Current Affairs The " another shooting in America " thread

[DanEFC92]

Mad.

 

[N.S.N.O.]

Mad.

Wow, unbelievable

 

[tsubaki]

Mad.

Wow, unbelievable

TBH I am not sure even a jury here would convict someone for murder or manslaughter after that, at least based on the long version of the CCTV footage that was released.

 

[DanEFC92]

TBH I am not sure even a jury here would convict someone for murder or manslaughter after that, at least based on the long version of the CCTV footage that was released.

How have you drawn that conclusion?

 

[tsubaki]

How have you drawn that conclusion?

Watch the second (longer) video that follows on from the first one.

The bloke who fires the shot is verbally rowing with someone in the car, gets thrown to the ground by the bloke who comes from the store (and who wasn't part of the argument it seems), pulls out his gun while still on the ground and fires one shot when the other bloke is still about six or seven feet away from him.

I am not saying he was justified to do what he did, but does a jury believe beyond reasonable doubt that he wasn't feeling seriously threatened on the basis of that tape?

 

[DanEFC92]

Watch the second (longer) video that follows on from the first one.

The bloke who fires the shot is verbally rowing with someone in the car, gets thrown to the ground by the bloke who comes from the store (and who wasn't part of the argument it seems), pulls out his gun while still on the ground and fires one shot when the other bloke is still about six or seven feet away from him.

I am not saying he was justified to do what he did, but does a jury believe beyond reasonable doubt that he wasn't feeling seriously threatened on the basis of that tape?

Aye, I've seen the footage.

The person he was arguing with was the murdered man's wife. One could argue that people like that feel emboldened to start arguments knowing that they are armed. A case of the George Zimmerman's.

When he points the gun, the man backs away and is no longer a threat. He then proceeds to shoot the man anyway.

 

[tsubaki]

Aye, I've seen the footage.

The person he was arguing with was the murdered man's wife. One could argue that people like that feel emboldened to start arguments knowing that they are armed. A case of the George Zimmerman's.

When he points the gun, the man backs away and is no longer a threat. He then proceeds to shoot the man anyway.

... which does sort of ignore the elephant in the room, which was that the person who fired the shot had just been put on the ground (and by someone he wasn't rowing with). People do tend to panic when that happens, especially when the person who did is still nearby. Was the bloke still a threat when he had his gun out?

You might think that, I might think that, but juries (here and over in the US) invariably give the benefit of the doubt to people who have just been assaulted and react out of fear.

 

[Mikey_Fitzgerald]

 

[Boba Fret]

... which does sort of ignore the elephant in the room, which was that the person who fired the shot had just been put on the ground (and by someone he wasn't rowing with). People do tend to panic when that happens, especially when the person who did is still nearby. Was the bloke still a threat when he had his gun out?

You might think that, I might think that, but juries (here and over in the US) invariably give the benefit of the doubt to people who have just been assaulted and react out of fear.

Don't want to bring this up but i feel i must. If the roles were reversed and it was the black man who shot and killed because he felt threatened would he still be walking free?

 

[tsubaki]

Don't want to bring this up but i feel i must. If the roles were reversed and it was the black man who shot and killed because he felt threatened would he still be walking free?

Should he be? Yes. Would he be? Doubtful (though with that CCTV, once it got to trial it would be almost certain).

 

[LinekersLegs]

Sigh of resignation. God forbid a measly amount of tax dollars goes to study something that is killing our citizens at a rate of about 25,000+ per year.



House GOP appropriators block funding for gun violence research
House Republican appropriators Wednesday rejected a proposal to designate millions of dollars for the Centers for Disease Control and Prevention for gun violence research, voting 32-20 to keep the language out of a fiscal 2019 spending bill.

The party-line vote marked Democrats’ latest failed bid to spur studies into preventing firearm-related injuries and deaths — and comes despite a bipartisan agreement earlier this year that the CDC is permitted to conduct such research. The agency's ability to study gun violence had been limited by a 1996 provision that prevented the CDC from collecting data to advocate for gun control.

More here:
https://www.politico.com/story/2018/07/11/gun-violence-research-714938

As we all know it is because the research would likely undercut the idea that “guns don’t kill people, people kill people.”
https://www.washingtonpost.com/business/2018/07/27/actually-guns-do-kill-people-according-new-study/
The study analyzed data on 221 gun homicides and 1,012 nonfatal shootings that happened in Boston between 2010 and 2014. On first glance, the numbers provided a confirmation of the depressing demographics of shooting cases: “Most gunshot victims and survivors were young minority men with prior court arraignments,” Braga and Cook found. “Most attacks occurred in circumstances where gangs or drugs played an important role.” Most occurred outdoors in disadvantaged neighborhoods.

