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Author Topic: AmeriPol thread  (Read 3534550 times)

nenjin

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Re: AmeriPol thread
« Reply #48495 on: May 25, 2022, 10:38:07 pm »

Yeah, a pistol and an AR-15 at the lower level is like, $700. A few paychecks at a part time job or a couple drug transactions.
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Re: AmeriPol thread
« Reply #48496 on: May 26, 2022, 02:20:57 am »

So, that nbc article about Abbott removing regulations on handguns being a democrat lie because the shooter used a long gun... NBC isn't a propaganda arm of democrats (just because FOX news is republican propaganda doesn't mean there NEEDS to be an equally propagandistic force for the democrats) and it isn't a lie. The only way I can frame this as a lie, is if one thought that since the article pointed out that handgun deregulation happened, that means that Abbott was personally responsible for the shooting, by increasing the chance that person could get a handgun. But that is a strawman. No one said that. It's a simple message that these people that continually decrease the regulations of the weapons used to mow down people are contributing to the problem. Maybe not this bill for the most recent shooting, but past and future bills for past and future (and this) shootings.

And on the point about "all lies matter"... It's very similar to the problem with people saying "all lives matter". All lives do matter, but black lives in particular are being treated as lesser in the eyes of the "justice" system. Therefore emphasis was needed on the "black" part. Much like how if there is an accident, and 10 people have a cut on a limb while another has a shard of glass in their stomach, you don't yell at the medical personnel "ALL THESE INJURIES MATTER" as they focus on the clearly more severe problem. All lies matter, but some are far, far worse. And telling others to also look at the limb cuts after they point to the pierced organ comes across as.... wrong. Not any certain type of "wrong", just a fundamental type of "wrong" that defies rationality.
« Last Edit: May 26, 2022, 02:55:12 am by Micro102 »
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Starver

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Re: AmeriPol thread
« Reply #48497 on: May 28, 2022, 04:01:58 am »

In an (almost suspiciously) tailor-made event to help the gun-lobby, a man who apparently shouldn't have had an AR-15-like (unlike the school shooter, who totally was allowed to) tried to shoot up a birthday party in Charleston, West Virginia, after an admonishment that he'd driven too fast on the road where children had been playing. But it was all Ok... a woman quicklh shot him dead with her own handgun. She is not being charged.

(Also earlier some decunct reality-show star opined that instead of helping Ukraine against his friend you should spend the allocated money to make US schools safer. He said it the the NRA, who cheered, so obviously the thinking there is to arm every child from kindergarten upwards, to overcome the failings (separately) highlighted with the police response in this latest (for now) case. Par for the course. Those who are convinced of their right approach will stay convinced of their right approach. Though in this case the person speaking once did have some say on when the purse-strings are loosened, and never did much of anything that wasn't just "leave well alone".)
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Vector

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Re: AmeriPol thread
« Reply #48498 on: May 28, 2022, 10:42:36 am »

So... yeah. New entry in the top 10 deadliest school shootings. Latest count I've seen is 21 dead, 3 adult, 18 elementary school kids, in a texas attack. Shooter was 18, also dead at this point.

Actually engaged cops prior to killing anyone, apparently didn't do much to stop them. Information's fairly sparse, still, near as I can tell. Likely will be for a bit. Fucked up as it ever is :-\

To update:

Quote from: New York Times
UVALDE, Texas — Furtively, speaking in a whisper, a fourth-grade girl dialed the police. Around her, in Room 112 at Robb Elementary School, were the motionless bodies of her classmates and scores of spent bullet casings fired by a gunman who had already been inside the school for half an hour.

She whispered to a 911 operator, just after noon, that she was in the classroom with the gunman. She called back again. And again. “Please send the police now,” she begged.

But they were already there, waiting in a school hallway just outside. And they had been there for more than an hour.

The police officers held off as they listened to sporadic gunfire from behind the door, ordered by the commander at the scene not to rush the pair of connected classrooms where the gunman had locked himself inside and begun shooting shortly after 11:30 a.m.

“It was the wrong decision, period,” the director of the state police, Steven C. McCraw, said on Friday after reading from the transcripts of children’s calls to 911 and from a timeline of the police inaction during nearly 90 minutes of horror at the elementary school in Uvalde, Texas.

