Only in America

[pErvinalia]

Black security guard who detained a gunman was shot dead by police when they arrive.

[JimC]

Be fair - he was clearly guilty of being armed while black...

[Seabass]

Wisconsin company giving every employee a handgun for Christmas
https://thehill.com/blogs/blog-briefing ... -christmas

[Tero]

Good guy with gun was black. Now dead.
https://www.cnn.com/2018/11/15/us/chica ... index.html

[Rum]

Good guy with gun was black. Now dead.
https://www.cnn.com/2018/11/15/us/chica ... index.html

One of the consequences of the gun culture you have in America just struck me.

The sheer levels of grief and loss that your population has to live with. It is hard enough to lose loved ones to disease or even accidents but when you lose someone because of gun violence there is something so brutal and avoidable about it.

America in 2016 had about 37000 deaths attributable to guns (15% of the world total - and Brazil was the only country higher). Assuming every death affected close family - a conservative estimate of say, five people, that is a lot of grief, family tragedy, a lot of orphans and windows. A lot of parents who feel their own lives are over. It is pretty awful, isn't it?

[Tero]

First time ever!
Texas Students Will Soon Learn Slavery Played A Central Role In The Civil War
https://www.npr.org/2018/11/16/66855717 ... -civil-war

[Sean Hayden]

Yeah right, I'd be surprised if most students before high school were able to mention something besides slavery as a cause for the Civil War.

How do these people come up with this stuff?

[laklak]

It's the South, and everybody knows the South is just trailer park racists, anti-abortion fundys, and inbred idiots. Oh and assault rifles. Ask any Yankee.

Or Californian. They probably know even more about it than your average Yankee.

[Sean Hayden]

This looks like California to me though.
























No, I don't think this is a fair representation of most Americans understanding of the Civil War. It is still funny though.

[Sean Hayden]

It's the South, and everybody knows the South is just trailer park racists, anti-abortion fundys, and inbred idiots. Oh and assault rifles. Ask any Yankee.

Or Californian. They probably know even more about it than your average Yankee.

Right. I did a bit of digging and found that nationally more than half of the students asked were able to give at least a partial list of causes for the Civil War on US History assessments. Slavery was included in all the examples of full or partially correct answers. I'm assuming slavery must have been mentioned in nearly all the rest for them to have even been considered partially correct.

It would be interesting to see Texas specifically. I'm betting it's better than the national average on this question though.

[laklak]

When my oldest daughter was in 6th grade they were studying the civil war, would have been what, 25 years ago or thereabouts? She was taught that slavery was the central issue of the war. She also knew all about Harriet Tubman, U.S. Grant, Honest Abe, and Sherman the Butcher. I asked her who Jefferson Davis was and she didn't know. Also didn't know Stonewall Jackson, J.E.B. Stuart, or even that flower of Southern gentlemanly masculinity, Marse Robert E. Lee. Very Yankee-centric. So I'm skeptical that the Redneck Southern Racists have been filling the kids' heads with garbage for the last 3 decades.

[Seabass]

What sort of history lesson covers Grant but not Lee? I don't see how that's even possible.
And no Jefferson Davis? How do you cover the Civil War and leave out the Confederate president, ferchrissakes? And Stonewall Jackson is probably the best known Confederate general after Lee...

[laklak]

It was only 6th grade, so I imagine it was a limited overview. You just tell them about slavery, the underground railroad, and what great guys Abe and Uly and Bill were, and leave it at that. She didn't even realize Florida was part of the Confederacy. This was the gifted program, BTW, for the smart kids, Christ knows what they taught the others.

[Tero]

‘Unwanted subject’: What led a Kirkland yogurt shop to call police on a black man
Ragland, 31, is both a court-appointed special advocate and a visitation supervisor, so his job is to oversee meetings between kids and the parents who have lost custody of them.

That’s what he was doing at the store — he was supervising an outing between a mother and her 12-year-old son. The boy wanted ice cream, so the three drove to Menchie’s, arrived together and had been sitting there for about half an hour, visiting, when Ragland looked up to find two police officers standing at the table.

“They asked me to leave,” Ragland said. “They asked for my ID. They told me the manager had been watching me and wanted me to move along.”

Ragland did “move along,” he says — though that phrase, as if he were a stray dog, made him bristle. The police report reflects that the Kirkland officers were told he was there working. In fact he was legally required to be there overseeing the mother and son.

“Ragland had two associates (female adult and male juvenile) with him, who stated they were there with him for visitation,” the report says. They were asked to leave anyway, and they did.

“Store employees … told me that he had been in the store for a while and did not buy anything, and he was not making them feel comfortable,” says an “unwanted subject” report. The employees “were both thankful that Ragland was gone.”
https://www.seattletimes.com/seattle-ne ... black-man/

[pErvinalia]

God what a place.