Klint Ludwig, the grandson of Andrew Lester, the man who shot 16-year-old Ralph Yarl in Kansas City last week, told CNN today that he wasn’t surprised that his grandfather had shot the teenager.
It's completely out of control. I think we are reaching the point where if Republicans don't do something they are going to get voted out, even in gerrymandered districts. Combine that with the drip drip drip of women getting killed by the Dobbs decision and the GOP gotta be having a conniption hemorrhage.
You know, I think you're right -- and I think that some Republicans know it. However, their response to the threat of being voted out is to double-down on their attempts to suppress the potentially anti-Republican vote.
How well do they know history? Not well enough to realize that when all peaceful ways to effect change are cut off, bad things happen. Really bad things: Ask Louis XVI and Marie Antoinette, for instance, or Tsar Nicholas II, or Mohammad Reza (formerly Shah) Pahlavi, or any number of others.
The U.S. system offers a safety valve -- several safety valves, in fact -- through which "we the people" can make change happen. Thanks to the unfettered power of money (thank you, SCOTUS), some of those valves work sludgily at best. Closing off others strikes me as short-sighted at best, dangerous at worst. Langston Hughes's "Harlem" comes to mind: "What happens to a dream deferred? . . ."
Then on the other hand my BIL who is diehard GOP(he hates orangehead though so? but that may be just an act) jkeeps buying guns. Also brags about how he is making so much money in gun companies. But he is like 67 so maybe they are finally dying off...
Gen Z (including the ones who aren't old enough to vote yet) is also taking the lead -- and taking to the streets -- for sane gun laws. Not surprising, since they've been subjected to "active shooter drills" pretty much since they entered school. We boomers had regular fire drills, and in the '50s and early '60s nuclear-attack drills were common in some places, but we mostly laughed them off because we rarely even heard of school fires. The reality of school and other mass shootings is in the students' faces (and those of their parents) almost every day. Knowing that the so-called grownups aren't doing diddly about it? It has to be infuriating.
There's another very reliable predictor of the shootings:
Violence
Data published by the Violence Policy Center in 2017 showed that 93% of murdered female victims were killed by male perpetrators they already knew. The World Health Organization (WHO) published a study about intimate partner violence in 2017. According to the WHO, approximately 38% of all murdered women were killed by an intimate male partner. In the United States, males comprise more than 90% of all violent criminal perpetrators. These statistics speak to the importance of education and prevention surrounding toxic masculinity.5
Not numb-- furious! Filled with a hatred of the GOP so intense it takes my breath away. I used to merely disagree with Republicans, but that was before they morphed into evil monsters barely recognizable as human beings.
The extreme right-wingers, the dedicated dogmatists on the fringe, on "both sides" of the standard political spectrum, really - * Right and Left,* based on the seating pattern in the French Assembly after the Bourbon aristocrats were deposed, executed by guillotine, fled abroad, or however you want to frame it - have always been filled with passionate intensity.
They've always been rabble-rousers, willing to smash things up first, and think about what they did later, if at all.
But the GOP really pushed beyond the limits of the envelope on January 6, and in its aftermath. Some instinctive disgust was expressed for a few weeks, then it was as if nothing much worse than a rowdy demonstration was supposed to have taken place, a visit by tourists who stumbled and accidentally broke up the place.
Add all the horrendous attacks on minority rights, women's rights, LGBT rights, and on and on and on, not to mention Herr Gropenfuehrer and his endless pathologies, and
no wonder people are morally outraged.
"Toleration of intolerance becomes itself a kind of moral evil."
- Thomas Mann, author
(Who was essentially forced to flee the Nazis in 1931, before Hitler
was installed as Chancellor in 1933, because of radio broadcasts he made
re: "passionate intensity:" Isn't that phrase from Yeats' "Second Coming?" "The best lack all conviction while the worst are full of passionate intensity."
Had that and Yeats's other poetry drummed into my receptive neocortex by Prof John Bergman at Macalester, in a Modern British and American Poetry course.
Between Yeats, Auden, Eliot, Pound, D.H Lawrence, Edna St. Vincent Millay, Sylvia Plath, Ted Hughes, among others, including Dylan Thomas's hypnotic, profoundly inspired, transcendentally brilliant play for voices, Under Milkwood, I unconsciously steal from the best!
I didn't mean to imply you should credit Yeats for the term "passionate intensity." I just think it's interesting how a phrase from a poem can find its way into ordinary discourse. (Not that your comments qualify as "ordinary!")
