America's Gun Violence

josevolution said:

Halifax2TheMax said:

And please, secede.

https://www.cnn.com/2021/04/10/us/fort-worth-freeway-shooting-texas/index.html

Yes please let’s see Texas deal with another freeze they could barely survive this past winter without crying for help from the fed! 

Halifax2TheMax said:

static111 said:

josevolution said:

Halifax2TheMax said:

And please, secede.

https://www.cnn.com/2021/04/10/us/fort-worth-freeway-shooting-texas/index.html

Yes please let’s see Texas deal with another freeze they could barely survive this past winter without crying for help from the fed! 

Yes because of our corrupt government all of us, more Biden voters than most other states, should die and be killed by ineptitude, thanks you two.  

Time for Tejas repubs to come to their senses and stop being the POOTWH Party or, as the chair of the Tejas State Repub party believes, secede already. Didn’t say “Biden voters should die and be killed by ineptitude,” but I do wonder if it should be a cause of death on a death certificate?

static111 said:

josevolution said:

Halifax2TheMax said:

And please, secede.

https://www.cnn.com/2021/04/10/us/fort-worth-freeway-shooting-texas/index.html

Yes please let’s see Texas deal with another freeze they could barely survive this past winter without crying for help from the fed! 

Yes because of our corrupt government all of us, more Biden voters than most other states, should die and be killed by ineptitude, thanks you two.  

Halifax2TheMax said:

Back to business as usual. 'Murica.

Police report multiple victims in Tennessee school shooting (msn.com)

tbergs said:

josevolution said:

https://twitter.com/jeffreyguterman/status/1381564166872428545?s=21
Uhmmm 

That is the most depressing thread ever. Kids getting shot left and right.

At eight-fifteen on a pre-pandemic Friday morning, Shaina Harrison arrived at the Bronx Academy of Health Careers, one of seven specialized high schools in the massive Evander Childs Educational Campus building, in a northerly part of the borough. She had come from Red Hook, in Brooklyn, where she lives, to teach a weekly for-credit class on gun violence and how to prevent it. New Yorkers Against Gun Violence, or N.Y.A.G.V., the nonprofit organization of which she is one of three full-time employees, has been sending her to teach in New York City high schools for nine years, since she was in her mid-twenties. She is almost six feet tall, and she wears false eyelashes, bright-red lipstick, and striking clothes—on this day, a red fleece coat, a bold black-and-white-checked blouse, wide-leg trousers, and square eyeglasses with pink-and-black frames. Her black, wavy hair hung to below her shoulders.

The students in the class were ninth graders, some still not much more than little kids. She told them to call her Shaina. Some kids were paying attention, others had receded back into their hoodies like monks in cowls, and two or three laid their heads on their desks and closed their eyes. Harrison announced that this would be a safe space and also a brave space where everybody could say things that were hard to say, without being judged. Turning to some girls in hijabs who were talking, she picked up the rhythm, chatted with them, and said to the class, “I’ll always receive what you give, and hear it, and give you something back. I want to hear what you’re saying. Your voice is more important to me than mine.”

She told everybody to take out a pen and a piece of paper, because they were going to play a game. The kids groaned. She said the game was called Two Truths and a Lie. She told them to write down two things about themselves that were true, and one that was a lie. The rest of the class would then guess which two were true and which one was the lie. She went first: “One, I got in seventeen fights in high school.” The kids with their heads on their desks sat up. She did look as if she might be able to fight. Then she said, “Second, I am a singer. Third, I am famous on Instagram. Now you tell me which are the truths, and which is the lie.”

A boy raised his hand. “I think you are a singer, you did get in fights in high school, and you aren’t famous on Instagram.”

“Why am I a singer? Because I look like maybe I sing in a church choir?”

“Yeah. And I think you got in fights in high school because people bullied you.”

“Why did people bully me?”

“I don’t want to say.”

“Nothing will bother me. This is a safe space and a brave space.”

“Because you’re overweight?

“O.K., I hear that. I receive that. And why don’t you think I’m famous on Instagram?”

“I don’t know. I just don’t think you are.”

Another kid said, “You’re a smart person. You don’t waste your time on social media.”

