By David Futrelle
Three white supremacists have been charged with attempted murder after one of them fired at a group of antifascist counterprotesters after a speech by neo-Nazi celebrity Richard Spencer at the University of Florida in Gaineville yesterday.
The Miami Herald reports:
Just before 5:30 p.m., just as protesters outside Spencer’s speech at UF’s Phillips Center were wrapping up, Gainesville police said the trio started heckling some anti-Spencer protesters with Hitler chants, Nazi salutes and threats. At one point, cops said, convicted felon Tenbrink pulled out a gun and the brothers encouraged him to use it.
He fired a single shot that missed the group, police said, then sped off in a silver Jeep. An off-duty Alachua County Sheriff’s Office deputy spotted the car 20 miles out of town around 9 p.m. and arrested the group. The Fears brothers are held on million dollar bonds in the Alachua County jail. Tenbrink’s is $3 million.
Surprise, surprise: Two of the three were amongst the alleged “very fine people” marching with their fellow white supremacists in Charlottesville.
Tenbrink, 28, and William Fears, 30, were spotted at Charlottesville, the site of the largest white nationalist gathering in years that erupted in violence. Fears identifies himself on Twitter as “Charismatic leader of a White breeding cult” and tweeted “blood and soil,” the notorious Nazi slogan.
This is terrorism, plain and simple. It’s appalling the story isn’t getting more attention in the media.
Here are some tweets with more details on what happened.
3 white supremacists arrested in Florida for shooting at anti-racism protesters https://t.co/zn6bUBqFK3
— Vox (@voxdotcom) October 20, 2017
https://twitter.com/efoster_eric/status/921495556790325248
“Kill them”: Three men charged in shooting after Richard Spencer speech https://t.co/gqCXtWSmD3
— The Washington Post (@washingtonpost) October 20, 2017
And these three aren’t the only violent white supremacists who should be getting a lot more attention from the press — and the cops.
Who are the white supremacists assaulting people at rallies in Berkeley, Charlottesville and Huntington Beach? We found some of them: pic.twitter.com/fL5yzyI8Om
— ProPublica (@propublica) October 19, 2017
A Cali racist group—the Rise Above Movement_is full of violent felons. Law enforcement pays it little attention: https://t.co/8AFZS9HVsO
— ProPublica (@propublica) October 19, 2017
The ProPublica piece is a long one but I think a necessary read for anyone concerned with the rise of a violent fascist movement in US.
— 🏳️🌈Spacedad (@SuperSpacedad) October 20, 2017
My thoughts exactly.
Meanwhile, everyone in the White House continues to lie about Trump’s shockingly callous treatment of a grieving Gold Star mother and the congresswoman who has stood up for her.
Specifically, this entire John Kelly story is fiction. Not one bit of it actually happened. pic.twitter.com/eGSQU0S3wc
— Daniel Dale (@ddale8) October 20, 2017
https://twitter.com/TVietor08/status/921452065338953729
Hey @realDonaldTrump I know how much you love calling out FAKE NEWS so here’s your daughter-in-law quoting a transcript that doesn't exist. https://t.co/TheR8FGrWY
— shauna (@goldengateblond) October 20, 2017
"He knew what he signed up for"
Kelly: I told him to say it
DJT: I didn't say it
LaraT: I saw the transcript
Sanders: There's no transcript— Jules Suzdaltsev (@jules_su) October 20, 2017
Don TrumpJr. has thrown himself into the fray though he apparently has trouble telling black women apart.
https://twitter.com/kibblesmith/status/921064156610088962
Rachel Maddow has a pretty convincing theory on why Trump doesn’t want to talk about Niger: that the 4 US soldiers died in part as a result of the Trump administration alienating the government of Chad, which pulled its troops out of Niger after Trump put the country (a longtime ally in the war on terror) on his alleged non-Muslim ban list for an extremely stupid reason.
Maddow connects the dots on how Trump adding Chad to his travel ban may have gotten soldiers killed in Niger https://t.co/PYk203GxVM
— David Futrelle (@DavidFutrelle) October 20, 2017
In a whole other arena of terrible, things are even worse in Puerto Rico than official reports acknowledge:
Real death toll in Puerto Rico is probably 450 — much higher than official count https://t.co/msCyhMDyyQ
— Sarah Kendzior (@sarahkendzior) October 18, 2017
But our country still has its heroes. Along with Rep. Wilson and all those working diligently to save lives in Puerto Rico, there is this dude:
A man in an apartment on Connecticut Ave. mooned President Trump’s motorcade to the Embassy of Kuwait tonight, per the pool report pic.twitter.com/ifGC8ycXat
— Hunter Schwarz (@hunterschwarz) October 19, 2017
Here are some cute animals because we all need more of them this week. And every week these days, frankly.
everything is terrible so here’s a baby lion cub learning to roar pic.twitter.com/JZpZGj69FJ
— shauna (@goldengateblond) October 18, 2017
https://twitter.com/awwcuteness/status/921260735119970307
https://twitter.com/ItsMeowIRL/status/921245209526132742
I’d also like to point out that marginalized people are a lot more likely to be charged and/or convicted for acts that would be considered self defense if a more privileged person did them. Remember when Marisa Alexander got 20 years for firing a warning shot at her abuser?