But they found stark differences in shooting outcomes depending on the caliber of gun used. They divided the calibers of guns used in the shootings into three categories: small, which included .22-, .25- and .32-caliber handguns; medium, including .380s, .38s and 9mms; and large, including .40s, .44 magnums, .45s, 10mms and 7.62 x 39s.

That last one is the type of round used in AK-47-style rifles. Strictly speaking, this round has a narrower diameter than even the medium calibers studied, but the authors say they categorized it as large-caliber because of the increased bullet velocity provided by the round’s large cartridge, which contains a relatively high volume of gun powder. Of note, there was only one shooting involving that kind of weapon in the data set. All the other shootings involved handguns.

They controlled for a number of other factors, such as circumstances of shootings and the number of times victims were shot. They then found that all else being equal, a person shot with a medium-caliber weapon, such as a common 9mm handgun, were roughly 2.3 times as likely to die of their wounds than someone shot with a small-caliber gun. Large-caliber gunshots were even deadlier, resulting in odds of death 4.5 times that of small-caliber gunshots.

“The implication,” they write, “is that if the medium- and large-caliber guns had been replaced with small caliber (assuming everything else unchanged) the result would have been a 39.5% reduction in gun homicides” in Boston during the study period.

 

[tsubaki]

In many ways its astonishing that you can still find out things about Alex Jones that make you think even less of him:

AUSTIN, Tex. — In the five years since Noah Pozner was killed at Sandy Hook Elementary School in Newtown, Conn., death threats and online harassment have forced his parents, Veronique De La Rosa and Leonard Pozner, to relocate seven times. They now live in a high-security community hundreds of miles from where their 6-year-old is buried.
“I would love to go see my son’s grave and I don’t get to do that, but we made the right decision,” Ms. De La Rosa said in a recent interview. Each time they have moved, online fabulists stalking the family have published their whereabouts.
“With the speed of light,” she said. “They have their own community, and they have the ear of some very powerful people.”
On Wednesday in an Austin courtroom, the struggle of the Sandy Hook families to hold to account Alex Jones, a powerful leader of this online community, will reach a crossroads. Lawyers for Noah Pozner’s parents will seek to convince a Texas judge that they — and by extension the families of eight other victims in the 2012 shooting that killed 20 first graders and six adults — have a valid defamation claim against Mr. Jones, whose Austin-based Infowars media operation spread false claims that the shooting was an elaborate hoax.

The Pozner hearing is a bellwether in three cases, including another in Texas and one in Connecticut, filed by relatives of nine Sandy Hook victims. It comes as the social media platforms Mr. Jones relies upon to spread incendiary claims initiate efforts to curb him.
The day after the Pozner case, in the same courthouse, is a hearing in a separate defamation case against Mr. Jones brought by Marcel Fontaine, who was falsely identified on Infowars’ website as the gunman in the Parkland, Fla., school shooting in February. Mr. Fontaine, who lives in Massachusetts, has never visited Florida. The Pozner family and Mr. Fontaine are being represented by Mark Bankston of Farrar & Ball, a law firm based in Houston.

Mr. Jones is trying to have the Pozner and Fontaine cases dismissed under the Texas Citizens Participation Act, which protects citizens’ right to free speech against plaintiffs who aim to silence them through costly litigation. Mr. Jones is seeking more than $100,000 in court costs from the Pozner family. Efforts to reach Mr. Jones on his cellphone and through the Infowars email were unsuccessful. Mark Enoch, his lawyer in the case, did not respond to telephone and email requests for comment.

Mr. Jones has emerged as an avatar for a “post truth” ethos that flourished online during the last presidential campaign. He gained a national spotlight and millions of followers after Donald J. Trump appeared on his show during the campaign, praising his reputation as “amazing.” Since then, many of Mr. Jones’s bogus theories have targeted President Trump’s perceived adversaries and reflect opinions held by his political base.
Last week Mr. Jones broadcast a bizarre accusation that Robert S. Mueller III, the special counsel investigating Russian interference in the 2016 election, was involved in a child sex ring. In an online broadcast, Mr. Jones addressed Mr. Mueller while repeatedly imitating firing a handgun, saying: “It’s the real world. Politically. You’re going to get it, or I’m going to die trying.”