More discussion. Finally, Harrison said, “O.K., here’s my answer. I did get in seventeen fights in high school—that is true. I didn’t like to fight, but somehow I got a reputation as a fighter, and then people were always wanting to fight me. Just bumping up against someone in the hall, suddenly I’d be in a fight. When I applied to colleges I had all those suspensions on my record, so even though I got all A’s and my test scores were good, some colleges were afraid to take a chance on me. Bowling Green, a college way out in Ohio, did give me a full scholarship. But that’s something we’ll talk more about later in the year—how things you do in high school can stay with you and affect your life later.

“Second truth: Yes, I am Instagram famous. I am a plus-size fashion influencer and mommy blogger with my own blog that tens of thousands of people follow every day. My hashtags are #FatGirlsBeWinning and #MyBravestSpace. And why wouldn’t someone like me have a fashion blog? Look at how I dress. I promise you will never see me twice in the same pair of glasses. I have at least ninety-seven pairs.”

Now every student was paying attention. She continued, “So, what is my lie? I said I’m a singer. That is definitely not true. Not all large Black women can sing. Some of us can hardly sing a note. I wish I could sing, I like music, but I don’t have that gift. See, you made a decision about me based on how I look. But how we look might not be who we are.”

The kids went next. A girl said that she liked her English Language Arts class, she was nice, and she spoke four languages. Nobody believed she spoke four languages, but it turned out that she did: French, English, and two African languages, Fulani and Susu; it was not true that she liked her E.L.A. class. Then a boy said that he was from Canada, he liked to cook, and he liked to play basketball. The class decided he couldn’t be from Canada: “If you’re from Canada, why would you come here? Canada is way better than here.” The surmise was correct; he was not from Canada. Another boy said that he had a sister in school, he liked to laugh, and he was a bodybuilder. The class pointed out that he did not look like a bodybuilder; he wasn’t. A girl said she was good at video games, was born in a foreign country, and had two pet turtles. Someone said that it is illegal to own turtles in New York City. The girl happily admitted to having made up the turtles.

When the class began, most of the students were in one of two modes: poker-faced and shut down, or in groups of several kids locked on to one another with that kind of teen-age telepathy in which the slightest raised eyebrow can produce screams of laughter. By the end, they were like citizens of the classroom. “I’m pushing you guys to look at your stereotypes,” Harrison said. “I want you to notice how sometimes you don’t really see other people, how you stereotype them, and how they stereotype you. How does stereotyping lead to gun violence? Because it makes us feel that we’re unsafe, and that we don’t know each other. What we don’t know makes us afraid. People pick up guns because they feel afraid, and powerless. Being afraid is a part of life, and we can deal with it in better ways. And we are not powerless, as I will show you.”

That class took place before covid, when schools were still open. Harrison has taught Two Truths and a Lie, she says, “hundreds of times.” Right now, she is teaching it in Zoom classes, to even more kids. During the year that she has been teaching remotely, gun deaths in New York City increased by eighty-eight per cent. In the past several weeks, eighteen people were murdered in mass shootings in Atlanta, Georgia, and in Boulder, Colorado. In the former incident, the suspect used a gun that he had bought the same day.

New Yorkers Against Gun Violence began as the result of a shooting twenty-eight years ago. On a spring afternoon in Brooklyn in 1993, four teen-agers from Crown Heights tried to steal a new off-road bicycle from a man named Allyn Winslow on a hill in Prospect Park. Winslow resisted and pedalled away, and one of the boys shot him twice with a .22-calibre pistol. One of the bullets hit his heart, and at the bottom of the hill he fell off his bicycle and died.

The shooting frightened the neighborhoods around the park. A few days later, people from Park Slope arranged a memorial and an anti-gun rally near the crime scene, with city and state officials and community figures. Hundreds of local residents showed up—a much bigger turnout than expected. Following that encouraging experience, three of the rally’s organizers started a group called New Yorkers for Gun Control.

