U.S.

Gun violence kills 160 as holiday weekend exposes tale of 'two Americas'

Joanna Walters in New York and agencies

July 7, 2020, 5:00 AM EDT

Photograph: Erik S Lesser/EPA

A six-year-old in Philadelphia, a seven-year-old in Chicago, an eight-year-old in Atlanta, a 15-year-old in New York, all shot. Community cries of “enough is enough”.
Neighborhoods in some of the largest US cities erupted in gun violence over the Fourth of July weekend, killing an estimated 160 people and leaving more than 500 wounded from Friday night to Sunday.
Georgia’s governor, Brian Kemp, declared a state of emergency on Monday after 31 people were shot and five killed over the weekend in Atlanta. He authorized 1,000 national guard troops to “protect state property and patrol our streets”.
Related: 'There are two pandemics': Chicago's gun violence persists amid lockdown

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But Chicago saw the worst violence in one of the bloodiest holiday weekends in recent memory, ending with 17 people fatally shot including a seven-year-old girl and a 14-year-old boy and 63 more wounded, an increase of five shootings on the high figures that had marred the holiday weekend the previous year.

Chicago police investigate the scene where a seven-year-old girl was fatally shot in the Austin neighborhood of Chicago on Friday. Photograph: Tyler LaRiviere/AP

Despite an effort that included an additional 1,200 officers on the streets and pleas from the city’s mayor, Lori Lightfoot, for residents not to reverse limited progress that had been made against the epidemic of gun violence, Lightfoot lamented the children whose “hopes and dreams were ended by the barrel of a gun”.
The city’s south and west sides have seen worse weekends this year, however, and a one-year-old and a three-year-old were killed during recent shootings. The rising violence prompted Donald Trump to write to Lightfoot and the Illinois governor, JB Priztker, both Democrats, accusing them of receiving more than $1bn in special federal funding for anti-crime measures and coronavirus relief that was “not being turned into results”.
“Your lack of leadership … continues to fail the people you have sworn to protect,” the letter said.
Lightfoot dismissed Trump’s letter as “all talk, little action”.

Secoriea Turner, eight, was killed near a Wendy’s in Atlanta. Photograph: Atlanta Police Department Handout/EPA

The shooting death of an eight-year-old girl, Secoriea Turner, in Atlanta, prompted the mayor, Keisha Lance Bottoms, to call for justice while noting the shadow such street violence casts over the huge and largely peaceful Black Lives Matter protests against racism and police brutality.
“Enough is enough,” Bottoms said. “If you want people to take us seriously and you don’t want us to lose this movement, we can’t lose each other.”
The shooting happened near the Wendy’s restaurant where a Black man, Rayshard Brooks, was killed by a white police officer in June.
“She was only eight years old,” Charmaine Turner said of her daughter Secoriea. “Right now, she would have been on TikTok, dancing on her phone.”
Atlanta police said two other people were killed and more than 20 injured in gunfire during the holiday weekend.
In New York, a series of shootings on Saturday and Sunday claimed at least nine lives and wounded 41 others in a rise in incidents in some neighborhoods. A 15-year-old boy was wounded in the Bronx.
And in Philadelphia, a six-year-old boy died of a gunshot wound amid five fatal shootings in about five hours on Sunday afternoon, police said.
The Trace, a non-profit news website covering gun violence in the US, which tallied the weekend toll of shootings in the US, reported that preliminary research from the University of California, Davis, has found a potential link between the rise in violence and a surge in gun-buying during the coronavirus pandemic, of more than 2.1 million more guns than usual between March and May.

