Karma, it’s a b!tch.

[pmax]

Originally Posted by Tobra

This thread is pretty much all about cultural norms

I'm scratching my head wondering how a black man riding a neon colored Kawasaki, alleged ... I can't tell, is now a "cultural norm".

Anyone else ?

[upsscott]

Originally Posted by Jeff Higgins

And this is kind of where I have been heading with this discussion. Left leaning anti-gun politicians and their friends in the media portray America as having a problem with gun violence. They want to peanut butter spread responsibility for this across all gun owners. They want to portray lawful gun owners, of all races, as contributing to the problem.

Nothing could be further from the truth. We do not have a gun violence problem in this country, we have a black violence problem. Subtract black on black "gun" violence numbers from the total and we instantly become one of the safest, most violence free nations in the world. We have a problem here that no one wants to even talk about.

Witness our own upsscott, a typical example of that breed. Page after page of discussion in which I challenged him to address this issue. He refused. Nothing but obfuscation and redirection. Which is one thing on a silly car forum like this, but it is exactly how the national discussion is going as well. We will never even begin to fix this until we can openly discuss it without fear of the "woke" or "politically correct" ostracizing us for doing so.

I simply don’t agree with your opinion. Don’t call me out as part of the problem. I’m a legal gun owner who believes in sensible gun ownership. Obviously the inner city is more crime ridden than middle suburbia. I don’t think that has **** to do with race. It has everything to do with economics first and foremost which then leads to a breakdown of family values which then leads to a breakdown of the rule of law. You want me to put all the blame on black people? I refuse to do that.

[upsscott]

Originally Posted by pmax

I'm scratching my head wondering how a black man riding a neon colored Kawasaki, alleged ... I can't tell, is now a "cultural norm".

Anyone else ?

Get past the stereotypes. A black kid could be into all sorts of things that aren’t considered the “Cultural norm.”

[upsscott]

Jeff, in your world, how do you fix this? If one particular race is responsible for the majority of the problem, what do you suggest as a solution to the problem? I’m all ears.

[pmax]

Originally Posted by speeder

With cars whizzing by, it's conceivable that no one saw the exact moment of the shooting. The stopped cars could have had their view blocked. So yeah, it's possible. These things go down quickly.

Traffic should have slowed down both ways ... that part of human nature I say can be counted on as a given. Not sure about the blocked view given this is Texas where oversized vehicles are the norm.

https://nypost.com/2021/07/02/motorcyclist-pulls-gun-in-road-rage-gets-killed-by-other-driver/

Will the police report include corroborating witness accounts ?

[pmax]

Originally Posted by upsscott

Get past the stereotypes. A black kid could be into all sorts of things that aren’t considered the “Cultural norm.”

Isn't that what's being discussed, trying to fit this incident into that box when it could simply be a case of an angry young man who played one too many video games or engaged in one too many protests thinking that blocking a freeway to confront an adversary is par for the course ?

[Jeff Higgins]

Originally Posted by upsscott

I simply don’t agree with your opinion. Don’t call me out as part of the problem. I’m a legal gun owner who believes in sensible gun ownership. Obviously the inner city is more crime ridden than middle suburbia. I don’t think that has **** to do with race. It has everything to do with economics first and foremost which then leads to a breakdown of family values which then leads to a breakdown of the rule of law. You want me to put all the blame on black people? I refuse to do that.

No one is putting "all of the blame on black people". No one. The statistics, however, do not lie - blacks kill one another at a rate six to eight times higher than anyone else. You are not rejecting my "opinion", you are rejecting those statistics. As such, you, folks like you, and your attitudes concerning this are contributing to the problem. For whatever reason, you refuse to have an honest conversation regarding this situation. That makes you a part of the problem. Sorry...

[pmax]

Originally Posted by Por_sha911

Are you going to publicly testify in a woke state that you saw a black person commit a crime and the white person was right to shoot him? BLM and CRT have got folks thinking twice about saying anything and then be crucified for it (or targeted by the radical left).

On the flip side, police also has an incentive to wrap this up quickly before the conversations drag on and suspicions brew.

[Jeff Higgins]

Originally Posted by upsscott

Jeff, in your world, how do you fix this? If one particular race is responsible for the majority of the problem, what do you suggest as a solution to the problem? I’m all ears.

That is the question of the day, isn't it? I'm actually a bit heartened that you had the courage to ask it. That is where the solution begins - by asking the hard questions. That is my "first step" along what is going to be a very, very long road towards a "solution". Quite honestly, I have no idea what that "solution" looks like. I'm not bright enough to figure that out. What I do know, however, is that the first step towards solving any problem is understanding that problem. Lifting the stigma surrounding this one is a very good first step, and one we need to take as a nation. Brighter people than me will have to take it from there.