The thing is I am fairly sure that's why I chose those words, we all, in that class, had Turning and turning in the widening gyre, The falcon cannot hear the falconer" etc. as an intense focus of study and Bergman's lectures --- he went to Ireland to Yeats symposia, the works!
The Second Coming
1:21
Recitation
Problems playing this file? See media help.
The Second Coming
Turning and turning in the widening gyre
The falcon cannot hear the falconer;
Things fall apart; the centre cannot hold;
Mere anarchy is loosed upon the world,
The blood-dimmed tide is loosed, and everywhere
The ceremony of innocence is drowned;
The best lack all conviction, while the worst
Are full of passionate intensity.
Surely some revelation is at hand;
Surely the Second Coming is at hand.
The Second Coming! Hardly are those words out
When a vast image out of Spiritus Mundi
Troubles my sight: somewhere in sands of the desert
A shape with lion body and the head of a man,
A gaze blank and pitiless as the sun,
Is moving its slow thighs, while all about it
Reel shadows of the indignant desert birds.
The darkness drops again; but now I know
That twenty centuries of stony sleep
Were vexed to nightmare by a rocking cradle,
And what rough beast, its hour come round at last,
Correction: Prof. John Berger, not Bergman, although when I google his name, only the author John Peter Berger, and his famous book Ways of Seeing comes up.
I really don't understand that, but the internet is weird. Some PHOTOS of Prof. Berger, yes, I recognize him in those, but not a shred of text, etc. I think he's still alive, no obit, but I'm really surprised there's not more...
Not by coincidence, I sent out a "group email" about the Gaston County, N.C. shooting and the related shootings mentioned by Lucian in this piece, with some links, including at the end:
Data published by the Violence Policy Center in 2017 showed that 93% of murdered female victims were killed by male perpetrators they already knew. The World Health Organization (WHO) published a study about intimate partner violence in 2017. According to the WHO, approximately 38% of all murdered women were killed by an intimate male partner. In the United States, males comprise more than 90% of all violent criminal perpetrators. These statistics speak to the importance of education and prevention surrounding toxic masculinity.5
Also this:
"Healthy or positive masculinity is the idea that men can be emotionally expressive, have female friends or mentors, and express their emotions without feeling emasculated."7
I admit I naively believed, back in the early 1970s, that "we" would have evolved into a world where that was the rule, not the exception. Yes, I was that clueless!
I don't its necessarily even racism, its simply living in fear. The NRA and Fox have conditioned people to think this menacing "other" is coming after you. It could be anything, the FBI, Antifa, the IRS, trans people, librarians, the kids on your lawn, they're out to attack you and take away your guns.
Go back to, say, the Reagan administration and start looking at all the PR and political ads for the war on drugs, the war on crime, welfare fraud, etc. Then come back and make your case that it's about "simply living in fear" -- not primarily about fear of Black people, especially Black men. Look at the rhetoric around immigration while you're at it. On second thought, if you've got extra time, go back to the decade or so leading up to the Civil War. Or you could just read Carol Anderson's THE SECOND: Race and Guns in a Fatally Unequal America. It's also worth remembering that fear often doesn't stay in its own lane, but in those cases it's not hard to see where it came from.
A FUCKING basketball!!!!! These people aren't intelligent enough to own a gun, it's obvious that we are going to need an IQ test for gun ownership in the near future. I would bet that an IQ test would solve over 50% of our gun problems. maybe 70-80% of them, who knows maybe more than that.
I hope you're wrong about that --- if it's correct that IQ has little to nothing to do with shooting people immediately, without even a momentary pause to reflect, we are in bigger trouble than I believed possible!
You may be right but it would be a good place to start, I know we have had evil genius perpetrators of horrible crimes, but they are a rarity I would think.
A more effective test would be for XY chromosomes. Unfortunately, if this was implemented, it would almost certainly lead to XYs using XXes as fronts. The XXes would almost certainly be willing collaborators, but still, hey, it might have an effect.
I call them itchy trigger fingers, trigger-happy, meaning a blood lust to shoot someone. Just because they can. It’s becoming ever clearer that many people who have guns shouldn’t have them. Their judgement is so impaired they cannot rationally judge the threat of a particular situation, and feel entitled to respond to everything with lethal force if they want to. This is even worse than the brutal code of the frontier. It’s dystopian, a total collapse of civilization, a lack of any morality, a jungle environment where at any moment you could find yourself in mortal danger. The constant diet of rage, grievance, and hatred served up by the likes of Fox News, the Reich wing, has brought us to this juncture, and our increasingly unlimited access to guns has loosened this expression of the deepest, darkest, corners of our souls. So much of it is done within an aura of Christianity. Irony doesn’t even begin to describe it.
