This idea that only white people are allowed to avail themselves of the claim of self-defense, or that they can largely just do whatever and get away with it by claiming self-defense, is absurd: a thread.
Jaleel Stallings was acquitted of multiple attempted murder charges related to him shooting at several St. Paul police officers last summer. He [reasonably] claimed self-defense and that he had no idea these guys were cops.
It took the jury only four hours instead of four days to acquit Stephen Spencer of murder in a white man's death during a race-related dispute. Spencer claimed self-defense.
Timothy Simpkins, an 18-year-old who shot three people with an illegally possessed gun at a Texas high school, is literally out on bond right now and claiming he shot in self-defense. Honestly, he has a viable claim wrt to the intended target.
Jesus Lima. Prosecutors argued he was the aggressor who shot a man he'd previously threatened. The jury sided with Lima, who said he was attacked by the man and four others and tried to retreat.
And there are plenty of white people who have been convicted of super questionable offenses where I thought self-defense was a viable claim. Case in point, Michael Strickland: oregonlive.com/portland/2017/…
Oh man, the amount of goalpost moving happening in response to this tweet is FUN. Like I'm very glad *you, specifically* have more nuanced arguments than "this never happens for black defendants" but let me tell you a lot of well-followed Twitter blue checks absolutely don't.
"But Amy, these 50ish cases are just anecdotes that don't address very obvious racial disparities in the system" like NO YOU DUNDERHEADS I know I literally have multiple threads on this thanks for refuting an argument I'm not making by supporting a premise I'm not debating.
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The interesting part about the last sentence is that it's so particularly true in the case of the Tucson shooting that it undermines the argument it's just "about the guns." Loughner was both an abuser of illegal substances, as well as clearly mentally ill and dangerous, and everyone knew it. His parents were incredibly worried about it. At the insistence of police, they took away his shotgun. On their own initiative, they kept disabling his car at night so that he couldn't easily leave. But the state never took action to ensure he couldn't just buy a new gun, which he did. His parents never really pushed the issue about a mental health evaluation (though I'm not unsympathetic to the difficulties of forcing your adult son to do anything). It's not that he fell into some grey area where there wasn't anything anyone could do under existing mental health frameworks - he should have been a clear candidate for involuntary inpatient commitment. Of all mass shooters, Loughner's stands out with the Parkland shooter as one of the most clear cut cases of "holy cow why did no one ever officially follow up or intervene." And that's not actually a story about guns. It's a story about our mental health system, where people who are clearly schizophrenic and dangerous are allowed to spiral sans appropriate intervention until they reach a point of acute crisis.
No, respectfully, the through lines are 100% the heated political rhetoric and the Secret Service's abject failures. Without those factors, the guns are utterly irrelevant to the equation. Guns in vacuum are just an object. The political rhetoric and security failures create the context in which a person desires to and is capable of using that tool for horrific purposes.
Unrelated - it's both weird and very telling that she reduces her characterization of the guns down to just "semiautomatic weapons." Not "weapons of war" or "assault-style weapons." No, the baddie here is basically every modern firearm. Normally they aren't so brazen in saying the quiet part out loud, but we're definitely seeing it more often.
The investigation "identified several critical failures and other breakdowns" during the response and refers to "cascading failures of leadership, decision-making, tactics, policy, and training that contributed to those failures and breakdowns."
The most significant failure? First responders treated a clear active shooter scenario--where generally accepted practice is to "immediately engage the subject...if necessary, bypassing injured victims and placing themselves in harm's way"--as a barricaded subject scenario.
Can we take a minute to appreciate how many women have protected themselves and others with firearms in the last two or so weeks? It's basically a highlight real of just how important the right to keep and bear arms is for us, too. Tip of the DGU iceberg, but important:
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Aug. 11, Tucson (AZ) - A woman living by herself fatally shot a would-be intruder who kept trying to break into her home despite knowing she was armed.
Aug. 11, Pottstown (PA) - A woman shot and wounded the father of her child after he assaulted her, leaving various injuries. He not only had an active restraining order against him, but also had active warrants for violating that restraining order.
(1) She was 30 weeks pregnant, which would have been illegal in most states pre-Roe [and most of the world], and is 20 weeks past the FDA's approved usage timeline for abortion pills.
(2) She wasn't charged under the abortion law. She was charged with concealing the remains.
(3) Her mother is charged with *performing* the abortion after 20 weeks, as well as with performing the abortion without a medical license.
(4) Doctors lose their licenses all the time for far less egregious things than prescribing abortion pills at 30 weeks.
(5) Survival rates for babies born at 30 weeks are somewhere between 95-98% in developed countries. The baby has vocal chords, fingerprints, fully developed lungs, and even eyelashes. It can open its eyes and blink. It can grasp the umbilical cord with its tiny hands.
Case in point - a Richmond teenager was fatally shot in Nov. 2021. Limited info, except for a March 2022 article detailing that his family was upset no arrests had been made. That could mean many things, including a lack of suspects.
But at some point between Nov. 2021 and today, the police determined this shooting was actually a justified homicide. They either told no one, or no one cared enough to report it. Can't find a public disclosure of that determination. If it exists, it flew under everyone's radar.