People have been getting killed for trivial matters like their last name or skin color for centuries.
Yup. Whites once again feel justified in murdering blacks for making them feel uncomfortable and don’t even try to hide it.
The Atlantic has an article on this. Hopefully this link works. Their take is that the widespread idea that we are in the midst of a surge of apocalyptic crime coupled with the much more recent realization that anyone, anywhere could have a gun has contributed to this epidemic of fear that is driving at least some of the violence. Like the violence against this guy on the subway who was, in the end, having a crisis of some kind and was probably not a threat to anyone but himself.
Note: I’m not saying we ARE in the midst of an apocalypic crime wave, just that the perception is out there. Among some groups. Fox News viewers, for example.
I mean Stand your Ground and open carry without permit laws are expanding, and there are even calls from the GOP to make them national. As long as you claim you felt unsafe they want you to be able to kill at will. If you are the right kind of person.
These laws are not centuries old…
I think the day to day joyless grind of survival has strained a lot of folks to the breaking point. I agree that it’s always been like this, and that the lethal results are just getting more news coverage.
I also think the myth of the American Dream plays a part. We are constantly told that the only reason we fail in America is because we didn’t work hard enough. We are collectively working our asses off, and it is never enough. Most people are either getting nowhere, or sliding backwards, and the moment we speak about how this system is killing us, we are told we are lazy and our misfortunes are all our fault. The problem is never the capitalist system with corporations becoming our feudal overlords.
After a while, a person explodes over a trifle because their life sucks.
So, anyway, back to the OP, the murder rate is actually way down in America from the bad old days of the 70s, 80, and 90s. So, is the claim that murders are shifting from big things to smaller things? Because far fewer people overall are getting murdered.
According to this chart, t’s lower than it was in 1990 but it’s on been its way up since 2015, and in 2020 jumped up 28% in a single year.
Twitter post from the Daily News. Yes, please, considering that maybe a dozen other varied sites I checked didn’t mention it.
In addition, that says he was ‘throwing garbage’. I don’t know what was in the particular garbage (presuming that he was actually throwing it), or if he’d brought it with him or found it already on the train; but most items that would be covered by that term don’t strike me as life-threatening to have thrown at you. Messy, annoying, and worth getting arrested for, yes. Worth being strangled to death for? Nope.
With by then three people holding him down?
And quite a few police forces are training not to use choke holds, because they’re too likely to kill the person being held. So, especially with no clear evidence that anyone’s life is in danger, it may well not have been proper to use such a hold.
And that’s the thing. We’re freaking out for a good reason. Things were getting better, and then, they started to get worse, and now they’re getting worse at a faster rate.
And a lot of us think it’s these new laws, which merely reflect the attitudes that have become more and more common in the US.
Sure, there used to be people being killed over trivial things, but once upon a time, we mostly realized that was a bad thing. People were expected to try to back down from a confrontation, and if someone got shot over a stupid argument, someone often went to jail.
But now, with Stand Your Ground laws, a whole lot of those kinds of cases no longer involve someone going to jail - killing someone in these circumstances has been made legal. And on top of that, because of these new laws, there are a lot of people who have started to think that they’re always justified in killing someone, even if the law ends up saying otherwise. When, “I was afraid, so I killed them” becomes a legal defense in so many cases, of course you get more people thinking, “I’m afraid, so it’s okay to kill!” all the time.
And there’s lots of people out there willing to defend that attitude, which just makes it worse. No matter how egregious an example we find, someone somewhere will die on the hill of defending that person.
And it is largely red state America driving this surge. It is no coincidence that the epicenter of America’s fascist awakening is also the epicenter for the violence. They are armed, paranoid, aggrieved and most importantly, empowered by a conservative establishment that feeds their rage.
And you also get people looking for an opportunity to legally kill someone.
Red State rage is one of the biggest problems our society has right now. This constant outrage machine, calling everyone groomers, pedophiles, communists, marxists. Ever escalating claims that the left wants to destroy everything and end America. It’s an addiction to being furious at other Americans and it is not going to end well.
Sounds about right. My claim is not so much that these murders have gone up since 2015, but that society is now starting to justify them on a “stand your ground” basis. As @Airbeck said, that is a new thing.
Back in the day the story would make the news, the murderer arrested and tried, and people would say, “well, Bob may have snapped, but now he’s a murderer and he has to go through the legal process just like anyone else.” Now an increasing number of people say “well, Bob was justified in what he did, and we should praise him as a hero rather than putting him through the legal process.” Sometimes those people are the local DA. That’s the part that is new.
Exactly. The mystery to me isn’t so much what is happening, but why it’s happening.
“Reason” and “Excuse” are not synonyms.
Is a homicide that isn’t prosecuted because of “stand your ground” even counted in those stats?
I mean, seriously, what did that 6 year old think was going to happen when she rang a doorbell? She brought this on herself!
Right, ISTM what we seem to have is more frequent reports of rapid escalation to deadly force from what we were used to consider things that would not get there.
Now, that is itself something of rose-colored glasses at work, as there have always been people with jumbo chips on their shoulders and an old-school punches-thrown fracas can easily end up with someone dead, but that, in the old days, would only make the hometown paper the day after, it would not be recorded by witnesses and made “viral”.
Have you ever been the victim of a violent crime? It’s going to be really difficult to say how one feels about what happened unless you were on that subway car and had a first hand observation of how threatening his behavior was. I agree some crazy person yelling or even throwing trash seems to not quite meet the thresh-hold for taking his life. But for those people who took action in the subway car there is no knowing at this point how scared they were at the time and how concerned they were that things were going to escalate beyond throwing stuff and actually start harming people. The choke-hold guy evidently went way to far and over the line, but scared people are going to act on that fear, especially in an enclosed space.
In NYC, especially, I can see how people don’t want to wait to see what happens - the idea of just sitting quietly and waiting for the situation to end is what the 911 hijackers counted on.
Is the New York Post better? “Police previously said he had been threatening other riders and throwing garbage at them.”
I don’t want to be killed by a chokehold for committing assault and battery, and by a strange coincidence I don’t go around committing assault and battery. I also don’t want anyone to assault me or batter me, and by a strange coincidence am entirely willing to consider applying a chokehold to someone who, y’know, assaults and batters. Why people care more about punishing the guy who interrupts a crime than the guy who commits a crime interests me a little, but not much.
Interrupting a crime by killing them is a pretty big deal. Even if the person killed is Black.
His color doesn’t interest me. His crime does.