[pmax]

Originally Posted by Jeff Higgins

No one is putting "all of the blame on black people". No one. The statistics, however, do not lie - blacks kill one another at a rate six to eight times higher than anyone else. You are not rejecting my "opinion", you are rejecting those statistics. As such, you, folks like you, and your attitudes concerning this are contributing to the problem. For whatever reason, you refuse to have an honest conversation regarding this situation. That makes you a part of the problem. Sorry...

Sorry, haven't read every single line of the lengthy exchange but what is "the problem", "the situation" and "the solution" identified here ... in short ?

[Jeff Higgins]

Originally Posted by pmax

Sorry, haven't read every single line of the lengthy exchange but what is "the problem", "the situation" and "the solution" identified here ... in short ?

*Sigh* Really? Too much trouble to go back and spend ten minutes?

The problem is we lost another young black man who chose a gun to address a situation that would not have driven most people to choose a gun. The bigger problem is that far too many young black men make that very same choice, and pay for it with their lives. At a rate six to eight times higher than that of any other race, even factoring in socio-economic factors such as poverty. One of the many factors perpetuating this ongoing tragedy is "polite" society's unwillingness, or inability, to even discuss it for fear of being labeled as "racist". The "solution", or at least the beginning of a "solution", would be to break down those barriers to an open, honest discussion.

[Por_sha911]

Originally Posted by pmax

Traffic should have slowed down both ways ... that part of human nature I say can be counted on as a given. Not sure about the blocked view given this is Texas where oversized vehicles are the norm.

Really? Let me ask another question (cstreit didn't answer my first one but you are welcome to do so):
Did you ever notice that if a white person is murdered in a bad neighborhood with gangs and violence, no body saw nuthin. If a police officer shoots a person of color people half the community saw it and people from three states all testify about how the thug with a rap sheet longer than your arm was such a kind and gentle soul... ?
Here's the MSM portraying the violent thug:

[Seahawk]

Originally Posted by Jeff Higgins

The "solution", or at least the beginning of a "solution", would be to break down those barriers to an open, honest discussion.

Start here, with a great liberal mind, DP Moynihan:

https://www.city-journal.org/html/black-family-40-years-lies-12872.html

Moynihan, then assistant secretary of labor and one of a new class of government social scientists, was among the worriers, as he puzzled over his charts. One in particular caught his eye. Instead of rates of black male unemployment and welfare enrollment running parallel as they always had, in 1962 they started to diverge in a way that would come to be called “Moynihan’s scissors.” In the past, policymakers had assumed that if the male heads of household had jobs, women and children would be provided for. This no longer seemed true. Even while more black men—though still “catastrophically” low numbers—were getting jobs, more black women were joining the welfare rolls. Moynihan and his aides decided that a serious analysis was in order.

Convinced that “the Negro revolution . . . , a movement for equality as well as for liberty,” was now at risk, Moynihan wanted to make several arguments in his report. The first was empirical and would quickly become indisputable: single-parent families were on the rise in the ghetto. But other points were more speculative and sparked a partisan dispute that has lasted to this day.

Moynihan argued that the rise in single-mother families was not due to a lack of jobs but rather to a destructive vein in ghetto culture that could be traced back to slavery and Jim Crow discrimination. Though black sociologist E. Franklin Frazier had already introduced the idea in the 1930s, Moynihan’s argument defied conventional social-science wisdom. As he wrote later, “The work began in the most orthodox setting, the U.S. Department of Labor, to establish at some level of statistical conciseness what ‘everyone knew’: that economic conditions determine social conditions. Whereupon, it turned out that what everyone knew was evidently not so.”

But Moynihan went much further than merely overthrowing familiar explanations about the cause of poverty. He also described, through pages of disquieting charts and graphs, the emergence of a “tangle of pathology,” including delinquency, joblessness, school failure, crime, and fatherlessness that characterized ghetto—or what would come to be called underclass—behavior.

Moynihan may have borrowed the term “pathology” from Kenneth Clark’s The Dark Ghetto, also published that year. But as both a descendant and a scholar of what he called “the wild Irish slums”—he had written a chapter on the poor Irish in the classic Beyond the Melting Pot—the assistant secretary of labor was no stranger to ghetto self-destruction. He knew the dangers it posed to “the basic socializing unit” of the family. And he suspected that the risks were magnified in the case of blacks, since their “matriarchal” family had the effect of abandoning men, leaving them adrift and “alienated.”

More than most social scientists, Moynihan, steeped in history and anthropology, understood what families do. They “shape their children’s character and ability,” he wrote. “By and large, adult conduct in society is learned as a child.” What children learned in the “disorganized home[s]” of the ghetto, as he described through his forest of graphs, was that adults do not finish school, get jobs, or, in the case of men, take care of their children or obey the law.

