, over the bar's speakers which has been playing a casual, 50s - 80s smooth mix designed to appeal to the crowd (Paul Simon, Tom Petty, Fleetwood Mac, the Doobies, Roy Orbison, Jerry Lee, etc). All of a sudden, Liberty Lies by David Baerwald comes on. There might not be 5 people on the forum who have a clue about his music.

The opening verse (delivered behind lush guitars and keys) goes:

"We've got a different kind of murderer here
A man on my TV said
A random kinda feeling starts to fill the air
And we're left here to count the dead"

Now on to Dire Straits and Heavy Fuel.

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53 minutes ago, DDD Dad said:

Yes, because the reason this happened is because he was here illegally not that he had access to (and repeatedly used in his front yard) an assault weapon.

I can tell you with absolute certainty it wouldn’t have happened had he not.  So…partial credit.  I’m sorry this one wasn’t another white cis incel so this would be easier for you. 

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46 minutes ago, GhostOfTomJoad said:

All of a sudden, Liberty Lies by David Baerwald comes on. There might not be 5 people on the forum who have a clue about his music.

Probably more than 5.  At the very least I'm one.

"Liberty, Lies, and amputees"

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Probably more than 5.  At the very least I'm one.
"Liberty, Lies, and amputees"
I knew you'd be one, JJ.

Liberty, lies and refugees,
Big brass bands and amputees,
There's homes for the homeless if there's home for me
'Cause baby I've been crawling"

How does THAT song get shuffled into some random yacht rock-ish channel today, at that time.
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Republican Gun Violence Diversion Flow Chart

 

Brown = Illegal immigration is the problem 

Black = Democrat controlled cities are the problem 

Sandy Brown = Terrorism is the problem 

White = Mental Health is a problem that needs to be addressed 

Asian = (somebody change the subject fast)

 

 

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