NRA propaganda about needing a gun for safety is directed towards middle class white people for a reason.
Point taken. I still wouldn’t recommend taking any actions that would escalate a violent encounter.
That sounds awful, WWTH. Hugs.
Alan, one thing that I get the impression is different in the US from the UK is a sense of entitlement around property. I’ve known plenty of people who probably would shoot someone for stealing property as revenge against the other person, rather than because of fear for their own safety. The people who keep guns in case of burglars often give me the impression it’s more about anger at someone for stealing from them than about safety.
We’ve got this attitude if “I’ve got mine; you get yours” where way too many people think taxes are about stealing frtom them and everyone is out to take what they rightfully earned.
@ WWTH
Oh, I completely understand that; I know you’re highly empathic, and compassionate about victims. Apologies if I gave the impression otherwise.
And I completely agree with you about the gun thing. Obviously it’s up to individuals how they protect themselves, but a home defence gun is only useful if it’s easily to hand and loaded; and that’s a pretty dangerous object to have lying around.
@dreemr
The one example I can think of that justifies firearm ownership for self-defense are those whose work takes them into the northern wilderness. I’m thinking geologists or surveyors; my brother has spent many a month in the Canadian north on exploratory sample collecting for mining companies near Stewart and Yellowknife, and the company he worked for mandated at least one person be licensed to use firearms and to carry a shotgun into the field. The grizzlies that inhabit the Northwest Territories and British Columbia can be quite aggressive, so I’ve heard from an ex-girlfriend of his who spoke of a time when a bear chased her and a fellow geologist (who was armed with said shotgun) across a river. He had his shotgun at the ready once they were on the far bank, but thankfully the bear left them alone at that point.
Wow, according to Wikipedia, a grizzly bear’s bite has been measured at over 8 MPa (1160 psi)!
When it comes to thieves and theft, I’ve noticed that sometimes you can’t always tell what of yours will be considered valuable enough to steal.
There’s a guy in the area where I live who came out one morning to find someone had stolen the doors off his pickup truck – a1970’s Ford, I think. The thieves ignored the power tools hiding behind the seats, and ignored the good stereo system it had. They just took the truck doors.
The conclusion the police reached was that someone was so desperate to replace the doors on their own 1970’s Ford truck, that they felt they had to steal someone else’s doors to do so.
So yeah, it can be hard to defend your property when you have no idea sometimes what of yours a thief would consider valuable enough to take.
I love that the guide pamphlet for Yellowstone gives advice on what to do in a bear encounter but concludes with:
“Under these circumstances bears have been known to cause only minor injuries”
“Carry some bells and pepper spray and keep an eye out for bear poo.”
“How do you know it’s bear poo?”
“It smells of pepper and it’s got bells in it.”
@weirwoodtreehugger
Uh, my reading of what Surplus said wasn’t quite so much “guns are good” or “killing people who break into your home is fine” but more about risking their own life to defend their property, because for some people their stuff could be reasonably considered to be worth as much as their lives. To quote:
@Surplus via WWTH
Pre fuckin cisely! It’s not class privilege not to think killing burglars is a good idea. It’s actually class and white(!) privilege to look past the ways this is just not an option some of us have. Case in point, black people can’t do guns. We just can’t. There is no Stand Your Ground, no concealed carry, no Castle doctrine for us. We shoot somebody, that’s it for us. Our calculus is ‘would I rather lose my work spreadsheets or my damn freedom? Or even my life if depending on which cop responds to the 9/11 call and what mood the fucker is in’. You don’t think you could keep living if you had your stuff stolen, I wouldn’t be given the chance to make that decision if I shot the person stealing my stuff
(Came out angrier than I’d hoped, but there it is)
@ Axe
You’ve seen the video I take it of a white guy and then a black guy walking round the same open carry area with an AR-15?
I don’t even need to type anything else do I?
Since we are on the subject of home defense,
general thoughts on less lethal weapons?
@ treeperson
They should have stopped making them after the first sequel. Although that bit with the exploding toilet was funny.
@Alan Robertshaw
I see what you did there!
But in seriousness I was wondering if things like pepperball and tasers were decent defensive options,
of course for the cost of some of these things you could get a shotgun and loud it with rubber buck or bean bags.
More concerned abut nazis then burglars to be honest since as a legal observer my mother has managed to get on our local groups shit list.
@ treeperson
Well both of those are very illegal here anyway. They’re ‘prohibited weapons’ under our Firearms Act.