For its first act of protest, the group joined with an organization called Parents of Murdered Children and collected about a hundred pairs of shoes that represented some of the people killed by guns in the state in 1993. They lined up the shoes on the sidewalk in front of the office of Alfonse D’Amato, the Republican senator from New York, who always voted with the N.R.A. Afterward, Ellen Freudenheim, one of the group’s founders, did a more ambitious performance-art-like piece on the steps of the Capitol in Washington, this time with thirty-eight thousand pairs of shoes, representing the number of Americans who were dying from gun violence every year. The Silent March, as the event was called, received a lot of press coverage and remains one of the most powerful anti-gun protests ever.

New Yorkers for Gun Control, to broaden its mission, soon changed its name to New Yorkers Against Gun Violence. Two years after its founding, N.Y.A.G.V. started an education fund, to bring the anti-gun-violence message to schools.

I first met Harrison in 2013, when she had been with N.Y.A.G.V. for four years. Bowling Green College had not worked out. She was there less than a semester when her grandmother, who had raised her and her younger sister, died. Harrison returned to Brooklyn, back to her old bedroom in her grandmother’s apartment, in the Red Hook Houses, and got a job with AmeriCorps, which sent her to a conflict-mediation organization in Crown Heights called Save Our Streets. AmeriCorps paid her four hundred dollars a month, on which she supported herself and her sister. After she had been with AmeriCorps for two years, New Yorkers Against Gun Violence hired her away.

On our first meeting, she and I walked around the playgrounds and streets of Red Hook as she showed me places where people had been shot, and she described what it was like, in previous years, to hear gunshots all the time. At thirty-three, she still lives in the same neighborhood and now has a three-year-old son.

Rebecca Fischer, the executive director of N.Y.A.G.V., started with the organization in 2013. She is forty and grew up in Massachusetts. Her father is a professor of labor law at Western New England University; her mother taught at the law school. In high school, Fischer hung out with the skateboarders and kids with shaved heads and thought she was the only boring person. She also got good grades, led the school debate team, and played cello. She went to Tufts, where she majored in clinical psychology and comparative religion, and then to Benjamin Cardozo law school. She took a job at a New York boutique firm that advises nonprofits. At twenty-six, she married another lawyer; they have two sons and live in Park Slope, where N.Y.A.G.V. began.

One morning in December of 2012, Fischer was texting with a colleague at her firm when the school shooting occurred at Sandy Hook. The colleague had a six-year-old son in the school. Some time passed before she found out that her son was O.K.; he had sheltered in a classroom and had to walk past bodies to leave the building. Fischer told me that being part of that experience, even at one remove, felt “surreal and insane.” She changed her life—she got involved with social-justice groups at her synagogue, met anti-gun-violence activists across New York, became a volunteer for N.Y.A.G.V., and eventually joined its board. When it was looking for a new director, she applied for the job.

N.Y.A.G.V. has successfully lobbied the state legislature to pass major gun-safety measures. A law now requires that all guns in homes with children be under lock and key, thanks partly to the group. The ReACTION curriculum, developed by Harrison and scaled up by Fischer, is taught in nineteen schools and serves more than five hundred students. Fischer sees her job as bringing forward the young activists—Harrison and N.Y.A.G.V.’s other teachers—while she supervises, lobbies, and raises money.

The Evander Childs building sits on a major east-west Bronx thoroughfare called East Gun Hill Road. During the Revolutionary War, American troops stored cannons on high ground. One night, when the cannons were unguarded, two saboteurs pounded rat-tail files into the touchholes and broke them off so that the cannons could not be fired. The Americans brought the cannons to a local hill, farther behind the lines, to repair them—thus, East Gun Hill Road. The nation began in gunfire; at the surface of our consciousness and deep in our subconscious, guns are everywhere.

On another morning at the Bronx Academy of Health Careers, Harrison’s lesson took up the subject of “toxic masculinity.” She was wearing a red, green, and black plaid-flannel shirt, close-fitting black jeans, and shin-high faux-Timberland boots. She asked the students to make one list of the qualities that a “good man” might have, and another of the qualities of a “real man.” Then she and the kids talked about each category: a good man is caring, takes care of his family, works hard but doesn’t necessarily have a lot of money. A real man is tough, stands up for himself and his friends and family, doesn’t avoid conflict, doesn’t cry. “A real man can’t be a wussie,” one boy said, and Harrison replied, “Thank you for your answer, and you also didn’t use the word beginning with a ‘P,’ and I appreciate that.”

Continued next post