Chicago is, woefully, a tale of two cities and across the country it’s a tale of two Americas
Rev Gregory Livingston

The Rev Gregory Livingston, a pastor and civil rights leader who moved to New York last summer after many years running an anti-violence community organization in his native Chicago, spoke of Chicago “going through absolute madness”.
But he warned that nationwide systemic racism that is not being addressed, and the “violent history” of America that has not been reckoned with were dividing people and causing some communities to break down.
“Chicago is, woefully, a tale of two cities, and across the country it’s a tale of two Americas. Chicago is a very segregated city, and that legacy is part of what’s fueling this horrific violence,” Livingston told the Guardian.
He condemned “corruption and racism” and said the pandemic and economic fallout had exacerbated inequality. The pandemic has been disproportionately hard on Black Americans already suffering economic and healthcare deprivations.
Livingston campaigned strongly to vote out the previous Chicago mayor, Rahm Emanuel. Lightfoot has been in the position since May 2019, and has just appointed a new police chief.

The Rev Gregory Livingston: ‘Chicago is a very segregated city and that legacy is part of what’s fueling this horrific violence.’ Photograph: Joshua Lott/The Guardian

Lightfoot agreed with Livingston’s point that a long history of segregation in Chicago and under-investment were “at the root” of the “explosion” of violence.
“You have to give a sense of hope. You have to reach out to those young men on the corners who are the shooters, but it can’t just be on the police and the city government. It’s all hands on deck,” Lightfoot said.
She said of Trump: “We are leading. He needs to take our lead and follow it.”
Livingston called on Lightfoot to tackle racism and policing problems “head on”.
“There is an individual responsibility [among those shooting], but there are also conditions that create a climate of violence,” he said.
He accused the New York mayor, Bill de Blasio, of being “scared” of confronting racism in the New York police department. “There is no courage in city hall,” he said.
And he warned mayors across the US that Chicago was the “control” for what would happen elsewhere this summer if inequality and the demands of protesters coast to coast since George Floyd, an African American, was killed in Minneapolis by a white police officer did not spur change.
The White House press secretary, Kayleigh McEnany, declared herself dismayed that she was not asked about the weekend shootings at her briefing on Monday, despite citing “a doubling of shootings in New York City for the third straight week”.

Multiple shootings in multiple Democrat-run cities such as New York and Chicago. Tragic loss of life.

But not one question during the briefing... pic.twitter.com/krdPbmyr1w
— Kayleigh McEnany (@PressSec) July 6, 2020

Journalists at the briefing responded that she had ended the 22-minute briefing and departed while many were still waiting, hands raised, to ask questions.

Whoa................Scared whites will pick up a gun, but are too scared to pick up a book | Opinion

U.S.

Scared whites will pick up a gun, but are too scared to pick up a book | Opinion

Leonard Pitts Jr.

July 7, 2020, 4:04 PM EDT

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Scared whites will pick up a gun, but are too scared to pick up a book | Opinion