After days of shifting explanations and conflicting accounts, the disclosures answered many of the basic questions about how the massacre had taken place. But they raised the even more painful possibility that had the police done more, and faster, not all of those who died — 19 children and two teachers — would have lost their lives.

The frank and sudden revelation by Mr. McCraw that a police commander decided not to go inside the classroom even as the gunman continued shooting brought forth an eruption of shouts and emotional questioning. At times, Mr. McCraw struggled to be heard. At others, he appeared overcome, his voice breaking.

Gov. Greg Abbott of Texas, who earlier in the week had said the police “showed amazing courage by running toward gunfire,” said on Friday at a news conference in Uvalde that he had been “misled” about the events and the police response, adding that he was “absolutely livid.”

Mr. Abbott, who hours earlier abandoned plans to appear at a National Rifle Association convention in Houston, told reporters that state lawmakers would review the tragedy and determine what went wrong. “Do we expect laws to come out of this devastating crime? The answer is yes,” he said.

To the children inside Robb Elementary School, Tuesday began as a day of celebrations and special treats — movies in classrooms, photos with family in front of a glittery curtain and award ceremonies for students finishing their year in two days, as relatives proudly gripped their hands as they walked down the hallways.

Gemma Lopez had gym class that morning, and an awards ceremony. She watched “The Jungle Cruise” with her fourth-grade classmates in Room 108. Some of the students finished up work, others played around, “doing whatever we do,” as she put it.

Then she heard loud popping in the distance, like firecrackers. She realized something was wrong because she saw police outside the classroom window. And the popping grew louder.

“Everyone was scared and everything, and I told them to be quiet,” Gemma, 10, said. One of her classmates thought it might be a prank and laughed. Gemma said she had hushed her. They had done drills for this. She turned out the classroom lights, as she had been taught to do.

“I heard a lot more of the gunshots, and then I was crying a little bit,” she said, “and my best friend Sophie was also crying right next to me.”

The 18-year-old gunman, who crashed his grandmother’s pickup truck at 11:28 a.m. in a ditch by the school, began by firing outside — more than 20 times, first at bystanders and then at classroom windows. A Uvalde school district police officer arrived at the scene but did not see the gunman and drove past him.

Minutes later, the gunman was inside, pulling open a side door that should have been locked but had been propped open by a teacher who had gone outside to retrieve her cellphone.

Jasmine Carrillo, 29, was working in the cafeteria with about 40 second-graders and two teachers when the attack began. The lights dimmed — part of a schoolwide lockdown that had gone into effect.

Once he entered the fourth-grade building, Ms. Carrillo said, the shooter banged and kicked on the door of her 10-year-old son Mario’s classroom, demanding to be let in. But he could not open the locked door.

Instead, he moved to others.

In the connected classrooms, Room 111 and Room 112, a pair of teachers, Eva Mireles and Irma Garcia, had also been showing a movie, “Lilo & Stitch,” as the students finished up their lessons. One of the teachers moved to close the door and seal the classroom from the hallway. But the gunman was already there.

Miah Cerrillo, 11, watched as her teacher backed into the classroom, and the gunman followed. He shot one teacher first, and then the other. She said he shot many students in her classroom, and then went to the adjoining one and opened fire, said her grandfather, Jose Veloz, 71, relaying the girl’s account.

Then he began shooting wildly.

The terrifying echo of at least 100 gunshots rattled through the school as children in the classrooms and both of the teachers there were shot and fell to the ground. It was 11:33 a.m.

Not all of the children inside were killed in that horrifying moment. Several survived and huddled in fear next to their limp friends. One of the children fell on Miah’s chest as she lay on the ground, her grandfather said. Terrified he would return to her classroom, Miah said, she took the blood of a classmate who fell dead and rubbed it all over herself. Then she played dead herself.

Two minutes after the gunman first entered the pair of classrooms, several police officers from the Uvalde Police Department rushed into the school. A pair of officers approached the locked door to the classrooms as gunfire could be heard inside. The two were struck — graze wounds, as their injuries would later be described — as bullets pierced the door and hit them in the hallway.

Minutes passed. Miah heard the gunman go into the room next door and put on “really sad music,” as she described it to her family.

