He Pleaded Against Gun Violence. Bullets Silenced Him.
Delmonte Johnson’s death in a drive-by shooting is a far too common way for young Americans to die.
▻https://www.nytimes.com/2018/09/10/opinion/delmonte-johnson-gun-violence-chicago.html
cf. aussi
Armani Harris
La semaine dernière, Armani Harris, un jeune homme de 25 ans a été tué par balles à huit cent mètres de là où je loge.
▻http://residenchi.constantvzw.org/2018/08/23/armani-harris
Launching a National Gun-Control Coalition, the Parkland Teens Meet Chicago’s Young Activists | The New Yorker
▻https://www.newyorker.com/news/dispatch/launching-a-national-gun-control-coalition-the-parkland-teens-meet-chicag
“The Road to Change,” as the tour is called, Parkland students will educate young voters about the March for Our Lives platform and visit politicians who oppose their agenda. The students will also, according to their Web site, “meet fellow survivors and use our voices to amplify theirs.” The Parkland students were leaders, but uncomfortable ones. The kind of attack they experienced, although far too common, is still a rare and extraordinary thing—two-thirds of the firearm deaths in the United States are suicides, and most others are homicides, with only a fraction of those being mass shootings. The students understood that they are examples of America’s gun problem but also outliers. As such, their intention to let other activists speak to their own circumstances was both honest and good. On the other hand, a movement needs leaders. In advertising for the first march of the summer, the former Parkland student Emma González was listed as a headliner, alongside Chance the Rapper, Jennifer Hudson, Gabby Giffords, and will.i.am.
When McDade emerged, he was dressed formally, in a summery pink button-down shirt, black trousers, and velvet loafers. At the March for Our Lives rally this spring, he and another North Lawndale student, Alex King, had walked onstage wearing matching blue sweatshirts and with their fists raised. They wore tape over their mouths, which they then removed to talk about the six hundred and fifty people who died from gun violence in Chicago last year, the seven hundred and seventy-one who died in 2016, and their own experiences of fear and death. It may not have been obvious from their speeches, but McDade and King come from a different tradition of activism than that of the Parkland students, who cleverly troll the National Rifle Association on social media, rattle off statistics, and seek out discussion with politicians. McDade, King, Wright, and their classmates are more likely to quote the speeches of M
artin Luther King, Jr., than a SpongeBob meme or a study from the Brady Center to Prevent Gun Violence. Their policy priorities reflect their immediate circumstances—they speak less of gun control than the need for more youth-employment opportunities, mental-health resources, and funding for the public schools they attend. Their experience of gun violence is not of a single traumatic emergency but of a chronic problem that is only one instance of the social inequality around them. McDade told me that, during a school town-hall meeting on violence, when the audience was asked who knew at least thirty people who had been shot, eighty-five per cent of the people in the room had raised their hands. Although they have more reasons to be angry than most people their age, they radiate peace and compassion. As this movement begins to form a national coalition, they are its philosophers, its bodhisattvas.❞
“Democrats can’t listen to the Parkland students supporting the prevention of gun violence but not listen to these children,” a student from the North Side named Juan Reyes told me. “Why does the country only listen when white bodies drop?” one sign read.
A South Side student named Trevon Bosley gave a long list of examples of people who had been killed at home getting ready for school, on a bus coming home from school, in a park after school, playing basketball, celebrating the Fourth of July outside, and, in the case of his own brother, standing on church grounds. “The next time someone else asks you what makes you a possible victim of gun violence in Chicago, you tell them ‘living,’ ” he concluded. Maria Hernandez, an organizer with Chicago Black Lives Matter, criticized local politicians. “These people say they represent us—they don’t talk to us!” she said. Further actions were announced, including a shutdown of the Dan Ryan Expressway, on July 7th, and a hunger strike called Starve for Change.
In interviews leading up to the Peace Rally, Parkland students had insisted on speaking to the media only in tandem with a kid from Chicago. They claimed that the press was biased toward the privileged children of Parkland, paying too much attention to them and to school shootings, instead of focussing on the coalition they were trying to build, in which every gun death was equal in its tragedy and emergency, no matter the cause or context. They were right about the press focus; a local CBS report I watched emphasized the presence of the Parkland students instead of the home-town base, neglecting to mention Saint Sabina, North Lawndale, the local organizers of March for Our Lives, and their respective messages.
“Part of the reason we didn’t speak last night was because we can’t,” Hogg said. “We don’t know what it’s like to go to school and have to worry about being shot at. We have to worry about bullets coming from inside of our school, not outside of it. But across America we have to deal with both issues and reconcile that there’s inner-city gun violence, there’s Native American gun violence in the form of suicides, and there’s suburban gun violence in the form of mass shootings. We have to work together to solve these issues as an American community.” This was a good point, and one that I thought might have been more effective if it had been made in front of national reporters and a large crowd of people from different walks of life. I asked if white people in the suburbs could be trusted to listen to the experiences of black people in the cities, to see them as part of a shared national problem.
“I know they will,” Hogg said. “I have faith that they will.”
“Exactly,” King said. “No matter the color of skin, no matter where you’re from, pain is pain, so I feel like they will listen.”
The Sexist, Racist Implications of the ’Walk Up, Not Out’ Movement | Alternet
▻https://www.alternet.org/news-amp-politics/sexist-racist-implications-walk-not-out-movement?akid=16850.2663896.0nM9pI
The student walkout itself has drawn protest from those who disagree that gun control is the solution. The "Walk Up, Not Out” movement is led by parents who believe more “kindness” among students, rather than gun control legislation, will end gun violence. Those at the helm of Walk Up have shared ideas such as increased school security measures that would effectively transform schools into prisons and could have negative consequences for students of color. They have also expressed support for mental health resources while ignoring how scapegoating the mentally ill fails to address the real problem. The real problem is guns and insufficient regulation of gun owners who have access to weapons that kill hundreds in minutes (the mentally ill are far more likely to be victims than perpetrators of gun violence).
