Fourteen shot in Austin, apparently by two people trying and failing to shoot each other in a large crowd. Reportedly the Bandidos MC secured the area so the defunded police — present for the crowded festival, but in much reduced numbers — could concentrate on rendering aid to the victims. The news reporters don’t confirm it explicitly, but I do see a whole lot of Harleys in the background of their shots.
9 comments:
So they'll be blamed, then? As well as Texas in general. "Texas," (especially Dallas) was blamed for the JFK assassination and brain-diseased Charles Whitman, after all.
And unless there is a white racism angle involved, there will be a call for gun control. Actually, there will probably be one anyway. Austin voted to defund the police by over 1/3 last summer. I don't know if they actually did that, though, so I won't jump to that conclusion. But be alert.
https://abcnews.go.com/US/wireStory/austin-cuts-police-budget-13-amid-national-defund-72358985
The news is easy to follow even without reading the story. Any facts will be stuffed into the preferred narrative.
Maybe Buckhead can hire the Bandidos MC to police their neighborhood - not being facetious, something along those lines seems like the logical/inevitable outcome of reducing public safety forces.
It turns out to have been a feud between two black teenager affinity groups, who disliked each other due to their encounters at high school.
https://abcnews.go.com/US/wireStory/police-fatal-austin-mass-shooting-arose-teenage-feud-78325286
So the Bandidos will not get the blame for this, but I'm persuaded that they might have done under other circumstances.
One of the victims' brother is urging people not to politicize his death in order to push for gun control.
https://news.yahoo.com/austin-shooting-victims-brother-death-003300743.html
The counterargument might be that if we could get teenagers to return to fighting with fists, they wouldn't kill anyone; even if they just went back to knives, like the Jets, they'd probably only kill each other and not a bunch of random bystanders.
However, teenagers are already forbidden by law from possessing handguns. So in fact all the guns used were already illegal, and the police could have enforced those laws if they had seen the guns (and if they dared to do so in today's climate regarding police encounters with black males).
Elise:
You're definitely right that the alternative to police is something more like militia. Indeed, we've seen that from the beginning: the Seattle CHAZ immediately developed a warlord who was passing out rifles from the back of his car.
In the 1981 documentary Hells Angels Forever, they interviewed people from the neighborhood in New York where their clubhouse was. Not everybody liked them, but they did allow that the block was one of the safest in what was a bad part of New York City (in an era with far higher crime rates than today).
"teenager affinity groups" ? Who had experienced "encounters" at their school?
I can't help but admire the careful diction used in composing the report.
In my honest opinion teenagers who don't avidly desire to continue schooling beyond sixth or eight grade should not be compelled to do so. Nor should the chess club be forced into proximity with the wrestling team or the choir compelled to share the stage with the thespians. Forming up these little cliques of "us" to protect one another from all the others of "them" just seems to be asking for "encounters" and escalation.
If there must be compulsory secondary education, several facilities supporting small numbers of students -- a few hundred, tops, instead of a few thousand -- seems like the appropriate approach.
I see from the details (to the extent that I trust those reports) that the gun-concealing children attended school in/near Killeen, (near Ft Hood) not Austin. The Harker Heights High School has enrollment of about 2500 children.
"Reading proficiency" on state standardized tests for all students of the school is scored at "48%" which puts the institution into the top half of schools, state-wise. (Sad!)
So, yes, this is what our better schools produce.
Institutional failure across the board is the order of the day.
According to reports now, this was the second shooting incident between these two "affinity groups"-- the second person arrested, Jeremiah Tabb, had apparently already shot one of the victims once "a few weeks ago". Which leads to the question of, why was he on the street in Austin, outside of a bar, with a gun in his waistband, a handful of days after shooting the exact same kid in the leg?
I'm sure you're all very glad to know that the City of Killeen and the Killeen school district are going to coordinate their crime-fighting efforts now. Sigh. The only reason we know any of this is that, at age 17, he's considered an adult for these purposes. The other shooter is apparently only 15, and there's already plenty of talk about, um, not wanting to ruin a juvenile's future and all that.
they did allow that the block was one of the safest in what was a bad part of New York City
I've heard the same anecdotally about areas where Mafia families lived back in the day.
Post a Comment