Inside the room, the gunman fired 16 more shots. More officers arrived outside. By noon, there were 19 officers from different agencies in the hallways, and many more outside the school.

By 12:10 p.m., one of the students phoning 911 reported that eight or nine students were still alive, Mr. McCraw said.

Parents gathered near the grounds and around Uvalde, a close-knit community of 15,000 west of San Antonio, searching desperately for any word of their children inside, increasingly distraught at the silence of texts sent and not replied to.

“I prayed with four ladies that everything would be all right,” said Lupe Leija, 50, whose 8-year-old son, Samuel, was inside. In the midst of the pandemonium, his wife, Claudia, sent their child’s teacher a text: “Kids OK?”

In less than a minute, she got the response that she wanted: “Yes, we are.”

Other parents were increasingly angry, urging the officers who appeared to be milling about to end the shooting that they could plainly see and hear was still going on.

But the commander at the scene, Chief Pete Arredondo of the Uvalde school district police department, determined that the nature of the situation did not call for officers to rush in, as active shooter trainings have prescribed for decades, since the massacre at Columbine High School in 1999.

Mr. McCraw said the commander had determined that the gunman was no longer an active shooter, but a barricaded suspect — “that we had time, there was no kids at risk,” he said. The commander ordered up shields and other specialized tactical gear to enter the room.

Through the long, excruciating minutes, they waited for it.

“They were there without proper equipment,” said Javier Cazares, who arrived in anguish at the elementary school, panicked for his daughter, Jackie Cazares, who was trapped inside. He watched as the shields were brought in slowly and not at the same time. “One guy came in with one and minutes later, another one came in,” he said.

Chief Arredondo did not respond to requests for comment on Friday.

By 12:15 p.m., specialized officers from the Border Patrol arrived at the school after driving about 40 minutes from where they had been stationed near the border with Mexico.

The federal agents arrived to a scene of chaos — people pulling children out of windows while the local police, carrying only handguns and a few rifles, were trying to secure a perimeter. The specially trained agents did not understand why they were left to wait, a law enforcement official said.

At 12:19 p.m., another girl called from Room 111, but quickly hung up when another student told her to. Two minutes later, there was another call, and three shots could be heard.

More time passed. Another call came to 911 from one of the two girls at 12:47 p.m. By then, the children had been trapped with the gunman for over an hour.

The girl in Room 112 implored: “Please send the police now,” according to the transcript read by Mr. McCraw.

A few minutes later, at around 12:50 p.m., the specially trained officers from the Border Patrol opened the locked door with keys from a school janitor and burst into the room,  firing 27 times inside the classroom, and killing the gunman.

Another eight spent cartridges were found in the hallway, fired by law enforcement. During the course of the massacre, the gunman fired 142 times, Mr. McCraw said, using an AR-15-style rifle, one of two he had purchased several days earlier with a debit card, just after his 18th birthday.

Jackie, who always wanted to be the center of attention, the “little diva” to her family, died in the shooting, alongside her classmate and cousin, Annabelle Rodriguez, a quiet, honor-roll student.

Miah, the 11-year-old whose classmate died beside her, survived, as did both of the children who had quietly called 911.

But Miah’s family has been unable to hug her because of the bullet fragments embedded in her back and in the back of her head, said an aunt, Kimberly Veloz. She still needs to see a specialist in San Antonio to remove them, but she does not want to leave the house, she said.

“She still thinks he’s going to come and get her,” Ms. Veloz said. “We told her that he’s dead. But she does not understand.”

Mario, the 10-year-old whose mother was working in the cafeteria, has refused to eat since Tuesday and is unable to sleep at night.

The academic year in Uvalde is over now, but Mario’s mother, Ms. Carrillo, said her son, afraid of another attack, does not want to go back to school.

She has had to be honest with him, that the friends he made at Robb Elementary, his friend Jose Flores, the schoolmates he expected to see again in the fall, were all gone.

“They are with God now,” she told him.


The police were outside the building for an hour, tased parents who wanted to break into the school and help their children, received numerous calls to 911 from inside the classroom with the gunman where gunshots could be heard on the line, and waited to engage the killer until they thought "no more children were at risk" (meaning in this context that the shooter had finished killing every single person in the room). The police said that they were afraid of being shot.