Wait for the "feminist backlash," claiming that position amounts to "biological essentialism."
I happen to agree with that backlash, btw.
Are you ready to contend with that, since they and I are absolutely serious, and it isn't a simple discussion? There are some considerations on both sides, that's certain.
For instance, another move in this controversy is the claim that estrogen makes females more "passive" (or whatever sort of supposed biological inevitability you want to cite)
See what I mean? Unless you are only joking, this becomes a real problem!
It's inherently controversial when you delve into the implications --- seems that it would allow men to escape from taking any really meaningful responsibility for their violent assaults, shootings, fist fights, the works! That doesn't seem fair or in accord with how the law treats this, at least IN THEORY, anyway.
I personally reject any kind of reductionism along those lines, for that reason and others.
Back in the day feminists regularly accused each other of "biological essentialism." On the whole, I think it has less to do with testosterone levels and more to do with XY chromosomes coupled with social/cultural expectations and conditioning.
FFS! Canada, the UK, France, and other civilized countries are now telling their citizens not to come to the US. I am so embarrassed to be an American right now. Thanks for turning us into a shithole nation Republicans.
Speaking of 'mental state' the poor ole pillow guy is going to be a little short of cash soon, his 'feathery' mind might not being doing well. Should I pray for him? "It's all Hunter's fault"
WE need a million person march on Washington---like the Women's March---that is non violent (and finds a way to deal with saboteurs) to drive home the simple truth that GUNS KILL GUNS KILL---Sure there are other ways to kill (knives; a blow to the head; etc etc) but guns make it EASY. It is time to confront the Party of Death (once known as the GOP). Sure the Right Wing Nuts will say these were disturbed, etc. people. But without guns at hand, this nation would not be facing another round of violence. In Ohio I have to assume that anyone I meet on the street has a gun, given the carry laws here.
Ho hum, just another day in Second Amendment ‘Murikkka, the land of the free(dumb) and the home of the “brave”…and now the guns rights advocates want concealed carry in Hawaii, the land of Aloha…WTF??? What could possibly go wrong, huh?
I sympathize with Klint Ludwig's dilemma of a racist grandfather whose conduct is abhorrent, and Ludwig's acknowledgment of his grandfather's reflexive response that involved no consideration of the accidental and innocent purpose of the knock on the grandfather's door by a teenager looking no further than to collect his siblingsand drive them home. He knocked on the door of the wrong house on the wrong street. Then, to hear his grandfather's excuse that he was defending himself, and misrepresenting what happened afterwards, that must have been horrific and demoralizing.
Little kids with their parent, cheerleaders, truly angelic appearing teenage boys, kids simply turning into the wrong address or opening the wrong car door. Guns available everywhere and the relentless drumbeat of hateful/fear-mongering media is distorting people’s sense of reality.
The Repug Fascist traitors are working hard to do the bidding of their filthy, billionaire, neonazi mentors; ie, working to install the Shock Doctrine.
It's completely out of control. I think we are reaching the point where if Republicans don't do something they are going to get voted out, even in gerrymandered districts. Combine that with the drip drip drip of women getting killed by the Dobbs decision and the GOP gotta be having a conniption hemorrhage.
Can only pray that it’s the case.
You know, I think you're right -- and I think that some Republicans know it. However, their response to the threat of being voted out is to double-down on their attempts to suppress the potentially anti-Republican vote.
How well do they know history? Not well enough to realize that when all peaceful ways to effect change are cut off, bad things happen. Really bad things: Ask Louis XVI and Marie Antoinette, for instance, or Tsar Nicholas II, or Mohammad Reza (formerly Shah) Pahlavi, or any number of others.
The U.S. system offers a safety valve -- several safety valves, in fact -- through which "we the people" can make change happen. Thanks to the unfettered power of money (thank you, SCOTUS), some of those valves work sludgily at best. Closing off others strikes me as short-sighted at best, dangerous at worst. Langston Hughes's "Harlem" comes to mind: "What happens to a dream deferred? . . ."
