Saturday, February 12, 2022

Why the Complacency Over Gun Violence?

If you look at a city like Minneapolis objectively, there are shootings daily. People are shot and shot to death at an alarming rate. That means law enforcement is reacting to these violent crimes daily. If you research the statistics, when it's not being obscured by the media, most of the victims are black lives. Most of the arrested shooters are as well. When you think of the hundreds of cases handled by the police, and the relatively few mistakes, it begins to show that the number of people killed by police, is a small number in comparison to the number being killed by gun violence every single day. Yet, the media, and certain groups have skillfully turned our attention to the few tragic deaths of individuals at the hands of police; and deflected the reality of daily killings by criminals, to back page news to be ignored because it doesn't bring the masses out to demonstrate their rage. In fact, if a child or innocent person is killed, few people mourn. It's only when out of hundreds of shootings and hundreds of encounters that someone being arrested suffers an unfortunate death or injury from police, that anyone notices. The bigger problem, is the criminals, who are killing people every single day. And the more frequently police are called on to react to this violence, the more statistical chance that the cops might harm someone in the process. Somehow, that has been forgotten. The sheer numbers of shootings should be enough to make people upset, yet they save the outrage for the handful of deadly police encounters. This kind of backward thinking has allowed criminals to be treated like victims, and victims to be ignored. And it is all reinforced by the amount of time and repetition selected, highly charged stories are given by the media outlets.

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