Police officer shot and killed a Black teenage girl holding a knife

[CivilDiscourse]

- remember the black cop, David Dorn, that was killed by looters last year when he was trying to protect a friend's store? Where was the nationwide furor over that?

Last year, it was all about not hurting the important message that went up in response of BLM. Epidemiologists went against their best judgement because condemning mass protests would have been hurting the movement. Focusing on violence would have hurt the movement. The death you mentioned would have hurt the movement. Calling them riots would have hurt the movement.

Source: https://www.nytimes.com/2020/07/06/us/Epidemiologists-coronavirus-protests-quarantine.html

And then the brutal killing of George Floyd by the police in Minneapolis on May 25 changed everything.

Soon the streets nationwide were full of tens of thousands of people in a mass protest movement that continues to this day, with demonstrations and the toppling of statues. And rather than decrying mass gatherings, more than 1,300 public health officials signed a May 30 letter of support, and many joined the protests.

That reaction, and the contrast with the epidemiologists’ earlier fervent support for the lockdown, gave rise to an uncomfortable question: Was public health advice in a pandemic dependent on whether people approved of the mass gathering in question? To many, the answer seemed to be "yes."

"The way the public health narrative around coronavirus has reversed itself overnight seems an awful lot like " politicizing science," the essayist and journalist Thomas Chatterton Williams wrote in The Guardian last month. "What are we to make of such whiplash-inducing messaging?"

...

Still, the divergence in their own reactions left some of the country’s prominent epidemiologists wrestling with deeper questions of morality, responsibility and risk.

Catherine Troisi, an infectious-disease epidemiologist at the University of Texas Health Science Center at Houston, studies Covid-19. When, wearing a mask and standing at the edge of a great swell of people, she attended a recent protest in Houston supporting Mr. Floyd, a sense of contradiction tugged at her.

"I certainly condemned the anti-lockdown protests at the time, and I’m not condemning the protests now, and I struggle with that," Dr. Troisi said. "I have a hard time articulating why that is OK."

Mark Lurie, a professor of epidemiology at Brown University, described a similar struggle.

"Instinctively, many of us in public health feel a strong desire to act against accumulated generations of racial injustice," Dr. Lurie said. "But we have to be honest: A few weeks before, we were criticizing protesters for arguing to open up the economy and saying that was dangerous behavior.

"I am still grappling with that."

To which Ashish Jha, dean of Brown University’s School of Public Health, added: "Do I worry that mass protests will fuel more cases? Yes, I do. But a dam broke, and there’s no stopping that."

Some public health scientists publicly waved off the conflicted feelings of their colleagues, saying the country now confronts a stark moral choice. The letter signed by more than 1,300 epidemiologists and health workers urged Americans to adopt a "consciously anti-racist" stance and framed the difference between the anti-lockdown demonstrators and the protesters in moral, ideological and racial terms.

Those who protested stay-at-home orders were "rooted in white nationalism and run contrary to respect for Black lives," the letter stated.

By contrast, it said, those protesting systemic racism "must be supported."

"As public health advocates," they stated, "we do not condemn these gatherings as risky for Covid-19 transmission. We support them as vital to the national public health."

...

She acknowledged that the current protests are freighted with moral complications, not least the possibility that a young person marching for justice might come home and inadvertently infect a mother, aunt or grandparent. "If there’s an elder in the household, that person should be cocooned to the best extent that we can," Dr. Bassett said.

But she said the opportunity to achieve a breakthrough transcended such worries about the virus. "Racism has been killing people a lot longer than Covid-19," she said. "The willingness to say we all bear the burden of that is deeply moving to me."

Others take a more cautious view of the moral stakes. Nicholas A. Christakis, professor of social and natural science at Yale, noted that public health is guided by twin imperatives: to comfort the afflicted and to speak truth about risks to public health, no matter how unpleasant.

These often-complementary values are now in conflict. To take to the street to protest injustice is to risk casting open doors and letting the virus endanger tens of thousands, he said. There is a danger, he said, in asserting that one moral imperative overshadows another.

"The left and the right want to wish the virus away," Dr. Christakis said. "We can’t wish away climate change, or the epidemic, or other inconvenient scientific truths."

He said that framing the anti-lockdown protests as white supremacist and dangerous and the George Floyd protests as anti-racist and essential obscures a messier reality.

When he was a hospice doctor in Chicago and Boston, he said, he saw up close how isolation deepened the despair of the dying - a fate now suffered by many in the pandemic, with hospital visits severely restricted. For epidemiologists to turn around and argue for loosening the ground rules for the George Floyd marches risks sounding hypocritical.

"We allowed thousands of people to die alone," he said. "We buried people by Zoom. Now all of a sudden we are saying, never mind?"

© Copyright Original Source

[Cow Poke]

Last year, it was all about not hurting the important message that went up in response of BLM. Epidemiologists went against their best judgement because condemning mass protests would have been hurting the movement. Focusing on violence would have hurt the movement. The death you mentioned would have hurt the movement. Calling them riots would have hurt the movement.