Walk Up’s ultimate premise is that the responsibility for ending school violence should be placed on the shoulders of young people who are in school to learn, while demanding nothing of the policymakers who are actually in positions to make change. The movement seems to place the blame for shootings on those who are purportedly complicit in the bullying and marginalizing of students who go on to become mass shooters.
Wald also addressed this in her post: “This argument only applies to crimes overwhelmingly committed by white boys. Their crimes are tragic betrayals of an underlying innocence that is never attributed to black boys selling drugs on the corner.”
In 2015, a 14-year-old Muslim boy was handcuffed and taken into custody for building a clock. In 2014, 12-year-old Tamir Rice was shot and killed by police for brandishing a toy gun in a playground. In 2013, 17-year-old Trayvon Martin was shot by a vigilante for walking on the streets at night wearing a hoodie. We have no problem with accepting black and brown people as dangerous, but we pull out all the stops to humanize mass shooters hailing from white communities. Women are disproportionately affected by gun violence, yet they are pressured to proactively stop the hypermasculine violence that targets them. Walk Up’s message of telling young people to just “be nicer” to one another ignores the implications this language has for young women and the pressure it places on them.
A number of statistics exemplify the connection between gun violence directed at women or initiated by people with records of abusing women. Every year, hundreds of women are killed for rejecting men; more than 1,600 women are killed by men every year. Annually, an average of 760 Americans are killed with guns by spouses, ex-spouses or intimate partners, and the majority of these cases involve guns and collateral damage that claims the lives of other victims. Domestic violence victims are five times more likely to be killed when their abusers have access to a gun.
America’s unique gun violence problem, explained in 17 maps and charts - Vox
▻https://www.vox.com/policy-and-politics/2017/10/2/16399418/us-gun-violence-statistics-maps-charts
America is an exceptional country when it comes to guns. It’s one of the few countries in which the right to bear arms is constitutionally protected. But America’s relationship with guns is unique in another crucial way: Among developed nations, the US is far and away the most violent — in large part due to the easy access many Americans have to firearms. These charts and maps show what that violence looks like compared with the rest of the world, why it happens, and why it’s such a tough problem to fix.
▻https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=mqv2Fg_kxAg
My daddy he once told me : ’Don’t think you can be a man’
’With just a bullet in your gun and a pistol in your hand’.
Guns are now outlawed and only outlaws have guns
And you can’t walk the streets feeling safe anymore
Only thieves on parole and the cops out on patrol
Walk the streets feeling safe, ain’t it strange? Due to gun control.
Let me see you dance, ooh-oo,
let me see you dance
Let me see you dance,
partner dance, ain’t it strange hit the floor?
Due to gun control.
In this land of milk and honey, we tried so hard to make our own
You’ve got your feel of choice,
living clean and living long, long.
The power of persuasion, like a leg with broken bones
and let’s not show out of town
You loose everthing you own
Only thieves on a parole and the cops out on patrol
Walk the streets feeling safe, ain’t it strange?
Due to gun control.
Let me see you dance, ooh-oo,
let me see you dance
Let me see you dance, partner dance,
ain’t it strange out of range ?
Due to gun control.
In this great country of ours, yes we have finally grown
Built with sweat and muscle and tape recorded telephones
Only thieves on a parole and the cops out on patrol
Walk the streets feeling safe,
ain’t it strange? Due to gun control.
Let me see you dance, ooh-oo, let me see you dance
Let me see you dance, partner dance, ain’t it strange hit the floor?
Due to gun control
Due to gun control.
Ooh-hoo, due to gun control
Ooh-hoo, due to gun control
▻https://sonichits.com/video/Willy_DeVille/Gun_Control
►https://fr.wikipedia.org/wiki/National_Rifle_Association
#NRA #Gun_Control
Je ne suis pas sûr de comprendre : #Willy_Deville il est contre le Gun Control ?
Voici un serpent de mer étatsunien qui ressemble beaucoup à son cousin ouest-allemand Tempolimit .
▻http://content.time.com/time/nation/article/0,8599,1826694,00.html
Liberals say Iraq is another Vietnam; conservatives say Barack Obama is Jimmy Carter redux. Abba’s a megahit, and Elton John’s going to be performing at Madison Square Garden. Had enough of these ’70s flashbacks? Brace yourself for another: the return of the national speed limit, courtesy of one of the country’s most venerable politicians.
Republican Senator John Warner of Virginia — elected in 1978 — recently expressed interest in the idea of a national speed limit to conserve gasoline.
▻https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/National_Maximum_Speed_Law
La même discussion a régulièremnt lieu en Allemagne - mais à 40 km/h de plus. On oublie souvent qu’une limitation de vitesse de fait à 130 km/h existe en Allemagne : si on a un accident à une vitesse au dessus de 130 km/h on est automatiquement considéré comme coupable à cause de vitesse non adaptée aux circomstances.
Pourtant c’est une discussion que suscite beaucoup moins d’émotions outre-atlantique. Ce qui est freie Fahrt für freie Bürger aux propriétaires de Porsche allemands c’est plutôt le droit de porter des armes aux rednecks américains. On a le droit de posséder un revolver, mais on n’a pas le droit de l’utiliser pour tuer n’importe qui ...