So now, Karen’s got a gun.
To be clear, her name wasn’t actually Karen — it was Jillian Wuestenberg. But Wuestenberg’s behavior — she and her husband, Eric Wuestenberg, drew guns on a black woman and her daughter in a parking lot near Detroit last week after she and the girl inadvertently collided — is certainly Karen-like. As in the social-media meme of white women weaponizing their entitlement and privilege against people of color.
Karens call police on black people for barbecuing in a public park, swimming in a public pool, selling bottled water on a public street. Amy Cooper, a New York City Karen, notoriously called 911 claiming she was being attacked in a public park by an African-American man after he asked her to put her dog on a leash. Karens have become ubiquitous.
But they aren’t usually armed.
One is wary of falling into the journalistic trope of labeling any three similar incidents a “trend.” Yet, this sort of thing does seem to be happening a lot lately. Days before the Michigan confrontation, one Patricia McCloskey came out of her home in St. Louis awkwardly holding a handgun as a group of Black Lives Matter protesters marched down the street toward the mayor’s house. Her husband had a long gun.
Two weeks before that, Joseph Max Fucheck, a male Karen — a Kevin? — in Miami-Dade County pulled a gun on a black man, Dwayne Wynn. Wynn had been standing across the street from his house talking to a neighbor when Fucheck drove by and left a business card in his mailbox. When Wynn retrieved it, Fucheck circled back, produced a handgun and, in a tirade punctuated by racial slurs and other profanity, accused Wynn of stealing “my property.” This, he said, is “why you have people like you getting shot.”
Taken together, these incidents, all caught on video, paint a grim picture of how many white Americans are responding in this summer of racial justice uprising. Namely, with the desperate panic of people who think the race war has come to their doorsteps. They’re breaking out guns and circling the wagons in defense of privilege and prerogative.
It’s a dangerous, combustible mindset, egged on by the arsonist in the White House. Which makes one all the more thankful for those white people who have not lost their damn minds.
If the police murder of George Floyd was, for many African Americans, superfluous confirmation of things we already knew, it was, for many white Americans, a jolting revelation of things they never guessed. It cannot be easy to learn that much of what you’ve been taught is a lie, that you are the product of a system designed to inculcate and maintain racism in you, to ensure there are voices you never hear, people you never see, stories you never know.
Such a discovery can upend one’s understanding of one’s country and oneself. So Karen got a gun. But we’ll be a better country when Karen gets a book, when she emulates morally courageous white people seeking to know things that have been withheld. They’re the ones now reading Ta-Nehisi Coates, Robin DiAngelo, Michelle Alexander and Douglas A. Blackmon, the ones now watching “13th,” “I Am Not Your Negro,” “Do The Right Thing” and “Eyes On The Prize,” the ones chanting “Black lives matter!” — even in lily-white places where no black lives are lived.
In so doing, they bring hope to a difficult crossroads of our national existence. Hard truths are being told at last and so many white people are running away from them.
We are redeemed by the ones rushing toward them instead.

Chicago violence erupts during holiday weekend, at least 67 shot and 13 killed

July 5, 2020, 1:08 PM EDT

Nine of the victims were minors involved in the Chicago violence, with two fatalities so far; Garrett Tenney reports.

If you are going to erase history by getting rid of statues and changing names..... doesn't that mean that you erase slavery too?

We all know that it happened just like the history that everyone is trying to get rid of. But you can't have it both ways.

Either it happened or it didn't.

Protesting is nothing more than complaining about something that p_sses them off.

It has turned from protesting something that YOU REALLY FEEL STRONG about.... to just walking the streets yelling and screaming about what pi_sses you off TODAY.

Grow the hell up!

Either KNOW why you're protesting or stay home !!

Report: NFL to play Black national anthem before 'The Star-Spangled Banner' at Week 1 games

 The NFL is doing nothing but separating the country.

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Report: NFL to play Black national anthem before 'The Star-Spangled Banner' at Week 1 games

Jack BaerWriter

July 2, 2020, 4:13 PM CDT

Scroll back up to restore default view.

The pregame festivities during Week 1 of this year’s NFL season are reportedly going to include a new song.
The NFL is planning to have “Lift Ev'ry Voice And Sing,” widely known as the Black national anthem, performed at its season openers this fall, according to ESPN’s Jason Reid. The song will reportedly be played before the “The Star-Spangled Banner.”
The NFL is also reportedly considering other measures for the season to recognize victims of police brutality. That could reportedly include listing names of victims on uniforms through helmet decals or jersey patches, as well as educational programs.
All of this comes after a notable shift in the NFL’s approach to racial inequality. NFL commissioner Roger Goodell made headlines when he stated “Black lives” matter and conceded the league was wrong for not listening to past player protests, a statement that came in response to a public demand from many of the league’s Black stars.
Much remains to be done if the NFL is serious about helping foster change. Colin Kaepernick also notably remains a free agent, though Goodell has said he encourages teams to sign the quarterback.
Several players — including Adrian Peterson, Baker Mayfield and Kyler Murray — have already signaled they will still protest racial inequality during the national anthem this season.