Recent “most popular” stories on the Infowars website included “Marine Veteran, Man Wearing Trump Shirt Violently Attacked Near Trump Star in L.A.,” “Revealed: U.N. Plan to Flood America With 600 Million Migrants,” and “Left Protests ‘Racist’ Stand Your Ground Law After Black Man Shot in Self-Defense.”
On Friday, Facebook removed Mr. Jones’s personal page from the site for 30 days, citing “bullying” and “hate speech.” The company has yet to take any action against the Infowars Facebook page, despite pleas from Sandy Hook parents. Last week, YouTube removed four of Mr. Jones’s videos for violating its child endangerment and hate speech standards and barred him from live-streaming on the site for 90 days, though his channel remains a main source for his broadcasts.

The videos removed included one called “Prevent Liberalism,” in which a man chokes a child and throws him to the ground. Another one was called “Shock Report: Learn How Islam Has Already Conquered Europe.”
Mr. Jones and his lawyers say in court filings that the Pozner family’s suit is an effort “to silence those who openly oppose their very public ‘herculean’ efforts to ban the sale of certain weapons, ammunition and accessories, to pass new laws relating to gun registration and to limit free speech.”
That stance echoes Mr. Jones’s original false claims that Sandy Hook was staged by government-backed gun control activists. Mr. Jones’s lawyer says in court filings that Mr. Jones’s theories are opinion, which is more broadly protected by the First Amendment. He also maintains that Mr. Pozner and Ms. De La Rosa are public figures, because Mr. Pozner has created a nonprofit to combat the harm caused by online falsehoods and Ms. De La Rosa has advocated a ban on assault weapons, like the AR-15-style rifle used in the Sandy Hook shooting.
If the parents are found to be public figures, they will have to prove actual malice, or that Mr. Jones knew the claims were false, but repeated them anyway.

The Pozner family’s story is recounted in the court filings: In 2015, after Mr. Pozner succeeded in having an Infowars video taken down from Mr. Jones’s YouTube channel, “Mr. Jones went on an angry rant about me for nearly an hour,” Mr. Pozner said in an affidavit. Mr. Jones “also hosted a call with an obsessed fellow conspiracy theorist who issued a threat to me.”
“Mr. Jones then showed his audience my personal information and maps to addresses associated with my family,” the affidavit says.
Lucy Richards, an Infowars devotee, was arrested the next year for repeatedly threatening Mr. Pozner’s life. She was sentenced to five months in prison last year. As a condition of parole, a judge ordered that she cease consuming Infowars programming, the court documents state.
“This type of misinformation is a bit of a societal crisis,” Ms. De La Rosa said. “This isn’t someone on a soapbox in Times Square spewing nonsense. It’s someone who every day generates income from his demonstrably false utterances.”
Starting days after the shooting, Mr. Jones helped spread false claims that the Sandy Hook parents were “crisis actors” in a government conspiracy. A month after the shooting, he began broadcasting excerpts from Ms. De La Rosa’s interview with the CNN anchor Anderson Cooper, which was taped in front of the Edmond Town Hall in Newtown. Mr. Jones falsely claimed that the interview was taped in a studio before a “green screen.”
In an April 2017 Infowars broadcast titled “Sandy Hook Vampires Exposed,” according to the court documents, Mr. Jones aired the clip of Ms. De La Rosa’s interview, noting that when Mr. Cooper turns his head, “his nose disappears repeatedly because the green screen isn’t set right.” The Pozner filings include an affidavit from Grant Fredericks, a forensic video analyst and expert witness, in which he attributes the anomaly in the videotape to “postproduction compression,” common in video production, and said “no credible video professional, editor or web-content specialist would conclude” that the interview was taped in front of a screen.
In court filings responding to the Pozner suit, Mr. Jones’s lawyer says that “certain comments that he had previously made in connection with possible faking or staging events at the Sandy Hook shooting was not an accusation against the children or families, but against the media and government officials, whose actions led many to question the official version of the event.” The parents, the filing says, “isolate specific statements, take them out of context while ignoring other relevant portions, and misinterpret what was said.”
Ms. De La Rosa and Mr. Pozner will not appear in court on Wednesday, in part because of safety concerns.

https://www.nytimes.com/2018/07/31/...sandy-hook.html?smtyp=cur&smid=tw-nytpolitics

 

[summerisle]

A record ?

 

[DanEFC92]

 

[TheBigIguana]

My dad informed me that he wants to go to a gun bingo. America is wild guys