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posted by takyon on Friday July 08 2016, @03:22PM   Printer-friendly
from the "All-lives-matter."-President-Obama dept.

Snipers in Dallas: [5] Cops Dead; [6] More Cops Wounded

The Atlantic reports:

Two gunmen shot eleven police officers in Dallas, Texas [at 8:58 PM July 7], killing at least four of them.

[...] At a Thursday night press conference, Dallas Police Department Chief David Brown said [...] officers had one of the suspects "cornered", but did not offer further details.

"Tonight, it appears that two snipers shot ten police officers from elevated positions during the protest/rally", Brown said in an initial statement. "Three officers are deceased, two are in surgery, and three are in critical condition. An intensive search for suspect is currently underway." The police department later said an eleventh officer had also been injured and a fourth officer had been killed.

[...] The shootings occurred during a protest against police killings earlier this week in Louisiana and Minnesota. Hundreds rallied in downtown Dallas, near the corner of Main Street and Lamar Street. Local news footage captured what sounds like several gunshots being fired, and the crowd scattering.

[...] No motive has yet been established and it's unclear whether the shooting was related to the protest.

The New York Times just broke the story about the latest in the police killings of black men. It seems the tide has been turned. [Five] Dallas police officers were killed tonight at a protest in that city over these shootings.

I am not surprised, nor am I particularly shocked. No doubt there will be more to come on this topic as the evening progresses. Hopefully something good comes out of this, but I am inclined to doubt it.

takyon: Some more details: One suspect was killed by an explosion intentionally caused by a police robot. He reportedly told a negotiator that he was upset about Black Lives Matter, the recent police shootings, and wanted to kill white people, especially police officers. He said he was not affiliated with any groups and acted alone. Other suspects have been arrested, and a "person of interest" (often identified as a suspect by the news media) was arrested early in the night after he was photographed with his unloaded AR-15. He handed his weapon to an officer shortly after the shootings, and later turned himself into the police for questioning.

President Obama spoke about the shootings shortly after arriving in Poland for a NATO conference. In part, he mentioned that, "When people say 'black lives matter,' that doesn't mean blue lives don't matter, it just means all lives matter — but right now the big concern is the fact that the data shows black folks are more vulnerable to these kinds of incidents [...] This isn't a matter of us comparing the value of lives. This is recognizing that there is a particular burden that is being placed on a group of our fellow citizens. And we should care about that. And we can't dismiss it. We can't dismiss it."


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  • (Score: 1, Interesting) by Anonymous Coward on Friday July 08 2016, @05:41PM

    by Anonymous Coward on Friday July 08 2016, @05:41PM (#371935)

    Yeah, that was bothersome to me as well. I'm wondering if the government is going to release a recording of that statement (ideally with enough context to make fudging it difficult), or if we're just expected to take their word on the divisive language that lumps most of America in with them as targets.

    Even if he straight up said that, nobody should take it at face value. The consciously expressed thoughts of people who are so motivated that they commit acts of political violence are generally a poor means of understanding their personal motivations. Being contemplative and analytical are traits that don't often go hand-in-hand with shooting sprees. That's more the province of hot-heads and the unstable - going out in a "blaze of glory" is usually the last step on a long path of increasingly disturbed behavior.

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  • (Score: 2) by Runaway1956 on Saturday July 09 2016, @12:45AM

    by Runaway1956 (2926) Subscriber Badge on Saturday July 09 2016, @12:45AM (#372138) Journal

    " Being contemplative and analytical are traits that don't often go hand-in-hand with shooting sprees"

    You know this - how? Maybe it would be more accurate that if any contemplative, analytical people have gone on shooting sprees, those people didn't survive to talk with psychologists and analysts.

    How many published works written by racists have you read? May I suggest the Turner Diary? How about works published by convicts? Maybe you've read everything ever written by the KKK, and the Black Panthers?

    I suggest that your claim is unsupported.

    • (Score: 0) by Anonymous Coward on Saturday July 09 2016, @01:38AM

      by Anonymous Coward on Saturday July 09 2016, @01:38AM (#372162)

      > How many published works written by racists have you read?

      It is weird you equate going on a murder spree with being a racist.
      And then you cite a bunch of racists who did not go on murder sprees.

      If all racists were spree killers we'd all be dead. And I sure as hell would not want to be living anywhere near your racist ass.