A new song is reportedly coming to NFL pregame ceremonies. (AP Photo/Roger Steinman)

Approaches to national anthem amid pandemic have varied

As leagues slowly return to action amid the coronavirus pandemic, the NFL’s addition of “Lift Ev'ry Voice And Sing” to their season openers is one of a few ways leagues are handling the national anthem differently in the wake of the killing of George Floyd and subsequent protests.
After the vast majority of its players knelt while the national anthem was played for an empty stadium, the National Women’s Soccer League changed its policy to allow players to remain in the locker room while the song is played.
Major League Soccer has said it will take a different route by simply not playing the anthem, citing the lack of fans in the stands.
MLB and the NBA have not yet announced if they will do anything differently with the anthem when they return to action.

'You’ve been warned': Florida sheriff says he may deputize gun owners against protesters

Andrew Pantazi, The (Jacksonville) Florida Times-Union

July 1, 2020, 1:48 PM CDT

Clay County Sheriff Darryl Daniels in October, 2018.

JACKSONVILLE, Fla. – Clay County Sheriff Darryl Daniels, no stranger to making viral videos appealing to tough-on-crime politics, released a video Tuesday that said he will make “special deputies of every lawful gun owner in this county” if he feels the county is overwhelmed by protesters.
The three-minute video shows Daniels standing in front of 18 deputies as he derides civil rights protesters as godless disruptors and tells them to stay out of Clay County, a suburb of Jacksonville.
"If we can’t handle you, I’ll exercise the power and authority as the sheriff, and I’ll make special deputies of every lawful gun owner in this county and I’ll deputize them for this one purpose to stand in the gap between lawlessness and civility," he said.
"That’s what we’re sworn to do. That’s what we’re going to do. You’ve been warned."

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Daniels, the county’s first Black sheriff, is himself under investigation by the Florida Department of Law Enforcement related to an affair he had with a fellow officer when he was at the Jacksonville Sheriff’s Office and a subsequent false arrest of that officer.
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Daniels is a first-term sheriff up for reelection who has said he wants to one day be a congressman. He is being challenged by six opponents, including former Atlantic Beach Police Chief Michelle Cook, former Clay County Sheriff’s Office Emergency Management Director Ben Carroll and Mike Taylor, a former FDLE agent and state attorney’s investigator who has earned the endorsement of former Gov. Jeb Bush.
Post by ccsofl.
His challengers accused him of inviting chaos to Clay County and insulting the training necessary to become a sheriff’s deputy.
“We train under intense situations to control the adrenaline dump,” Taylor said, “and we don’t do a perfect job at it, but we train to be prepared to make decisions under pressure. That’s necessary to be effective. To think we can put anyone in that role and it’ll be OK, we’re asking for a much bigger problem and inviting chaos and anarchy in the streets. The citizens of Clay County deserve better than that.”
Taylor added that deputizing private citizens could make the county liable to pay out lawsuits if the newly deputized citizens don’t act appropriately. “I don’t believe it was intended to be a pro-police message. I believe it was intended to be a propaganda message. Real police professionalism actually acknowledges that professionally trained police officers cannot be replaced by a swearing-in ceremony.”
Cook said the video was a sign Daniels wasn’t capable of leading. “What Daniels said yesterday may sound tough and macho. But, instead, it is a call for vigilantism and another signal that he is incapable of leading the sheriff’s department and keeping Clay County safe.”
She added: “Instead of dealing with real issues in a meaningful way, he is behaving like a reality show sheriff and calling attention to himself. To make matters worse, he pulled 18 officers off the streets to be used as props for his taxpayer-funded campaign stunt. It’s no wonder morale is so low among our fine officers.”
Carroll, who spent 14 years at the Sheriff’s Office, said he runs a nonprofit that trains churches and private schools, and he believes it’s foolish to think private citizens could replace deputies.
“I’m sure that was a political production for the sheriff. I doubt seriously that there will ever be the need in Clay County to deputize all the citizens to stand in the gap. I believe the sheriff’s department is totally capable of standing in the pike.”
Carroll said he supports citizens owning and training to use firearms to protect themselves, but he believes the Sherrif’s Office must be capable of handling protesters on its own.