Bad Apples

There's been a lot happening on the Valdosta State campus in the past few days.  First a series of protests involving walking on a U.S. flag.  Then a publicity hound got in the mix, stealing the flag and giving the group publicity they never could have achieved on their own.  With the media now paying attention, we found that the protesters were affiliated with the New Black Panthers.  And then yesterday, the University police discovered a backpack apparently belonging to the leader of the protesters, Eric Sheppard, that contained handgun.  An arrest warrant has been issued, and Sheppard is now a fugitive, and presumed "armed and dangerous."

Now, the most probable case is that all this true, that Sheppard is an amateur would-be terrorist (or at least an angry young thug), and when the police eventually catch him, they'll be removing a dangerous animal from the streets.

But I can't help being a little suspicious.  Consider the number of stories of police planting evidence.  The many examples of institutional racism in law enforcement.  And of course, the inflamed passions on VSU lately, as the police were forced to defend someone desecrating a flag - a very unpopular decision locally.

Then consider how odd it would be for Sheppard to leave that backpack just lying around.  I mean, come on - who leaves their gun lying around like that?  Isn't it just a bit too convenient that the police not only found the backpack containing the gun, but that they also found "unmistakable evidence" that it belonged to Sheppard?

This is why "a few bad apples" really are a problem.  Most police officers are trying to do a difficult job honestly and properly.  But there's a few doing it wrong - and worse, those bad apples have been left in the barrel for _decades._  It's hard to trust any police officer at this point, because there's no way to tell which ones are bad, and no confidence that even the good cops will report them.

Last, consider that this is coming from a privileged, white, upper-middle-class male.  I've never been stopped by the police unreasonably (a couple of traffic stops, each one deserved); never been mistreated by a cop; never even been the subject of rude behavior from a cop.  And I still have trouble believing this convenient discovery.  How much harder is it going to be for people who get harassed on a regular basis?  Who are the same color as all those unarmed men that have been shot to death by cops in the last few years?  In a community where a black high schooler was found dead, rolled up in the middle of a wrestling mat, and the death was ruled accidental?

I don't expect this to end well.

Just Making a Comparison...

A friend of a friend posted this picture a few days ago -
The picture itself is fairly offensive - showing our current sitting President, elected by a majority of the voters, alongside a list of some of the worst dictators of the last century. In fact, the poster got called out on that, but defended herself with the claim that this was only showing leaders in the two categories. It wasn't meant to imply that Obama himself is a murderous megalomaniac...it just happens that his opinions and policies regarding personal weapons place him in the same group as all those horrible people.

Yeah, right. Just a coincidence. Okay, let's look at this a bit.

First, of course, is the obvious - these names and faces were not chosen at random. If we're looking at world leaders associated with gun control...where's Tony Blair, who got the 1997 Firearms Act passed in the UK? Ronald Reagan, who endorsed the Brady Act? Angela Merkel, who signed a measure in Germany that even bans Tasers? I'm guessing that they weren't considered scary enough - especially Reagan. Including him on the list would have confused the target audience severely, I suspect. It is fairly obvious that this list was designed to provide a group of absolute villains specifically for the purpose of ranking Obama alongside them. Showing that some reasonable people support certain gun control measures would have been counter-productive to this Orwellian hatefest.

Second, to be a fair comparison, Obama's policies have to actually qualify him as a leader looking to strip citizens of their right to own guns. Does he have that sort of record? I haven't seen much on that from him. Back in June, he apparently put out some executive orders that would result in computerizing background checks, increased enforcement of existing laws, and improving interstate cooperation. None of which sounds quite like prying guns out of peoples' hands - and I haven't even found confirmation that the orders were issued. Even the NRA says he hasn't done anything on the issue - though of course that only means it's a conspiracy to do more later. But before you go lumping our President in with a bunch of dictators...shouldn't you be able to point to something he's actually done?

Third, the others in the group really ought to belong there, too. Some of them, sure. Stalin, yep. He instituted gun control in the Soviet Union. Amin, Castro? Couldn't find anything on them. Though Uganda seems to me to have been a failed state under his rule, so I wonder just how effective any gun laws really were...and I suspect that it isn't all that relevant in Cuba, where most of the populace can't afford food, let alone a handgun. But Lenin? Gun control in the Soviet Union appears to have started under Stalin, not Lenin. And Hitler? It turns out the 1938 German Weapons Act completely DEregulated long guns and ammunition, as well as liberalizing the rules on licensing. (In fairness, it also made it illegal for Jews to own any guns at all - but considering all the other antisemitic legislation of the time, it hardly seems fair to characterize that as gun control.)

So tell me again - is this really a picture showing the category that Obama's actions have placed him in, alongside all these historical villains? Or is this yet another attempt to demonize the President with lies, half-truths, and innuendo?

Of course, if you wanted to do it right, you could leave the picture exactly the same, and merely change the captions - the pictures in the bottom row are all leaders who believed that they had the right to murder their own citizens purely on their own word. But the people who put out this sort of thing seem to be just fine with that.