JuliusGoat

JuliusGoat OP , 5 days ago

Afterward, the story reported that the child wasn't following the man's orders.

The man, who saw himself as the protector of his community, decided that the child was a danger because he had decided that it was his job to decide who was dangerous and who was not.

JuliusGoat OP , 5 days ago

So the self-appointed community defender pulled out his people-killing tool—the ownership and use of which is seen as a fundamental right in this country—and issued some commands, and the child obeyed, because he was being accosted by an armed stranger.

JuliusGoat OP , 5 days ago

However, the community protector was unsatisfied with the child's compliance, so he killed the child.

This is also seen as a fundamental right in this country, provided you're the kind of person who is allowed by our dominant cultural narrative to appoint yourself a protector.

JuliusGoat OP , 5 days ago

In the name of community safety, the community protector shot the child six times in the back, according to the story, so this must have been an extremely dangerous-seeming child, especially the back part of him.

JuliusGoat OP , 5 days ago

I know framing the story like this is likely to raise objections from the gun-defender crowd, including a knee-jerk reaction against my calling a 17-year old a "child." It's one way I know using killing tools to execute teens is something that's seen as a fundamental right.

JuliusGoat OP , 5 days ago

But I have children around that age, and if some maniac who fashioned himself a community protector decided to murder them for some self-created reason, I would mourn a child, because of course I would, and so would you, I would presume, if you are still capable of empathy.

JuliusGoat OP , 5 days ago

Empathy is a challenge in a culture that scorns empathy, in a culture that so often looks at killing and explains to you why your distress is dangerously wrong-minded, and why you ought to take the more realistic view, which is to numb yourself to increasingly murderous cruelty.

JuliusGoat OP , 5 days ago

What was he doing? I will be asked. Why was he there? I will be asked. What did that BB gun look like, though? I will be asked. How was he holding it? You're making my point, I will answer, feeling far more tired than I did before.

JuliusGoat OP , 5 days ago

The story reported that the murderer was an off-duty security guard, a job which bestows the same authority to issue orders to citizens or kill them for noncompliance as does that of an off-duty pizza delivery guy.

The story also reports that it is unclear where he is employed as a guard. That's fair enough, since whether he is a guard or not doesn't matter. It does put him in a uniform, which I suppose means something to people who believe uniforms automatically grant killing authority.

JuliusGoat OP , 5 days ago

Whatever the case, it was deemed important enough to hit the headline, the "security guard" of it all conveying something or other to someone or other about something or other that I've been pondering ever since.

To me, it conveys two disturbing truths.

JuliusGoat OP , 5 days ago

First, every bad guy with a gun thinks they are a good guy with a gun.

Second, our dominant cultural narrative will often keep the "good guy with a gun" story going for you even after you've proved yourself to be the exact sort of menace to society you presumed you were protecting everyone from.

JuliusGoat OP , 5 days ago

There's something about a local gun-toting maniac deciding random teens are a danger and executing them that is treated by our dominant cultural narrative as a thing that self-evidently creates community safety.

JuliusGoat OP , 5 days ago

Certain people get to be presumed community protectors, even though they are self-deluded menaces. They get to decide who is a danger, even though they are the danger. They get to decide they have defended themselves, even though they are the ones who attacked.

JuliusGoat OP , 5 days ago

The people they killed do not get to have defended themselves, even though they were actually in danger, and anything they did to defend themselves from their attacker will justify their killing.

And this sort of thing happens all the time.

JuliusGoat OP , 5 days ago

The killer often gets no charges, or gets acquitted, and all the usual people celebrate the impunity of gun-havers to kill non-gun-havers. In any altercation, especially if your demographic is right, being a shooter conveys a sort of automatic innocence.

JuliusGoat OP , 5 days ago

Sometimes the famously acquitted killer even becomes a sought-after right wing celebrity, not (as one might expect) for being a hamburger mascot impersonator, but rather as a handy way to celebrate supremacist impunity in matters of summary execution.

JuliusGoat OP , 5 days ago

It occurs to me that this sort of thing might be one of the reasons off-duty security guards of uncertain employment get the idea that they have the right to execute teens at their own discretion.

And this is why I think it's important to call the child "a child," and the murderer "a murderer." It's no longer as early in this young century as it once was, and we should become rugged with reality.

