Within hours of the tragic shootings in Aurora, Colorado, someone on the Internet posted this message (I'm not reposting it -- the original message -- here because despite the attempt to obscure this person's name, it still shows through and I don't wish to be responsible for her -- it's always a her, isn't it? -- receiving threats or anything else untoward):
"I think America needs to redefine what is a thug/gangsta. America is scared of people who look like Trayvon Martin Yet James Holmes (Colorado massacre), Dylan Klebold, Eric Harris (Columbine), Sung Hui-Cho (VA Tech) looked completely harmless living in everyday suburbia and terrorized hundreds of people. I'm just sayin'."
Now, to be fair, there is a rather large grain of truth in this, however, since the statement was made without a view towards it's truthfulness so much as to it's utility in continuing to portray Black America as the victim of bad publicity and systemic racism, vis-a-vis violent crime, it's not exactly an objective truth..In this regard, objective truth does not matter as much as perception. In fact, in all matters related to race in America today, truth flies right out the window, and perception trumps fact every time.
The implication of that statement is that white men are ticking time bombs with access to veritable arsenals, but an unfair criminal justice system picks only on innocent black kids in hoodies, and for no reason whatsoever.
This is, of course, patently false. In any case, I'm sure the original poster's sociology professor is so happy she could shit. Someone paid attention in her class...finally!
Anyway, the idea that only white men are serial killers/murderers or mass killers is patently false, and so easy to disprove that rather than waste time and bandwidth, I will simply ask you to Google it for yourself. Suffice to say that you will not have heard of many of the results you get (because the American media is dedicated to presenting the White Male as the most violent beast in America), and also because in many cases, it is difficult to actually know the race of the suspect because reporters often make a concerted effort to obscure this fact. You'll only know when they bring the dude out for a perp walk, or when he's about to go on trial.
Second of all, Black Men commit mass murders and serial killings all the time. While we call our White Mass Killers "Psychotic breaks", "Schizophrenics", "Deeply Troubled Men", these black killers usually have a title, like President for Life, or the individual crimes are subsumed within a larger one, say, 800,000 people slaughtered by club and machete in Rwanda, perhaps a million more in Darfur, the casualties of religiously-based terrorism in Africa.
I can hear my racial critics now: you're being being unfair, because we're talking about a crime here in America; not some tribal ethnic cleansing in Africa. Black folks in America labor under a totally different sort of injustice, and therefore should be held to a different standard.
Actually, I'm using your standard: if I (White Guy Who's Never Owned a Slave, A Plantation, Nor Ever Killed An Indian with Smallpox and Cheap Whiskey) can be held responsible for the sins of the past by virtue of having the same skin color as Columbus or Cortez -- and made to pay in real, usually monetary and political, terms for their crimes -- then you should also be held responsible by future generations for the crimes committed by people who have the same skin color. After all, according to you, true guilt spans nationalities, ethnicity, and generations to hold everyone responsible for the actions of a few.
But then again, if we did that (applied the standard equally), we wouldn't have the double standard upon which much of the racial grievance industry is built upon, and Je$$e Jackson would be waiting tables or mopping floors. But, I digress...
But let's take a look at African-Americans, specifically, just to be fair.
Very few black men go berserk and shoot up movie theaters and school buildings, this is true. However, they are far more likely to kill -- and mostly one another -- in the course of committing other crimes, and the majority of the criminal class in America (and by this I mean convicted) is both black and recidivist (you can look that up, too) which means, in effect, that for most with experience of the criminal justice system, at least their first murder is (maybe) simply a matter of time.
I guess, in a way, White Men kill in quantity, but Black Men kill as an afterthought; a way to silence a witness, an accident, the result of ineptitude, of faulty gun handling, of bad aim (it never ceases to amaze me just how many innocent bystanders -- in their own houses and beds! -- are shot every year by Urban Youths who can't shoot straight).
There were 51 murders in Chicago in the month of May, 2012, and the victims were (mostly) African-American, and probably killed by other African-Americans, but no...we don't want to talk about that...we want to talk about how only White Men kill in great numbers in a single event.
Just to prove that White Men don't have the market on depravity cornered, you can read about the two Chicago Gangstas who killed a man, and then probably would have gotten away with the crime, except that they posted a video of it on YouTube. This should not only prove that black men can, indeed, be every bit as depraved as your typical Caucasian psychotic break, but they're heart-breakingly stupid as well.
In fact, according to the FBI (these are 2010 figures) the most violent, and deadly, segment of the population is African-American men between the ages of 18 and 24. They may not kill 10, 20, or 50 people at one sensational go, but they kill more people over all.
Besides, James Holmes had something else your typical Black mass killer doesn't have: an IQ over 150. Do we make the case that only geniuses are potential time bombs, too?
Now that that particular objection -- using a tragedy to make an ultimately easily disprovable, high-school debating-society political point (i.e. Black People are unfairly treated) -- is out of the way, let's get to the real issue of Aurora, Colorado.
And that is that, at some point, we're going to find out that James Holmes was a certifiable nut case, it was known to his family, the police and local mental health officials, and no one did a damned thing to get him any help. I don't mean lock-him-up help, but real medical treatment that might have done some good and saved some lives. The real tragedy of Aurora, Colorado -- and it's one that is consistently repeated, because these sorts of events continue to occur -- is that the mental health system is in even worse shape than the overall health Care System is.
So long as we continue to concentrate scarce medical resources on keeping elderly cancer victims alive, or ensuring that illegal aliens can give birth to anchor babies in clean delivery rooms and then recover in bedbug-and-whooping-cough isolation wards, and figure out how to put tits on a guy who believes he's a woman trapped in a man's body, the Mental Health Care System will continue to break down while we argue over who kills more people, Black or White, and why we should have more gun control laws.
Priorities, people.
All of these people -- whether it's Columbine, Virginia Tech, or Aurora -- are dead mostly because the Mental Health System doesn't work, and neither the Law nor the Legal System are empowered to take the truly dangerous off the streets for their own good, and our safety.
UPDATE: Apologies: I've had to correct some grammar from the original post.
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