[This late night rambling attempt at a video reviews the murder of a black man who was doing nothing wrong in the broader context of hate crimes in America. We cannot tolerate hate crimes if we believe the second amendment preserves our right to bear arms against tyrants, especially if they are racist or bigots.
A note on statistics: This is the kind of statistical argument that I don't like to make, and I was exhausted by the time I got around to filming it. Treat the 12,000 personal hate crime estimate as a hasty calculation by proportion. The point is just that we are probably missing a large number of these, and 12,000 wouldn't be unreasonable. I also don't like the statistics available for crime in America for a number of reasons, but this is about as good as I think we can get:
Sources:
2018 FBI UCR: https://ucr.fbi.gov/hate-crime/2018
2018 BJS Full Report: https://www.bjs.gov/content/pub/pdf/cv18.pdf]
Follow up: I tried to edit the main body of this post after uploading it to 3Speak, and it looked like it worked, but it didnt save, so here I go again, putting a little bit of myself into this post.
Recently I listened to this podcast (https://reddotdistrict.podbean.com/e/ep-02-fuck-the-second-amendment/) by a guy named Mitch, from a firearms training group called "Armed Margins".. [yes im trying to onboard him..]
As a white, American, and a current member of a militia unit in Oregon, this podcast really struck a chord with me, and changed my perspective on the idea of the 2nd amendment, and the mandate of armed service levied upon able bodied males age ~17-65. I'll make a post about this podcast sometime.
This video from Walt, is one of the reason that I like him so much. He talks about what happened to Ahmaud Arbery, and the inequities faced by minorities in this country, and obviously around the globe.
In my opinion, in America, we face something I refer to as "equal opportunity oppression". The effect of this fact of life is never felt equally, it cant ever be felt equally because all of our life circumstances are unique.
I might to a vlog and follow up on this, because I want to touch upon the fact that some people when arguing against the notion of systemic racism and oppression will say that block folks commit a majority of violent crime, and that minorities in general are subject to police interaction because they commit the majority of violent crime.
I'd like you to ask yourself, if they are minorities than is it likely that the majority of the people creating laws, persecuting, prosecuting them are probably white?
I call it equal opportunity oppression, because this can happen to a 70 year old white man, when he attempted to return a lost or stolen riot helmet to the police and attempt to engage in dialogue. And this is the police response to a mid-day protest, that was likely peaceful.
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