Source: https://www.nytimes.com/2020/07/06/us/Epidemiologists-coronavirus-protests-quarantine.html

And then the brutal killing of George Floyd by the police in Minneapolis on May 25 changed everything.

Soon the streets nationwide were full of tens of thousands of people in a mass protest movement that continues to this day, with demonstrations and the toppling of statues. And rather than decrying mass gatherings, more than 1,300 public health officials signed a May 30 letter of support, and many joined the protests.

That reaction, and the contrast with the epidemiologists’ earlier fervent support for the lockdown, gave rise to an uncomfortable question: Was public health advice in a pandemic dependent on whether people approved of the mass gathering in question? To many, the answer seemed to be "yes."

"The way the public health narrative around coronavirus has reversed itself overnight seems an awful lot like " politicizing science," the essayist and journalist Thomas Chatterton Williams wrote in The Guardian last month. "What are we to make of such whiplash-inducing messaging?"

...

Still, the divergence in their own reactions left some of the country’s prominent epidemiologists wrestling with deeper questions of morality, responsibility and risk.

Catherine Troisi, an infectious-disease epidemiologist at the University of Texas Health Science Center at Houston, studies Covid-19. When, wearing a mask and standing at the edge of a great swell of people, she attended a recent protest in Houston supporting Mr. Floyd, a sense of contradiction tugged at her.

"I certainly condemned the anti-lockdown protests at the time, and I’m not condemning the protests now, and I struggle with that," Dr. Troisi said. "I have a hard time articulating why that is OK."

Mark Lurie, a professor of epidemiology at Brown University, described a similar struggle.

"Instinctively, many of us in public health feel a strong desire to act against accumulated generations of racial injustice," Dr. Lurie said. "But we have to be honest: A few weeks before, we were criticizing protesters for arguing to open up the economy and saying that was dangerous behavior.

"I am still grappling with that."

To which Ashish Jha, dean of Brown University’s School of Public Health, added: "Do I worry that mass protests will fuel more cases? Yes, I do. But a dam broke, and there’s no stopping that."

Some public health scientists publicly waved off the conflicted feelings of their colleagues, saying the country now confronts a stark moral choice. The letter signed by more than 1,300 epidemiologists and health workers urged Americans to adopt a "consciously anti-racist" stance and framed the difference between the anti-lockdown demonstrators and the protesters in moral, ideological and racial terms.

Those who protested stay-at-home orders were "rooted in white nationalism and run contrary to respect for Black lives," the letter stated.

By contrast, it said, those protesting systemic racism "must be supported."

"As public health advocates," they stated, "we do not condemn these gatherings as risky for Covid-19 transmission. We support them as vital to the national public health."

...

She acknowledged that the current protests are freighted with moral complications, not least the possibility that a young person marching for justice might come home and inadvertently infect a mother, aunt or grandparent. "If there’s an elder in the household, that person should be cocooned to the best extent that we can," Dr. Bassett said.

But she said the opportunity to achieve a breakthrough transcended such worries about the virus. "Racism has been killing people a lot longer than Covid-19," she said. "The willingness to say we all bear the burden of that is deeply moving to me."

Others take a more cautious view of the moral stakes. Nicholas A. Christakis, professor of social and natural science at Yale, noted that public health is guided by twin imperatives: to comfort the afflicted and to speak truth about risks to public health, no matter how unpleasant.

These often-complementary values are now in conflict. To take to the street to protest injustice is to risk casting open doors and letting the virus endanger tens of thousands, he said. There is a danger, he said, in asserting that one moral imperative overshadows another.

"The left and the right want to wish the virus away," Dr. Christakis said. "We can’t wish away climate change, or the epidemic, or other inconvenient scientific truths."

He said that framing the anti-lockdown protests as white supremacist and dangerous and the George Floyd protests as anti-racist and essential obscures a messier reality.

When he was a hospice doctor in Chicago and Boston, he said, he saw up close how isolation deepened the despair of the dying - a fate now suffered by many in the pandemic, with hospital visits severely restricted. For epidemiologists to turn around and argue for loosening the ground rules for the George Floyd marches risks sounding hypocritical.

"We allowed thousands of people to die alone," he said. "We buried people by Zoom. Now all of a sudden we are saying, never mind?"

© Copyright Original Source

In other words --- THE NARRATIVE --- screw people if they don't fit the narrative.

[rogue06]

My Ruger Security Six .357 magnum (my most favorite handgun ever) came with a built in safety -----

Don't pull the trigger - safety on
Pull the trigger - safety off

I believe they call that an internal safety in double-action revolvers.

[rogue06]

In other words --- THE NARRATIVE --- screw people if they don't fit the narrative.

Truth over facts. Or...

morallyright-factuallycorrect.jpg

[Mountain Man]

My Ruger Security Six .357 magnum (my most favorite handgun ever) came with a built in safety -----

Don't pull the trigger - safety on
Pull the trigger - safety off

I know you're being sarcastic, but some handguns actually do have the safety release built onto the trigger so that the action of placing your finger on the trigger will automatically disengage the safety.