But one thing I would say generally is, under real stress, a lot of people can’t even tie their shoelaces let alone operate anything complicated. You lose your fine motor control and there’s a lot of perceptual Distortions. So the issue is, whether you’d be able to deploy such things anyway. Probably better off just waving a rolling pin around.
@Alan Robertshaw
I’ve always found odd that less lethal options are often more restricted then firearms capable of killing a dozen or more people in seconds.
And I’ll take the swords I’ve been training with for over a decade over a rolling pin in a fight any day.
@Gussie Jives – I agree, but again, we’re talking more about undeveloped land rather than rural areas, which is really my only distinction.
What Alan said (both things – Lethal Weapon 3 was dire) 😛
As a practical legal suggestion:
A CO2 fire extinguisher will give you time to run, which is the primary aim of self defence – distract them/drop them for long enough for you to make tracks the hell outta there.
Dirt cheap, too and my god, do they ever hurt when you get a blast in the face.
Sorry for the off topic, but has anyone heard of this cult called NXIVM? I was just reading about it today. I only bring it up because the leader, Keith Raniere is exactly the man that manospherians want to be or think they are but the world can’t see it.
It’s all there. The obsession with IQ. The evopsych. The preying on underage girls. The Ayn Rand fandom and desire to start his own country. And here’s the kicker. He leeches off the women in his life while believing that he’s the superior one and others are parasites.
http://www.timesunion.com/local/article/Secrets-of-NXIVM-2880885.php#item-38491
In the UK surveys and interviews with actual criminals suggest the top deterrents for house entry are: evidence of a dog on the premises, access blocked by trellis, and lighting around the outside of the property.
I like the fire extinguisher suggestion though; they can be quite dangerous.
http://37.media.tumblr.com/382136b618241b6e347d51d9661baea6/tumblr_muwjwqMt9R1rey868o1_500.gif
@TreePerson:
Part of the problem is twofold:
First, any of the ‘less lethal’ weapons that can disable a person can still be lethal sometimes, especially if the target is already under stress. Tasers have triggered heart problems. Pepper spray can kill people who already have trouble breathing (say, asthma).
And second, if the person with the weapon considers it ‘non-lethal’, they may be more likely to actually use it in situations where they would think twice about using a gun.
But the main reason for this is likely the classic ‘putting the genie back in the bottle’ scenario. Guns have been around for so long, and are so well understood by the general populace (and in the U.S., have such a political lobby) that it’s pretty much impossible to set up good restrictions on them now. But with anything new that isn’t technically a gun, well, new rules can be written for that to restrict usage, and you have a lot fewer established manufacturers to deal with.
The problem with saying “just let them have your stuff, your stuff is not worth the burglar’s life” is that I don’t actually know that the person is only going to take my stuff. A non-trivial number of crimes are crimes of opportunity or of circumstance. Someone breaks into my house not expecting me to be home to take my stuff, and finds me there, and then … ??? What? They just look at me funny while they swipe all my things? They don’t imagine to themselves that now I know what they look like and can make a good police report, so maybe they ought to beat the shit out of me to warn me not to do that? There’s no chance that they will think, Hey, here is a defenseless female-presenting individual, time to rape! There’s no possibility that I get murdered in the process of a bungled burglary?
I know how I would weight my stuff vs. the life of someone who willfully invaded my house if I knew factually that the loss of my stuff was the only negative thing that was going to happen to me and that the other person was definitely going to die if I acted. And I also know that I weight my own safety waaaay higher than the safety of a home invader. I don’t know what a home invader is going to do to me. Posing it as stuff-vs-life is disingenuous. Stuff is not the only thing I’m in a position to lose in that situation.
@PoM
You don’t need to know a person personally to decide that, as a living human being you shouldn’t murder them.
Edit: I mean, absolutely take defensive measures but do you need lethal force?
@Alan
I heard about a device you can buy that goes on your keychain and if you activate it, it emits a really, really loud sound. Do you think that might work to scare a burglar or other predator away?
I didn’t say anything about knowing them personally? Or knowing them period?
It isn’t murder if I’m defending myself. Either morally or legally. I’m in my 40s and not very physically able, and so asking me to defend myself without a weapon is effectively telling me to not bother. If I had a knife in my hand, I would stab to kill to prevent myself being harmed. If I had a taser, I would keep it running until the person stopped moving. I know myself. I value myself very highly. I am not willing to lay my safety on anyone’s altar. If you feel differently about yourself, more power to you! But I don’t think I’m in the wrong just because I don’t think someone who breaks into my house with unknown intentions is more valuable than I am.
@kupo
Thats pretty much why I asked abut less lethal options,
the optimal out come leaves the intruder incapacitated but (mostly) unharmed and able to have their day in court.
But @Policy of Madness also has a point its very hard to tell if the person braking into your house is there just for my TV or if they have a more violent purpose.