fraggle said:
The increase in violence is relatively recent--the past couple of decades
There has been no increase in violence in the US overall.
cosmic said:
Strange isn't it that when a white person is shot by the police you rarely see anything on the news about it.
Bullshit.
You find and link a white, middle-aged, calm and respectful man, pulled over for a minor traffic violation and shot four times while sitting in the car with his wife and kid, that didn't make the news. We'll wait.
cosmic said:
The news doesn't want to wait to find out what exactly happened for it may show something different than they posted.
That was before cell phone cameras started showing up. It has become much more difficult, in some cases, to simply report the official version coming from the police desk and PR departments.
timojin said:
I remember earlier in the 60 - 70 The first shooting at Texas tower and for a while several years not much have been heard , from 90 up we have all kind killing with a gun in different states , inless you don't live in the States you are not aware,
Mass gun murder by crazy white men may be up a bit, but not violence in general. Overall, violence in the US has followed the pattern of other places that first allowed and then banned leaded gasoline - about sixteen years after the ban, rates of violence start to drop.
The drug wars - fueled by punitive legislation pushed by Republican governance and the crack cocaine epidemic abetted by Reagan's Iran/Contra operation - have been the major factor in the remaining US gun violence (other than suicide). The US also been dealing with the consequences of the 1980s cutbacks in government paid mental health care and other violence mitigating infrastructure, of course, but that seems to have been a relatively minor factor in gun violence.
Then there's the treatment of black men by police forces, which contributes to the violence far out of proportion to the simple count of bad events, high though that is.
So basically: racism, drug laws (also racist), poor gun control, economic collapse, the familiar litany, all of it exacerbated (if not actually caused) by a surge of fascism and concomitant partial breakdown of government. In a traditionally violent country.