Then on the other hand my BIL who is diehard GOP(he hates orangehead though so? but that may be just an act) jkeeps buying guns. Also brags about how he is making so much money in gun companies. But he is like 67 so maybe they are finally dying off...
Hayes Brown, regular contributor to the MSNBC newsletter, doesn't seem optimistic. He sees fear as a chronic condition of the U.S. populace, and one that fuels the stampede to buy guns and more guns. https://www.msnbc.com/opinion/msnbc-opinion/ralph-yarl-kaylin-gillis-shootings-rcna80439
I get his point. I still believe that the MAGATs (Republicans let's be honest) are dying off. Gen Z is voting for Democrats at a 4-1 clip.
Gen Z (including the ones who aren't old enough to vote yet) is also taking the lead -- and taking to the streets -- for sane gun laws. Not surprising, since they've been subjected to "active shooter drills" pretty much since they entered school. We boomers had regular fire drills, and in the '50s and early '60s nuclear-attack drills were common in some places, but we mostly laughed them off because we rarely even heard of school fires. The reality of school and other mass shootings is in the students' faces (and those of their parents) almost every day. Knowing that the so-called grownups aren't doing diddly about it? It has to be infuriating.
We had kiss your ass goodbye drills we called them. Basically put your head under your desk...
One can hope, but the cards are stacked by the GOP in their favor.
It's a house of cards...and it will fall.
Pride goeth before the fall...
Occam’s Razor.
The only constant in this on going campaign against peace and tranquility
Is the gun. We can never control human emotions but we can make the consequences of that less deadly if we got rid of the guns.
There's another very reliable predictor of the shootings:
Violence
Data published by the Violence Policy Center in 2017 showed that 93% of murdered female victims were killed by male perpetrators they already knew. The World Health Organization (WHO) published a study about intimate partner violence in 2017. According to the WHO, approximately 38% of all murdered women were killed by an intimate male partner. In the United States, males comprise more than 90% of all violent criminal perpetrators. These statistics speak to the importance of education and prevention surrounding toxic masculinity.5
greenhillrecovery.com/toxic-masculinity-vs-healthy-masculinity/#:~:text=Toxic%20masculinity%20is%20a%20term,assert%20their%20power%20and%20superiority.
good observation!
Is anyone else feeling numb by all of this? Numb, sickened...OY
Not numb-- furious! Filled with a hatred of the GOP so intense it takes my breath away. I used to merely disagree with Republicans, but that was before they morphed into evil monsters barely recognizable as human beings.
The extreme right-wingers, the dedicated dogmatists on the fringe, on "both sides" of the standard political spectrum, really - * Right and Left,* based on the seating pattern in the French Assembly after the Bourbon aristocrats were deposed, executed by guillotine, fled abroad, or however you want to frame it - have always been filled with passionate intensity.
They've always been rabble-rousers, willing to smash things up first, and think about what they did later, if at all.
But the GOP really pushed beyond the limits of the envelope on January 6, and in its aftermath. Some instinctive disgust was expressed for a few weeks, then it was as if nothing much worse than a rowdy demonstration was supposed to have taken place, a visit by tourists who stumbled and accidentally broke up the place.
Add all the horrendous attacks on minority rights, women's rights, LGBT rights, and on and on and on, not to mention Herr Gropenfuehrer and his endless pathologies, and
no wonder people are morally outraged.
"Toleration of intolerance becomes itself a kind of moral evil."
- Thomas Mann, author
(Who was essentially forced to flee the Nazis in 1931, before Hitler
was installed as Chancellor in 1933, because of radio broadcasts he made
questioning the rise of fascism).
re: "passionate intensity:" Isn't that phrase from Yeats' "Second Coming?" "The best lack all conviction while the worst are full of passionate intensity."
Had that and Yeats's other poetry drummed into my receptive neocortex by Prof John Bergman at Macalester, in a Modern British and American Poetry course.
Between Yeats, Auden, Eliot, Pound, D.H Lawrence, Edna St. Vincent Millay, Sylvia Plath, Ted Hughes, among others, including Dylan Thomas's hypnotic, profoundly inspired, transcendentally brilliant play for voices, Under Milkwood, I unconsciously steal from the best!
I didn't mean to imply you should credit Yeats for the term "passionate intensity." I just think it's interesting how a phrase from a poem can find its way into ordinary discourse. (Not that your comments qualify as "ordinary!")
The thing is I am fairly sure that's why I chose those words, we all, in that class, had Turning and turning in the widening gyre, The falcon cannot hear the falconer" etc. as an intense focus of study and Bergman's lectures --- he went to Ireland to Yeats symposia, the works!
