It's Watch!... Neighborhood Watch. Not shoot.

94% of African American homicide victims are killed by an African American.

 

Do you give a rip those 20 kids are dead? I mean honestly, do you? Because it seems Chicago always comes up here. It's horrific what's happening on the south side of that city. Every week new stories of tragedy, mostly ignored. Rules of society collapsing in certain ways. And whenever something like this happens, many are quick to point to the second city.

But that just seems to be using those hundreds of deaths as pawns in different ways. No one cries for Detroit, St. Louis or Philadelphia, all places where people are killed at higher rates. But we come to Chicago with warnings around partisan politics (you know who runs things over there) and laws about guns (an argument that conveniently ignores the existence of Indiana) or occasionally a comment on race. When something happens, the chorus asks, why isn't this group looking over there?

It's preponderance of murders is truly tragic and born of a complex network of problems, but each time it's referenced, it's lip service, an example to cast aspersions on a brand of politics and policy. Apparently the 20 kids dead this week of 500 dead last year are another sort of pawn, referenced to suit a need of argument and dehumanized in that way.

 

Zimmerman has been deemed "an innocent man" only because of prosecutorial overreach and a really stupid Florida law. You shouldn't be able to claim "standing your ground" if you're the one who provoked the confrontation. And that's exactly what happened here, Zimmerman caused the confrontation by essentially stalking a kid who he hadn't seen do anything wrong while packing a loaded gun, and continuing to do so even after the 911 dispatcher instructed him to stop. He might be a free man today, but he is hardly without blame.

And being upset about the racial coverage this case got is like being upset about the heat in Phoenix or a rainy day in Seattle. What the hell did you expect? This case was all about race from Day 1, race is largely the reason it happened. If it'd been a white kid in a Ralph Lauren shirt doing the exact same thing, Zimmerman doesn't follow him, he doesn't call 911, nothing happens, nobody dies. This all happened because Zimmerman thought the kid looked out of place, and reason for that is because he was a black kid wearing a hoodie.

And regardless of whether the left's "race baiting" was excessive or not, it doesn't make the right's celebratory crowing today any less unseemly.

 

Hearing so much lately about how black-on-black crime is the real problem we should be focusing on, I looked it up:

According to a U.S. Department of Justice report compiled by the Bureau of Justice Statistics, Homicide Trends in the United States, 1980-2008, 84 percent of white murder victims from 1980-2008 were killed by white people.

Where does that fit on the list of 1-986?

 

That's pretty funny, coming from Tony. Thanks for the laugh!

 

Every stat out there shows -- and has shown for as long as they've been keeping such statistics -- that the overwhelming majority of homicides occur between members of the same race. That same report showed the percentage of black victims killed by black perpetrators was 93 percent.

None of this is a news flash.

 

Based on what I've been hearing from a lot of people thrilled with the verdict in this trial, I'm not so sure about that. Yeah, that sure know about the black-on-black numbers, though.

For weeks, the chorus has been something like: "You know, those blacks really should be worried about how they kill each other, and how bad their neighborhoods are, and have you ever noticed how different they are from us, and for God's sake tell me why can they use the N-word but it's wrong for us to, and boy, oh boy, black-on-black crime. And oh, Chicago. Chicago! Because, you know, Obama."

That's a rough translation.

 

Uhhhh, only first-degree murder implies premeditation. By definition.

You did know that, right? Words mean things, dipshit. (Commas are useful, too.)

 

I'd imagine in most of those cases in Chicago, somebody was arrested and charges were filed. I doubt in any of those cases, the police showed up, took the shooter's story claiming self defense and let him go.

 

Uh, if he was stalking Martin, why did he tell the dispatcher he didn't know where Martin was?

 

And again, Zimmerman did not "murder" Martin so the point stands.

So please be fucking off now, dipshit.

http://dictionary.reference.com/browse/murder

 

Actually, what I think is being said is all the hand-wringing over this case makes it seem like white men stalking and killing black children is a grave national problem (when in fact that is not the case) that must be addressed, and that unless they're changed, Florida's loose gun and stand your ground laws will lead to thousands of such cases in the future, creating a dangerous environment for young black people in the state.

Meanwhile, in a city that has tighter gun-control laws and no stand your ground law (please check the facts here because I'm not at all sure of what Chicago's laws look like), young black people are being gunned down at an alarming rate every day, but the hand-wringers either haven't noticed or don't seem to care.