I've been watching a lot about the knockout game as of late. It really does seem to be a hate crime (It's also called Polar Bearing, because it's victims tend to be white). It's caused quite a stir in the black community, as those who know better seem to be cringing and distancing themselves from the attacks as well as possible.

Ultimately, it's the fault of a few individuals who feel powerless enough in their own lives to try to take it out on others. I see a connection between this feeling of powerlessness and the "stop and frisk" laws passed in many of the cities where the knockout game first became popular.

I think the solution to this kind of violence is improving police relations with the affected communities. The first step is getting rid of "stop and frisk", the second removal of police arrest quotas, the third would be reducing the black prison population's non-violent offenders.

Had a similar thing in the UK called "happy slapping". Originally you'd just slap a random stranger while somebody else filmed the reaction on their phone. Ofc, slaps turned into punches and kicks. Relatively harmless teenage delinquency turned into savage lynchings, and sometimes rape. A number of people died or were left with life changing injuries.

I wish I could say I was sorry he got shot. What exactly was the lesson he learned here? That some people have guns? What a waste of oxygen.

*law *controversy

Adding video to channels (Controversy, Law) - requested by MrFisk.

Doesn't it seem weird that the news has adopted the perpetrators cutesy euphemism to describe the assaults? It's like seeing a news story on the growing problem of surprise sex.

And since these attacks seem to be predominately black teens, congrats kids, you've just set race relations back decades in the US.

Never mind the millions of innocent people that will now be viewed with fear and suspicion...

Fucking idiots.

I hope none of his friends end up thinking this is a cool idea. I live in Lansing.

This struck me odd as well. It seems so strange that the news still describes it as 'teens playing a game' of sorts (to paraphrase). I feel like they should be saying something straight up like 'teens randomly attacking strangers' or 'teens brutally assaulting people in public'. There doesn't seem to be a reasonable level of gravitas around the reporting of this, which is unsettling.

As well as the adoption of the euphemism, I find it interesting that this is getting portrayed as "saved by the gun". Which is nothing close to the truth. The gun allowed the victim to get revenge, but it didn't protect him from the attack. Had the taser not malfunctioned, his gun would have been useless or worse, stolen and used against him.

It points out the weakness of the "guns as defense" claims...by definition, the attacker gets to make the first move. So unless you have your gun in your hand at all times, and are willing to shoot anyone you think suspicious, a gun will not prevent an attack. It -does- certainly provide incentive for the attacker to make his attack as lethal as possible, so that the victim has no second-strike capability.

Clockwork Orange is here.

(Gun vs Taser??? He didn't even know what it was and he shot him??????)

Yeah he shot him, good call. Great survival instinct. Smarter hu-man than tase-boy. Tase-boy survives, does some time, maybe he'll become someone who learned a valuable lesson. You don't fuck with some folks and expect not to get fucked back.

Yeah man, I was seeing Clockwork Orange scenarios for this place as soon as I was old enough to decipher the dissemination of misinformation. It's been here in ghettos and suburbs for quite some time prior to Burgess' 62 novel and has manifest throughout history as simply variations of a running theme...

"I see a connection between this feeling of powerlessness and the "stop and frisk" laws."

If we were science-minded, we'd demand statistics to confirm that hypothesis. And we'd look for data showing that removing "stop and frisk" reduces crime. But it's likely the opposite... "stop and frisk" works, and removing it increases crime.

The reason there's a correlation between cities with "stop and frisk" and the "knockout game" is because these cities passed "stop and frisk" in response to their unhinged urban youth violence.

These kids feel powerless because their academic scores are the level of third-worlders. Fix that, and everything else will fix itself.