The Second Coming
1:21
Recitation
Problems playing this file? See media help.
The Second Coming
Turning and turning in the widening gyre
The falcon cannot hear the falconer;
Things fall apart; the centre cannot hold;
Mere anarchy is loosed upon the world,
The blood-dimmed tide is loosed, and everywhere
The ceremony of innocence is drowned;
The best lack all conviction, while the worst
Are full of passionate intensity.
Surely some revelation is at hand;
Surely the Second Coming is at hand.
The Second Coming! Hardly are those words out
When a vast image out of Spiritus Mundi
Troubles my sight: somewhere in sands of the desert
A shape with lion body and the head of a man,
A gaze blank and pitiless as the sun,
Is moving its slow thighs, while all about it
Reel shadows of the indignant desert birds.
The darkness drops again; but now I know
That twenty centuries of stony sleep
Were vexed to nightmare by a rocking cradle,
And what rough beast, its hour come round at last,
Slouches towards Bethlehem to be born?
en.wikipedia.org/wiki/The_Second_Coming_(poem)
Correction: Prof. John Berger, not Bergman, although when I google his name, only the author John Peter Berger, and his famous book Ways of Seeing comes up.
I really don't understand that, but the internet is weird. Some PHOTOS of Prof. Berger, yes, I recognize him in those, but not a shred of text, etc. I think he's still alive, no obit, but I'm really surprised there's not more...
Yes--furious. See another post my me--I think we need a million person March like the Women's March. Time to deal with the Party of Death.
"the Party of Death"
🤬🤬
It's incidents like these that frighten people.
If you go to the wrong house and are the wrong color, you're dead.
Because the homeowner is a racist POS-either white or black.
Fox News loves this because it skews to their mantra,
"Everything is out to get you! Buy a gun! Protect yourself!"
And the NRA makes money from it, along with all the gun manufacturers.
As the last few days have shown, even pretty little white girls are no longer safe from angry, frightened, gun-toting MEN.
Not by coincidence, I sent out a "group email" about the Gaston County, N.C. shooting and the related shootings mentioned by Lucian in this piece, with some links, including at the end:
greenhillrecovery.com/toxic-masculinity-vs-healthy-masculinity/#:~:text=Toxic%20masculinity%20is%20a%20term,assert%20their%20power%20and%20superiority.
From the same source:
Violence
Data published by the Violence Policy Center in 2017 showed that 93% of murdered female victims were killed by male perpetrators they already knew. The World Health Organization (WHO) published a study about intimate partner violence in 2017. According to the WHO, approximately 38% of all murdered women were killed by an intimate male partner. In the United States, males comprise more than 90% of all violent criminal perpetrators. These statistics speak to the importance of education and prevention surrounding toxic masculinity.5
Also this:
"Healthy or positive masculinity is the idea that men can be emotionally expressive, have female friends or mentors, and express their emotions without feeling emasculated."7
I admit I naively believed, back in the early 1970s, that "we" would have evolved into a world where that was the rule, not the exception. Yes, I was that clueless!
I don't its necessarily even racism, its simply living in fear. The NRA and Fox have conditioned people to think this menacing "other" is coming after you. It could be anything, the FBI, Antifa, the IRS, trans people, librarians, the kids on your lawn, they're out to attack you and take away your guns.
Go back to, say, the Reagan administration and start looking at all the PR and political ads for the war on drugs, the war on crime, welfare fraud, etc. Then come back and make your case that it's about "simply living in fear" -- not primarily about fear of Black people, especially Black men. Look at the rhetoric around immigration while you're at it. On second thought, if you've got extra time, go back to the decade or so leading up to the Civil War. Or you could just read Carol Anderson's THE SECOND: Race and Guns in a Fatally Unequal America. It's also worth remembering that fear often doesn't stay in its own lane, but in those cases it's not hard to see where it came from.
A FUCKING basketball!!!!! These people aren't intelligent enough to own a gun, it's obvious that we are going to need an IQ test for gun ownership in the near future. I would bet that an IQ test would solve over 50% of our gun problems. maybe 70-80% of them, who knows maybe more than that.
It has very little to do with IQ, I would think.
I hope you're wrong about that --- if it's correct that IQ has little to nothing to do with shooting people immediately, without even a momentary pause to reflect, we are in bigger trouble than I believed possible!