8-Trigger-Safety-Must-Be-Pressed-for-Striker-Bar-to-Function-and-FP-and-Drop-Safeties-to-Release.jpg

Some people might say, "Then what's the point of the safety?" The point, of course, is that it is impossible for the gun to fire without someone deliberately squeezing the trigger, which is the sole purpose of the safety mechanism regardless of how it is integrated.

[Cow Poke]

I know you're being sarcastic, but some handguns actually do have the safety release built onto the trigger so that the action of placing your finger on the trigger will automatically disengage the safety.

8-Trigger-Safety-Must-Be-Pressed-for-Striker-Bar-to-Function-and-FP-and-Drop-Safeties-to-Release.jpg

Some people might say, "Then what's the point of the safety?" The point, of course, is that it is impossible for the gun to fire without someone deliberately squeezing the trigger, which is the sole purpose of the safety mechanism regardless of how it is integrated.

Yes, sir, and, IIRC, this was a result of cases where a sidearm accidentally dropped in such a manner that the hammer hit the pavement or whatever allowed the weapon to be fired.

Back in the 70's, there was an attempt to push police to a technology where a ring worn on your gun hand 'ring finger' would engage a magnetic mechanism in the grip of the firearm that would only allow the firearm to fire if that ring were present. It didn't go over, because too many times an officer is required to fire his weapon in less than "textbook" fashion, and the thing simply did not work reliably.

There were numerous attempts to come up with a solution where only the police officer could fire his own weapon, due to the fact that, so often, in a scuffle, the subject grabs the cop's gun and shoots the cop.

[rogue06]

Yes, sir, and, IIRC, this was a result of cases where a sidearm accidentally dropped in such a manner that the hammer hit the pavement or whatever allowed the weapon to be fired.

Back in the 70's, there was an attempt to push police to a technology where a ring worn on your gun hand 'ring finger' would engage a magnetic mechanism in the grip of the firearm that would only allow the firearm to fire if that ring were present. It didn't go over, because too many times an officer is required to fire his weapon in less than "textbook" fashion, and the thing simply did not work reliably.

There were numerous attempts to come up with a solution where only the police officer could fire his own weapon, due to the fact that, so often, in a scuffle, the subject grabs the cop's gun and shoots the cop.

Those "solutions" were abandoned when it was repeatedly shown that far too often the firearm wouldn't fire for the officer either. A non-functioning gun is a horrible thing to have when you find yourself in a situation where you need one that works.

It's a great idea in theory but nobody has found a practical, workable way to accomplish it.

[Cow Poke]

Those "solutions" were abandoned when it was repeatedly shown that far too often the firearm wouldn't fire for the officer either. A non-functioning gun is a horrible thing to have when you find yourself in a situation where you need one that works.

It's a great idea in theory but nobody has found a practical, workable way to accomplish it.

For the sarcastically impaired the following is said in jest

Yup, I think the only option that remains is the one where your weapon is tied to you with a rope around your neck! Those wonderful Canadians!!!!

rcmp rope.jpg

[rogue06]

For the sarcastically impaired the following is said in jest

Yup, I think the only option that remains is the one where your weapon is tied to you with a rope around your neck! Those wonderful Canadians!!!!

rcmp rope.jpg

Needs to go one step further. The Barney Fife system

[Sparko]

Yes, sir, and, IIRC, this was a result of cases where a sidearm accidentally dropped in such a manner that the hammer hit the pavement or whatever allowed the weapon to be fired.

Back in the 70's, there was an attempt to push police to a technology where a ring worn on your gun hand 'ring finger' would engage a magnetic mechanism in the grip of the firearm that would only allow the firearm to fire if that ring were present. It didn't go over, because too many times an officer is required to fire his weapon in less than "textbook" fashion, and the thing simply did not work reliably.

There were numerous attempts to come up with a solution where only the police officer could fire his own weapon, due to the fact that, so often, in a scuffle, the subject grabs the cop's gun and shoots the cop.

They need to build in Alexa!

"Alexa, disengage safety on my gun!"

Problem solved!

[Cow Poke]

For the sarcastically impaired the following is said in jest

Yup, I think the only option that remains is the one where your weapon is tied to you with a rope around your neck! Those wonderful Canadians!!!!

rcmp rope.jpg

By they way --- the "Sam Brown" belt shown here has been abandoned by most police departments except on "dress uniforms" because it was way too easy for the subject to grab that strap and whip the officer all over the place --- like giving the subject a "handle" with which to grab the officer.

[Sparko]

For the sarcastically impaired the following is said in jest

Yup, I think the only option that remains is the one where your weapon is tied to you with a rope around your neck! Those wonderful Canadians!!!!

rcmp rope.jpg

[Cow Poke]

It's like the Debol hisseff got to design the uniform and said, "let's include a rope around the neck of the officer so he can be choked to death, and that vertical belt thingie to grab him and drag him around".

[Sparko]

It's like the Debol hisseff got to design the uniform and said, "let's include a rope around the neck of the officer so he can be choked to death, and that vertical belt thingie to grab him and drag him around".

"and make sure the uniform is really bright so it stands out making them an easy target. Also, make it red so you can't see the blood stains."

[mossrose]

You guys know that the red serge uniform is only used ceremonially, right?