Marriage, on the other hand, provides a “stable home” for children to learn common virtues. Implicit in Moynihan’s analysis was that marriage orients men and women toward the future, asking them not just to commit to each other but to plan, to earn, to save, and to devote themselves to advancing their children’s prospects. Single mothers in the ghetto, on the other hand, tended to drift into pregnancy, often more than once and by more than one man, and to float through the chaos around them. Such mothers are unlikely to “shape their children’s character and ability” in ways that lead to upward mobility. Separate and unequal families, in other words, meant that blacks would have their liberty, but that they would be strangers to equality. Hence Moynihan’s conclusion: “a national effort towards the problems of Negro Americans must be directed towards the question of family structure.”

[flipper35]

Here in WI possession means you have control of the firearm but do not own it. For example, you borrowed it from your mom or dad. Ownership means the lawful owner.

If you are driving someone else's car, they are the owner but you have possession.

On the poverty thing, what is the ratio of kids with single moms and brothers with different dads between different cultures? How is the white hillbilly in the hills of the SE making 12k per year different than the latino in the SW on the same wage and different than a black in Chicago? I know Chicago families have little structure and have lots of half siblings and a lot of those kids join gangs for structure and discipline. Do the other poverty stricken races have the same family structure?

[Por_sha911]

Regardless of color, the welfare system encourages unwed motherhood with better benefits. Women will stay unmarried because they get mo money. The kids grow up thinking unwed motherhood is normal.

[Seahawk]

[flipper35]

Yes, but how many unwed have multiple kids with different men. I know welfare is a game most play to their advantage and that needs corrected. I hate to bring PARF into this and hopefully this doesn't get moved, but this is where the church has failed and the government took over. Anytime the government takes over a societal issue is bad because it brings power to the government and dependence on the population served by the program.

I tried, but the latest data I could find says Latino single mother families have the highest poverty rate. Blacks were next. It did not say haw many kids at home or how many fathers.

[MikeSid]

I believe the cause of this problem is actually well understood, but difficult to change, or perhaps there is just institutional resistance to the change that is required.

In short, black neighborhoods have statistically higher rates of gun violence than other (like white) neighborhoods of the same socio-economic level. I don't think this statistic can be seriously disputed (part of Jeff's point). A middle class black neighborhood will have a higher rate of gun violence than a middle class white neighborhood.

The problem is that we still have black neighborhoods and white neighborhoods. Most cities in the US have long standing race based neighborhood boundaries that were rooted in systemic racism. While the zoning laws have slowly changed over the years, it takes a long time for a community to completely equalize. And there may be resistance to this change, even by those who would benefit from it.

Black neighborhoods have traditionally had fewer resources available to successfully raise families. In my own city, which I have lived in for over 50 years, the difference between the parks department youth programs in one neighborhood versus another is palpable. The City may build a shiny new ballfield and community center, but that may not change how it is used. A community is more than it's physical infrastructure - it requires volunteers, business owners that invest in the community, and families that actively participate in raising their children to be responsible parts of that community. There are not as many (some may say none) impediments to doing that now in black neighborhoods, but there certainly used to be broad barriers that made that very difficult. Hope, as one example. If you don't have it, everything seems pointless, so why try, just survive.

Bottom line for me, it is going to take several generations to fix the long term effects of systemic racism that created our historic black and white neighborhoods. And until that changes, we will continue to see gun violence at a higher rate in historically underserved neighborhoods.

All that said, I have no idea where this motorcyclist lived or what his story is, so maybe his damage is just too much violent TV/Movies. But to Jeff's point, I don't think the statistics can be seriously disputed, and in my opinion the fix for that issue will likely take 100+ years - which is incredibly unfortunate.

[flipper35]

I can say around here, in small town USA, there are very few kids that see any color at all. They learn about color as they get older and get exposed to those that want to push racism.

[pmax]

Originally Posted by Jeff Higgins

*Sigh* Really? Too much trouble to go back and spend ten minutes?

The problem is we lost another young black man who chose a gun to address a situation that would not have driven most people to choose a gun.

Allegedly chose a gun, as claimed by the other with no witness that we know about who can corraborate ... see the different perspective ? The fact that he was carrying isn't pertinent since "everyone" in Texas does it.

The bigger problem is that far too many young black men make that very same choice, and pay for it with their lives. At a rate six to eight times higher than that of any other race, even factoring in socio-economic factors such as poverty. One of the many factors perpetuating this ongoing tragedy is "polite" society's unwillingness, or inability, to even discuss it for fear of being labeled as "racist". The "solution", or at least the beginning of a "solution", would be to break down those barriers to an open, honest discussion.

Brand newish looking bike, hardly impoverished I think you're jumping way ahead to the socio-economic stuff which may be completely irrelevant within this context let alone talk about a solution, this thread is still about the shooting right ?

Yeah, I did ask about, and skipped the verbiage, mainly because I don't see how it relates to this incident ... for now.