Saturday, January 14, 2017
RE TERROR AND RACE
This is Steve Winsor's comment re DK current post:
"One aspect of police procedure seems to create many opportunities for officers to fire their weapons. It is the 'I felt threatened' thing that police feel they can fall back on for protection from grand jury investigations.
"Saw this in the Jerry Waller death in Fort Worth several years ago. Two cops were called to a wealthy area of Fort Worth to investigate an alarm at night. The two pulled up to the wrong house and walked up the driveway. The owner of the house (a 75 year old local businessman) heard commotion and, grabbing a pistol, went out into his garage (the our door was open).
"The owner and the police conversed...one of the two cops (both were in their first year) quickly fired his 9mm 8 or 9 times and hit the homeowner (Jerry Waller) with bullets 6 or 7 times. The man's wife came out into the garage...saw her husband gunned down. She was quickly escorted out of the garage by the police (ostensibley to re-arrange the crime scene as needed, it is alleged).
"Irony: the cop who filled the homeowner with lead was trained by his father, who was a captain in the Fort Worth police department...and was in charge of the training division.
The cop who did the shooting claims he 'felt threatened'...and thus pulled the trigger.
"The Fort Worth grand jury declined to charge the officer. The 'felt threatened' routine worked. An innocent man was gunned down by a trigger-happy youn cop who was not even at the correct address. The family is in a 'wrongful death' lawsuit with the city ($6 million).
"It should never have happened. The cop did not need to open fire. The man kilkled did not fire his weapon...and was killed in his own garage. Oh...and he was white." SW
Let's talk about a few reasons besides those which Professor Kaiser and Winsor have referred to.
One important point is that America is much more dangerous than it was even forty years ago. Gun control not only failed but failed miserably to curb a trend toward arming the average citizen. There are reasons for this that go back to the founding, and to principles which seem to demand that all Americans should, if they choose, own and carry openly guns of all kinds.
Another trigger for greater gun ownership, among both whites and blacks, was racial unrest, which led to inner city violence, usually in ghettoes, where white organized crime made most of its money on poor blacks, and often worst in the North and West due to massive black migration only in the mid 20th Century from the South. I call it late fall out from the Civil War. The Great Migration Professor Kaiser refers to was itself a symptom of the malaise into which the South was thrust from the Civil War until now really. The Great Migration was a symptom of what I call the Morgenthau Plan, in effect, for the South after the War. It has lasted until today, and will still hound Americans long into the future.
I will augment this account as I go along...
Another important point is that the problem of black white race relations was never solved. It was never really even properly addressed politically.
Until after the Civil War, they had no social or political relations, really. Social and political relations were among whites only. They did have property relations. In this context, it is important to note that white servants, an enormous population in colonial America and existing there until the 19th Century, did have social and political relations with other whites, but these were attenuated. For most purposes, they were treated more or less like black slaves, did much the same field work very often, bought and sold, transferred, with tenuous legal remedies for a wronged servant.
Lincoln, and most all Northern thinkers and politicians, had planned transportation for blacks as a possible and likely solution.
No one, until after the Emancipation Proclamation and the Civil War, ever considered social and political equality, anywhere in the US as a solution.
That solution was imposed on the South by Republican Radicals after Lincoln's death. It was in fact a superiority of blacks over whites, under Reconstruction, rather than equality, in order to buttress the Republican Party machine after the war. The South, under Reconstruction, controlled by Radical Republicans in the North, and run by Northern scalawags and carpetbaggers manipulating freed negroes as Southern political leaders, was really what Bobbitt has called a ' State of Terror '. Cf Terror And Consent; Randall, The Civil War and Reconstruction.
Lynching started out, during the American Rebellion, as a way of dealing with white Royalists in Virginia. Congress later passed legislation protecting those who had done so...
An important issue that is seldom mentioned, in connection with the developments above, about racial conflict continuing, and the average American now often being armed. I will add this: ' armed and dangerous ', because the average American, or the rich or poor American, armed, white or black, is also clearly also dangerous, if to no one else than to himself, whether he is violent or not, whether he is at home or not, whether he wants to be considered by his fellow Americans, or by the police, as dangerous or not. The mere fact that he is armed, in my judgment, renders him inherently dangerous to anyone with whom he comes into contact, police or not. He usually knows very little about the dangers and disadvantages of being armed; he has not had much training in his weapon. He is often afraid or at least apprehensive, or he is a swaggerer, or he would not have bought one in the first place. And so on. He is armed and dangerous although he often has never committed a crime above a parking ticket. Some have.
The American police have now known this for a long time, from hard experience with any American, armed or not, rich or poor white or black. He has little or no respect for any authority whatsoever. The police, for a variety of reasons, engender little or no inherent respect from American citizens. Sometimes scorn.
See Randall Collins' recent post on the war between cops and blacks.
Lynching is now a thing on both sides of that. One is reminded of vigillantism more in general.