JuliusGoat OP , 5 days ago

Turns out the off-duty security guard messed up, though; instead of being celebrated as a hero, he's being arraigned for second-degree murder, and who knows? the charge might even stick.

Apparently the off-duty security guard got the idea that summarily executing teens was legal for men such as himself, and for whatever reason, in his case, it's maybe not.

JuliusGoat OP , 5 days ago

He seemed not only to have assured himself that he probably would have to kill somebody someday, but prepared for it, almost hoped for it.

I imagine he's surprised to discover that what he was actually preparing to become was a murderer of a harmless kid in a suburban mall.

JuliusGoat OP , 5 days ago

One might wonder: Where would he get such an idea? What led an off-duty security guard to deputize himself to murder a random teenager?

Good rhetorical questions! Let's talk about the so-called "supreme" court, bump stocks, and other cruel luxuries.

Full Essay: https://www.the-reframe.com/cruel-luxuries/

JuliusGoat OP , 1 month ago

He’s the result you can expect to see, in a society which believes that we have no shared society, that life must be earned, that profit is how you earn it, and that violence redeems.

JuliusGoat OP , 1 month ago

We can see that Trump isn’t a disruption to business as usual, but rather a purified concentrate of that business. Even though he spread supremacy's virus, Trump isn’t a virus. He’s the first unignorable tumor—for those of us comfortable enough to have ignored previous symptoms.

JuliusGoat OP , 1 month ago

Yes, he’ll have to be removed completely, but afterward things are going to have to be different. If they aren’t, then we’ll find ourselves here again.

And we may well find ourselves here again.

JuliusGoat OP , 1 month ago

Even many opposed to the spiritual virus of MAGA aren’t interested in quarantining or vaccinating against it. Some remain opposed to radical transformations to our lifestyle. Some want only to remove the tumor of Trump, then return to the exact situation that allowed it to grow.

JuliusGoat OP , 1 month ago

We’ve heard all the justifications for this, because we know them. We often are them. These complacent masses aren’t strangers, any more than the cheering red-capped throngs are strangers.

Often, they’re us.

JuliusGoat OP , 1 month ago

Happy, smiling, friendly, many of them. They love their kids. They go to church. They work hard. They pay their taxes. They walk their dogs. They love us, some of them. Yes, and we love them, many of them.

And if we seem so angry, perhaps the reason is that the anger we feel toward these friends and family and neighbors, while appropriate and honest, is easier than the deep sorrow and mourning, that those we love would so eagerly or complacently align with the pursuit of atrocity.

JuliusGoat OP , 1 month ago

Most of all, you can act in fathomless bad faith in favor of killing, and use as rationale the exact opposite of the thing you are creating.

For example, you can send Americans into two standing wars of choice and opportunity, and say you want to do it to make Americans safe.

JuliusGoat OP , 1 month ago

Or you can stand from a position of power and claim powerlessness, and claim that those with least power and influence have all power and influence, and are to blame for the reality you have created.

But never mind; now it is 2020, and the police are rioting—not for the first time.

JuliusGoat OP , 1 month ago

I should explain the police to you. The police are our white supremacist standing army, accountable to nobody, who we use to wage war against our fellow civilians, neighbors who we treat as domestic enemies.

JuliusGoat OP , 1 month ago

You can tell the police are an army because we give them military equipment to do their jobs. You can tell they are accountable to nobody because whenever those who are supposed to have the power to check them try to do so, they respond with threats and violence.

You can tell we use the police to wage war against our neighbors because we fund them, and the more violent they get, the more money we give them. They eat over half our city budgets in many places.

JuliusGoat OP , 1 month ago

And if you want to know which of our neighbors we consider our domestic enemies, or understand why they are a white supremacist army, you just need to watch who the police menace and kill here in 2020.

JuliusGoat OP , 1 month ago

On that subject, a police officer was recently waging war in one of our nations residential occupied zones—an area that just so happens to be predominantly Black—and while doing so, he murdered a Black man named George Floyd.

Floyd begged for his life as he was being killed, but the officer killed him all the same, using practices that were standard practice for cops, we all later learned, which is how you can tell that murdering Black people is sort of standard operating protocol for police.