      • (Score: 3, Insightful) by Runaway1956 on Saturday July 09 2016, @02:21AM

        by Runaway1956 (2926) Subscriber Badge on Saturday July 09 2016, @02:21AM (#372180) Journal

        THIS murderer was indeed a racist. Many of the mass killers have been racists. But, whether the individual killer is racist or not, the challenge remains: how many of their published works have you read? That guy, Anders, wrote quite a bit. The claim that shooters lack introspection, that they lack the ability to communicate their reasons and goals lacks merit.

        Some of those people are thoughtful people. The establishment doesn't want to promulgate their thinking, which is anti-establishment, so you have to dig a little bit to find their thoughts.

        As for living anywhere near my "racist ass", don't worry. There is someone down the street from you who has ideas about your own worthless carcass. Maybe Michael Madison's cousin lives around the corner from you. And, Wayne Gacy's nephew lives a couple blocks over, in the other direction. There's no reason for you to feel "safe" - that's just an illusion that you allow yourself to fall into.

        • (Score: 0) by Anonymous Coward on Saturday July 09 2016, @02:44AM

          by Anonymous Coward on Saturday July 09 2016, @02:44AM (#372184)

          > THIS murderer was indeed a racist.

          Maybe. But so what? There are tens of millions of racists. You are a racist. Are you plotting a spree killing?

          > Anders, wrote quite a bit.

          And said very little. Mostly just a regurgitation of the same stuff you masturbate to.

          > The claim that shooters lack introspection, that they lack the ability to communicate their reasons and goals lacks merit.

          A focus on the perceived evils in others is literally the opposite of introspection. It is pretty much all you do, so I can see why you would like to think that counts as introspection. But damn! You are the last person here, well maybe second to the mighty butthurt who has the mentality of an insecure middle-schooler, to understand introspection.

          It is kinda creepy that you are here defending murdering racists as having deep self-knowledge. Its like you were insulted.

          • (Score: 2) by Runaway1956 on Saturday July 09 2016, @02:57AM

            by Runaway1956 (2926) Subscriber Badge on Saturday July 09 2016, @02:57AM (#372194) Journal

            You insist on proving yourself a complete fool.

            GP's post indicated that every shooter is some kind of unthinking moron. I countered that not all of them are unthinking morons. Here you come to his defense, trying to paint me as a racist, and insisting that there is nothing to learn from any of the published works of any of the shooters.

            Try pulling your head out of your arse, take a nice deep breath of fresh, oxygenated air, and THINK about what you're writing.

            Then, go look for some of those published works, and read through them. Not every shooter is an idiot. Not only that, but sometimes they do make valid points. In fact, BLM is trying to make some of the same points that some of the shooters have made. Life is unfair, injustice and corruption hammers at people on a daily basis. Go, read, try to educate yourself. Those shooters didn't spring out of some other dimension. They were born into this world, and nurtured by this world. They took their ideas from real life.

            • (Score: 0) by Anonymous Coward on Saturday July 09 2016, @04:24AM

              by Anonymous Coward on Saturday July 09 2016, @04:24AM (#372216)

              I am the GP.
              You are the one who made it about racism.
              And now your argument is just pedantics? That not 100% of spree killers have serious mental problems because I didn't interview them all?
              BFG you idiot. You are one of the least self-aware people on this site. Half your posts are so unintentionally revealing that I've actually laughed outloud out how transparent they were.

              Hell your reason for bringing all this up is so fucking transparent. If the murderers in the out-groups you hate are murderers because of their surface thoughts then your hate for them is justified. If they are just nutjobs like all the nutjobs from your favored in-groups then you might start doubting your entire hate-based worldview start thinking of them as people instead of enemies.

              • (Score: 1, Insightful) by Anonymous Coward on Saturday July 09 2016, @06:11AM

                by Anonymous Coward on Saturday July 09 2016, @06:11AM (#372256)

                Different AC here, and from my view of the GP's post...

                Being contemplative and analytical are traits that don't often go hand-in-hand with shooting sprees

                ... it seems that Runaway has made some good points, referencing written works by advocates of mass murder, and instead of trying to defend the original point, the grandparent poster resorts to throwing around buzzwords at Runaway's references. Sorry, there are no "magic words" (e.g. racist, bigot, intolerant, nutjob, crazy, hate) that automatically and by themselves invalidate reasoning, no matter how dispicable the reasoner may or may not be.