We had a lot of white on white vigillantism and lynching, in the territories, over the slavery issue, such as the virtual war in Bleeding Kansas in the 1850s, during the long run up to the Civil War.
"Saw this in the Jerry Waller death in Fort Worth several years ago. Two cops were called to a wealthy area of Fort Worth to investigate an alarm at night. The two pulled up to the wrong house and walked up the driveway. The owner of the house (a 75 year old local businessman) heard commotion and, grabbing a pistol, went out into his garage (the our door was open).
"The owner and the police conversed...one of the two cops (both were in their first year) quickly fired his 9mm 8 or 9 times and hit the homeowner (Jerry Waller) with bullets 6 or 7 times. The man's wife came out into the garage...saw her husband gunned down. She was quickly escorted out of the garage by the police (ostensibley to re-arrange the crime scene as needed, it is alleged).
"Irony: the cop who filled the homeowner with lead was trained by his father, who was a captain in the Fort Worth police department...and was in charge of the training division.
The cop who did the shooting claims he 'felt threatened'...and thus pulled the trigger.
"The Fort Worth grand jury declined to charge the officer. The 'felt threatened' routine worked. An innocent man was gunned down by a trigger-happy youn cop who was not even at the correct address. The family is in a 'wrongful death' lawsuit with the city ($6 million).
"It should never have happened. The cop did not need to open fire. The man kilkled did not fire his weapon...and was killed in his own garage. Oh...and he was white." SW
Let's talk about a few reasons besides those which Professor Kaiser and Winsor have referred to.
One important point is that America is much more dangerous than it was even forty years ago. Gun control not only failed but failed miserably to curb a trend toward arming the average citizen. There are reasons for this that go back to the founding, and to principles which seem to demand that all Americans should, if they choose, own and carry openly guns of all kinds.
Another trigger for greater gun ownership, among both whites and blacks, was racial unrest, which led to inner city violence, usually in ghettoes, where white organized crime made most of its money on poor blacks, and often worst in the North and West due to massive black migration only in the mid 20th Century from the South. I call it late fall out from the Civil War. The Great Migration Professor Kaiser refers to was itself a symptom of the malaise into which the South was thrust from the Civil War until now really. The Great Migration was a symptom of what I call the Morgenthau Plan, in effect, for the South after the War. It has lasted until today, and will still hound Americans long into the future.
I will augment this account as I go along...
Another important point is that the problem of black white race relations was never solved. It was never really even properly addressed politically.
Until after the Civil War, they had no social or political relations, really. Social and political relations were among whites only. They did have property relations. In this context, it is important to note that white servants, an enormous population in colonial America and existing there until the 19th Century, did have social and political relations with other whites, but these were attenuated. For most purposes, they were treated more or less like black slaves, did much the same field work very often, bought and sold, transferred, with tenuous legal remedies for a wronged servant.
Lincoln, and most all Northern thinkers and politicians, had planned transportation for blacks as a possible and likely solution.
No one, until after the Emancipation Proclamation and the Civil War, ever considered social and political equality, anywhere in the US as a solution.
That solution was imposed on the South by Republican Radicals after Lincoln's death. It was in fact a superiority of blacks over whites, under Reconstruction, rather than equality, in order to buttress the Republican Party machine after the war. The South, under Reconstruction, controlled by Radical Republicans in the North, and run by Northern scalawags and carpetbaggers manipulating freed negroes as Southern political leaders, was really what Bobbitt has called a ' State of Terror '. Cf Terror And Consent; Randall, The Civil War and Reconstruction.
Lynching started out, during the American Rebellion, as a way of dealing with white Royalists in Virginia. Congress later passed legislation protecting those who had done so...
An important issue that is seldom mentioned, in connection with the developments above, about racial conflict continuing, and the average American now often being armed. I will add this: ' armed and dangerous ', because the average American, or the rich or poor American, armed, white or black, is also clearly also dangerous, if to no one else than to himself, whether he is violent or not, whether he is at home or not, whether he wants to be considered by his fellow Americans, or by the police, as dangerous or not. The mere fact that he is armed, in my judgment, renders him inherently dangerous to anyone with whom he comes into contact, police or not. He usually knows very little about the dangers and disadvantages of being armed; he has not had much training in his weapon. He is often afraid or at least apprehensive, or he is a swaggerer, or he would not have bought one in the first place. And so on. He is armed and dangerous although he often has never committed a crime above a parking ticket. Some have.
The American police have now known this for a long time, from hard experience with any American, armed or not, rich or poor white or black. He has little or no respect for any authority whatsoever. The police, for a variety of reasons, engender little or no inherent respect from American citizens. Sometimes scorn.
See Randall Collins' recent post on the war between cops and blacks.
Lynching is now a thing on both sides of that. One is reminded of vigillantism more in general.
We had a lot of white on white vigillantism and lynching, in the territories, over the slavery issue, such as the virtual war in Bleeding Kansas in the 1850s, during the long run up to the Civil War.
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