For the last day or so, the headlines have been dominated by the multiple murder at the Emanuel African Methodist Episcopal Church in Charleston, South Carolina. Law enforcement arrested Dylan Roof, 21, in Shelby, North Carolina. Roof is white, while the nine victims were black. Race appears to have been part of Roof’s motive. WRAL has the story here.
In other news:
New York prison break prompts call for GPS implants. CBS reports here that the successful escape of two inmates from a maximum security prison in New York has led at least one state senator there to propose implanting some convicts with GPS tracking devices. Any actual legislation would surely result in an Eighth Amendment challenge. I wouldn’t bet any significant sum of money either way on the outcome.
Gun bill passes NC House without controversial provisions. The News and Observer reports here that this year’s gun rights bill has passed the House and moved on to the Senate, but without its most polarizing provisions: the repeal of the handgun purchase permit system and the authorization for legislators with concealed carry permits to carry in the legislature.
State budget update. The House passed its budget. The Senate has now passed its quite different budget. Comparing the two as they pertain to the court system, the News and Observer reports here that “[t]he woefully out-of-date technology at the Administrative Office of the Courts would receive nothing from the Senate budget,” while “[t]he House budgeted $12 million for the first fiscal year, and another $7 million the next.” Further, “[t]he Senate would spend about twice as much as the House into a fund that pays private appointed attorneys for indigent defendants, in order to reduce a shortfall that has built up over several years leading to late payments,” but would cut the Capital Defender’s Office budget by one fifth. The two chambers will now attempt to resolve their differences, a process that could take weeks.
Stealing isn’t a crime in baseball. Well, stealing bases isn’t. Stealing signs isn’t a crime but is considered poor form, I think. Hacking into another team’s computer system to steal its database of player intelligence – as the St. Louis Cardinals are alleged to have done to the Houston Astros – is a federal offense. Professor Orin Kerr breaks it down here.
High tech helps officers enforce cyclist safety measures. I am an on-again-off-again runner, and not much of a cyclist. But I worry about my cyclist friends a lot, mainly because most of them have been run off the road by cars and have suffered serious injuries as a result. (They continue to ride, which suggests the possibility of undiagnosed brain injuries, but I digress.) Good news for cyclists comes from Chattanooga, Tennessee, where Ars Technica reports a bicycle officer has begun patrolling “with the brand-new Bicyclist and Safe Monitoring Applied Radar Technology (BSMART), a handlebar-mounted device that uses an ultrasonic sensor to calculate the distance between the bike and a passing car. Then it displays how far away the nearest edge of the car was to the bike in inches,” and if the driver was within the three feet mandated by state law, the officer can pull the car over and give the driver a warning or a ticket.
“Race appears to have been part of Roof’s motive”?…. I think you could safely venture out a little farther on that limb…
>>>Lew Powell June 19, 2015 at 10:44 am “Race appears to have been part of Roof’s >>>motive”?…. I think you could safely venture out a little farther on that limb…
JW Schrecker: To what purpose? In a polite society imbued with common sense and one that takes a realistic LOGICAL approach to such incidents it is more apparent that this about mental health issues than about any racial aspect seized upon by a young man clearly in the throes of mental anguish and torment.
How about for once we take a step back and allow our system of justice to do its job WITHOUT all the unnecessary emotion laden drama that serves to resolve nothing?
Or is it that YOU really do like to witness the homes and businesses of innocents burned down or damaged and people being injured? If you do then YOU are more of a problem to this society than this young man.
This young man acted on the resentment felt by many white people. If one looks at FBI crime stats for 2005 (the most recent available with a racial breakdown) it is found that 35,000 interracial rapes were committed by black males against White women with only 10 committed by White men against black females. If the numbers were reversed there would be a huge outcry.
As it stands, the recent murders of Whites in DC by a black male, the slaughter of a White family in Indianapolis, and the Wichita Horror are unmentioned. There is a race war going on. Most Whites like me choose not to join because we have too much (family, home, wealth) to lose. The young meth addict was free of personal and material constraints.
I’m approving this comment based on my general policy of approving comments that are at least somewhat topical and are not profane, regardless of viewpoint. However, it appears that the statistical claim made in this comment has been disavowed by those responsible for compiling the statistics in question, as noted here: http://mediamatters.org/blog/2011/11/21/experts-dispute-buchanan-on-race-and-crime/151253.
Well thanks, I guess, for allowing my factual comment. The statistics are from the FBI and they may be inaccurate in favor of White people committing less crime due to Whites and Hispanics being classified as one race. Your silence is deafening on the downplaying of black crime by the MSM.
Last week 80 or so Whites were singled out on a beach in Tunisia by a black muslim with about 40 killed. The MSM has provided Kardashian stories instead of addressing this. White genocide is real and one can be a willing and useful idiot or become educated.
You may not enjoy:
http://archive.frontpagemag.com/readArticle.aspx?ARTID=26368
JW, I guess I’m one of those whackos who thinks that race was the primary motive for an admitted white supremacist driving a couple of hours to kill a bunch of bunch of black folks at a famous AME church with the aim of starting a race war. I get crazy ideas sometimes, I admit.
I’m still trying to figure out how this conclusion I’ve jumped to makes ME more of a problem to our society than a mass murderer. Please explain.
JW Schrecker, maybe racism springs from mental illness, but that doesn’t mean that racism was not more than merely “part of Roof’s motive.” Your last paragraph directed at Lew Powell was angrier than anything Lew Powell wrote justifiably provoked. Are you really that angry about Powell suggesting that Roof’s primary motive was racially based or is there something else you are so angry about?