My mentality is certainly not contributing to America's obsession with violence. The problem with America's obsession with violence goes beyond my perceived lack of empathy and sympathy for the victims and reaches back centuries. Simply look at the way those in power treated Natives and African slaves and you'll see this. The unrestrained violence against citizens has gone unchecked and now shit has reached critical levels. Your mentality is contributing to America's obsession with violence, because you want to shift the blame from the oppressor and place the yoke on those who have no form of recourse/infrastructure to help them when injustice happens on a continuous basis. As long as your mentality persists innocent people on both sides will be gunned down.
What you're seeing is a byproduct or reaction to mistreatment but if people are unwilling to address this mistreatment, there is no way to be solutions orientated and the cycle will repeat until lawlessness for EVERYONE is the NORM.
When did I take sides? How have I shifted blame? I can say that police are to blame without vindicating murder. That's insanity.
White people pull up Alton Sterling's rap sheet and say "well he was a criminal, the cops were in danger, it's justified." Other people look at cops getting gunned down and say "well they're murdering people left and right, it's justified". The common factor here is that both sides, from their perspectives, are justifying violence on some level.
I'm taking the approach that no violence is justified. If I had to throw my hat in with one lot or the other, I'd throw my hat in with the minorities and the oppressed. But I don't have to choose one side or the other. I'm choosing a third side, where we as a country all decide that no violence is ever okay. Otherwise, this will never end. We need to decide that human life is more valuable. We need to decide there is never a legitimate reason for the cops to use a gun during a traffic stop, there's no legitimate reason to sell somebody an AR-15, there's no legitimate reason to get a sniper rifle and gun down cops that haven't murdered anyone. I think we need to get rid of the death penalty, clear out the prisons, change laws that have a disparate impact on different groups of people, and put social safety nets in place to help people with childcare, education, workers rights, healthcare, retirement, etc. We need to redirect the entire conversation away from "this side" v "that side" and away from "whether the cops were justified to shoot", and towards the conversation of "no sides" and "its never justified to kill".
I want to see justice for every cop that ever killed an unarmed black or white person, from Dylan Noble to Alton Sterling to Philando Castile. I want to see justice for Trayvon Martin. But not at the cost of a civil war or a revolution or violence. For a very simple reason:
The people in power have nuclear weapons and lasers and drones and stealth bombers and aircraft carriers. The minorities have handguns and rifles. If a "well regulated militia" tried to bear arms against a tyrannical government, as you suggest, they will lose. Badly. They will get slaughtered wholesale. And the majority of the country, who are not extremist like you, and who are not extremist like the Christian right, will sit there idly waiting for it to end.
So before you start applauding murder and throwing out words like "war" and "preemptive strike", you better have a good fucking plan for winning the war. Otherwise you're irresponsibly putting people at risk. And playing by the oppressors own rules.
If you're saying it's fine to kill any cop due to the actions of bad cops, then you're saying it's fine to kill any white person due to the actions of bad white people. The corollary is that cops can kill innocent black people due to the actions of bad ones. I cannot accept that dangerous, extremist mentality.
Peace is the answer. Not further division and destruction and decay, which is what happened last night.