To be clear they had body armor and guns and so on. Nobody stopped the situation until a border patrol agent heard the radio chatter and ten minutes later went in, found the guy, and killed him.

It has never, ever been so clear to me that the police are useless. Worse than useless.
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Frumple

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Re: AmeriPol thread
« Reply #48499 on: May 28, 2022, 11:45:16 am »

And for extra emphasis on that worse-than-useless, the local PD was apparently getting like 40% of the town's budget. Had their own fucking swat team and everything. Nearly half of what that town was investing into itself was going to the police, and, welp.
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Micro102

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Re: AmeriPol thread
« Reply #48500 on: May 28, 2022, 01:23:32 pm »

And it seems that the police were allowed to enter to get their own children out, while the parents were tased and pepper sprayed.
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Lidku

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Re: AmeriPol thread
« Reply #48501 on: May 28, 2022, 01:41:48 pm »

I love how Fox News is completely turning on the Uvalde police, when it was not the case before. lol
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Loud Whispers

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Re: AmeriPol thread
« Reply #48502 on: May 28, 2022, 01:58:03 pm »

I love how Fox News is completely turning on the Uvalde police, when it was not the case before. lol
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Vector

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Re: AmeriPol thread
« Reply #48503 on: May 28, 2022, 02:11:37 pm »

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Quarque

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Re: AmeriPol thread
« Reply #48504 on: May 28, 2022, 02:29:40 pm »

Remarkable how they manage to pervert the noble cause of protecting children.
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Dunamisdeos

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Re: AmeriPol thread
« Reply #48505 on: May 28, 2022, 02:35:35 pm »

I love how Fox News is completely turning on the Uvalde police, when it was not the case before. lol
Even they can recognise a lost cause

Proof that they've been lying all along is the enemy, and must be attacked. Simple as that.

Also, a Virginia lawyer is filing a restraining order against Barnes and Noble for selling Gender Queer.

First of all, that's ridiculous in a legal sense (and any other sense, naturally). Unless I'm mistaken there are no laws in VA regarding the sale of reading material and the like to minors. At least, I've never heard of any, and I didn't find any with a couple of quick Googles. I can only assume they mean to sue under federal obscenity law. Second, I'm not familiar with that book, what is it?


This could be a much more important case than a simple jackass-sues-over-his-moral-indignation. If brought to court under the pretense of federal law, it could serve as a precedent for establishing LGBTQ (one way or the other) as a legally obscene concept or idea. Conversely, it could establish a precedent as legally inoffensive.
« Last Edit: May 28, 2022, 03:21:44 pm by Dunamisdeos »
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Frumple

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Re: AmeriPol thread
« Reply #48506 on: May 28, 2022, 03:49:20 pm »

I'm roughly 90% sure LGBT stuff's been tried under obscenity laws already, probably several times given how persistent bigots are on the subject, with the obvious results of the general subject not qualifying.

The issue with that would be that the current conservative majority in the SCOTUS largely doesn't give a single sodden shit about precedent, so, y'know.
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Vector

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Re: AmeriPol thread
« Reply #48507 on: May 28, 2022, 04:56:43 pm »

Yeah, any GLBT content usually receives a much higher "maturity" rating than comparable heterosexual content and even romance with no sexual content whatsoever is considered inappropriate for elementary or middle schoolers.

(e.g. a genderswapped version of a fairy tale, to be clear how little sexual content I'm talking about).

Obscenity laws were almost made for us, y'know?
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"The question of the usefulness of poetry arises only in periods of its decline, while in periods of its flowering, no one doubts its total uselessness." - Boris Pasternak

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Dunamisdeos

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Re: AmeriPol thread
« Reply #48508 on: June 01, 2022, 04:31:46 pm »

Have there been any successful cases under current law?

I mean obviously people cite that all the time for this crap, but this one could have federal implications. I admit I'm not knowledgeable about previous cases not mentioned on the official .govs.
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Re: AmeriPol thread
« Reply #48509 on: June 01, 2022, 06:23:14 pm »

Another day, another mass shooting in America. This time at a Tulsa hospital.
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