In Chapel Hill, North Carolina, a troubled white man named Craig Hicks shot and killed three Muslim students. Muslims suspect a religiously-motivated hate crime, but the police say it was a dispute about parking -- apparently these students lived in another part of the apartment complex but kept parking in front of Hicks' apartment. Hard to know, since if anything makes people as crazy as religious hatred, it's fighting over parking spaces. Put the two together and something bad was bound to happen.
Gotta love the way bold, gun-owning sheep dogs like Hicks are making America safer for the rest of us.
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5 comments:
Oh, sure, it was totally just the parking.
The fact that the victims had Arabic names and were both phenotypically and culturally Arabic in apperance had nothing to do with it. Nor did the fact that the murderer is a militant atheist gunowner. Nnnnope. Not a thing to do with it.
Triple homicide should get him life in prison either way, though, so I guess it doesn't matter in the end what lies are spun around it. In either case it's just a senseless waste of four human lives and the awful suffering of all those who were close to them.
He was apparently a shooting waiting to happen, watching the 1990s white man rampage movie, "Falling Down," over and over again, according to his ex-wife.
http://talkingpointsmemo.com/livewire/craig-stephen-hicks-shooting-rampage-movie
Which is not to say that Islamophobia has nothing to do with it. When this person goes off, he targets people he is taught it is acceptable to treat as less-than human.
I was recently reading about the beating of Charles Sumner on the Senate floor by Preston Brooks. Brooks initially wanted to challenge Sumner to a duel, but was convinced by a friend that duels were for equals and that Sumner was not an equal, but should be beaten like a dog (or, probably more accurately, like a slave.) The ways that the uncivilized convince themselves that cowardice is virtue and brutality is fair is amazing.
When you shoot three people in the head, you have committed a hate crime. What remains is determining what particular form of hate this was. I'll wait for the investigation findings.
What amazes me is the media seems more interested in the possibility of a hate crime than the murders themselves. North Carolina has the death penalty, and I can't imagine what additional punishment could be tacked on.
The situation and those involved raise obvious questions, but people kill people for smiling at them the wrong way. It's difficult to reason through the thinking of an irrational mind.
@Shadow Flutter
"When you shoot three people in the head, you have committed a hate crime."
So you're saying America's current 'favorite son' and 'martyred' military darling, Chris Kyle - whose job was literally shooting hundreds of people in the head - is actually one of the worst hate criminals in our history?
Now, I personally am disgusted by the blind worship of Kyle as some sort of great American hero, but at the same time I recognize that something is only a hate crime if it's a crime committed primarily out of irrational hatred. Such hatred often might very well be an influencing factor in the motivations of people who become soldiers and go to war, but it's not the main driving force.
Making absolutist statements that needlessly broaden and blur the lines between different established concepts is destructive. An exploited employee is not a "slave", not everything which causes people to freak out is "Terrorism", and plenty of homicides are anything but "hate crimes".
And yes, I'm aware that makes it quite possible for Hicks's crime itself to not be a hate crime. But the available evidence sure doesn't seem to suggest "parking conflict" as the primary motivator here. If this isn't a hate crime, then it's mental sickness.
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