You may be right but it would be a good place to start, I know we have had evil genius perpetrators of horrible crimes, but they are a rarity I would think.
A more effective test would be for XY chromosomes. Unfortunately, if this was implemented, it would almost certainly lead to XYs using XXes as fronts. The XXes would almost certainly be willing collaborators, but still, hey, it might have an effect.
I call them itchy trigger fingers, trigger-happy, meaning a blood lust to shoot someone. Just because they can. It’s becoming ever clearer that many people who have guns shouldn’t have them. Their judgement is so impaired they cannot rationally judge the threat of a particular situation, and feel entitled to respond to everything with lethal force if they want to. This is even worse than the brutal code of the frontier. It’s dystopian, a total collapse of civilization, a lack of any morality, a jungle environment where at any moment you could find yourself in mortal danger. The constant diet of rage, grievance, and hatred served up by the likes of Fox News, the Reich wing, has brought us to this juncture, and our increasingly unlimited access to guns has loosened this expression of the deepest, darkest, corners of our souls. So much of it is done within an aura of Christianity. Irony doesn’t even begin to describe it.
Good point, at least in the wild west frontier you knew who the bad guys were and could hire contractors (gun fighters) to fight them.
I have a better idea than regulating gunpowder; let's regulate testosterone. Let them have their guns. Just no ammo . . .
Wait for the "feminist backlash," claiming that position amounts to "biological essentialism."
I happen to agree with that backlash, btw.
Are you ready to contend with that, since they and I are absolutely serious, and it isn't a simple discussion? There are some considerations on both sides, that's certain.
For instance, another move in this controversy is the claim that estrogen makes females more "passive" (or whatever sort of supposed biological inevitability you want to cite)
See what I mean? Unless you are only joking, this becomes a real problem!
It's inherently controversial when you delve into the implications --- seems that it would allow men to escape from taking any really meaningful responsibility for their violent assaults, shootings, fist fights, the works! That doesn't seem fair or in accord with how the law treats this, at least IN THEORY, anyway.
I personally reject any kind of reductionism along those lines, for that reason and others.
Back in the day feminists regularly accused each other of "biological essentialism." On the whole, I think it has less to do with testosterone levels and more to do with XY chromosomes coupled with social/cultural expectations and conditioning.
That's my view as well.
FFS! Canada, the UK, France, and other civilized countries are now telling their citizens not to come to the US. I am so embarrassed to be an American right now. Thanks for turning us into a shithole nation Republicans.
Speaking of 'mental state' the poor ole pillow guy is going to be a little short of cash soon, his 'feathery' mind might not being doing well. Should I pray for him? "It's all Hunter's fault"
Makes me very happy.
I do not want to live in this dystopian version of the Wild West. Vote the fu**ers OUT!
WE need a million person march on Washington---like the Women's March---that is non violent (and finds a way to deal with saboteurs) to drive home the simple truth that GUNS KILL GUNS KILL---Sure there are other ways to kill (knives; a blow to the head; etc etc) but guns make it EASY. It is time to confront the Party of Death (once known as the GOP). Sure the Right Wing Nuts will say these were disturbed, etc. people. But without guns at hand, this nation would not be facing another round of violence. In Ohio I have to assume that anyone I meet on the street has a gun, given the carry laws here.
Ho hum, just another day in Second Amendment ‘Murikkka, the land of the free(dumb) and the home of the “brave”…and now the guns rights advocates want concealed carry in Hawaii, the land of Aloha…WTF??? What could possibly go wrong, huh?
I sympathize with Klint Ludwig's dilemma of a racist grandfather whose conduct is abhorrent, and Ludwig's acknowledgment of his grandfather's reflexive response that involved no consideration of the accidental and innocent purpose of the knock on the grandfather's door by a teenager looking no further than to collect his siblingsand drive them home. He knocked on the door of the wrong house on the wrong street. Then, to hear his grandfather's excuse that he was defending himself, and misrepresenting what happened afterwards, that must have been horrific and demoralizing.
Little kids with their parent, cheerleaders, truly angelic appearing teenage boys, kids simply turning into the wrong address or opening the wrong car door. Guns available everywhere and the relentless drumbeat of hateful/fear-mongering media is distorting people’s sense of reality.
Sadly “the Wild West” was a safer place than modern America.
The Repug Fascist traitors are working hard to do the bidding of their filthy, billionaire, neonazi mentors; ie, working to install the Shock Doctrine.