Right wing violence is more planned and targeted. Left wing violence is more spontaneous and indiscriminate. But the end results are similar. People get killed.
Findings from Armed Conflict Location and Event Data raise concerns about continued violence during and after election day
www.theguardian.com
You really got to read the links you post before you post them. Let's read it together, shall we. It doesn't say what you thought it said. Most of the attacks appear to be random, or not political or examples of righties killing lefties.
In any event, you don't dispute that the real wacko mass killers are righties, not lefties, right?
At least 11 Americans have been killed while participating in political demonstrations this year and another 14 have died in other incidents linked to political unrest, according to new data from a non-profit monitoring political unrest in the United States.
Nine of the people killed during protests were demonstrators taking part in Black Lives Matter protests. Two were conservatives killed after pro-Trump “patriot rallies”. All but one were killed by fellow citizens.
https://www.theguardian.com/us-news...-george-floyd-hundreds-face-trials-and-prison
The new data highlights the danger of the presence of guns during politically charged protests, and raises concerns about continued violence during and after election day, when many Americans anticipate delays, confusion and protests before the winner of the presidential race is confirmed.
Violence at US protests
The
new data on fatalities and violence at American protests comes from a database created by the Armed Conflict Location and Event Data project (
ACLED), a non-profit, working in collaboration with a group of researchers at Princeton.
ACLED, a widely cited source for data on civilian casualties in Yemen, has been a non-partisan monitor of protests and violence in the Middle East, Asia, Europe and Latin America, and launched its US Crisis Monitor in July, citing concerns over
hate crimes and rising political violence.
ACLED found that the
overwhelming majority of the
more than 9.000 Black Lives Matter demonstrations that took place across the US after the killing of George Floyd have been peaceful. News reports at the height of demonstrations over Floyd’s killing cited
dozens of deaths in connection with protests, but many of those turned out to be
examples of deadly crimes carried out in the vicinity of protests, rather than directly related to the demonstrations themselves, the researchers concluded. ACLED’s dataset only focuses on
political violence.
Most of the protesters killed this year were shot to death, and many of the incidents involved confrontations at protests that escalated and turned deadly when at least one of the people involved had a gun.
Lee Keltner, a navy veteran who made custom western hats, was shot after a “patriot rally” in Denver on 10 October.
Video and photographs of the incident appear to show Keltner slapping a security guard for a local news crew, who responds by pulling out a gun and shooting him.
Aaron “Jay” Danielson, a far-right Trump supporter, was shot after a rally in Portland in August. Danielson’s suspected killer,
Michael Reinoehl, was a leftwing protester who called himself an “anti-fascist”, and who was later shot to death by law enforcement officials, an outcome Donald Trump referred to as “
retribution”.
Garrett Foster was
reportedly carrying an AK-47 rifle when he was shot to death in July by an armed man who had been driving a car through a crowd of
Black Lives Matter protesters in Austin. Whether Foster
threatened the driver with his gun is still disputed. The man who shot and killed Foster, the US army sergeant Daniel Perry, had previously tweeted “Now is the time to take up arms and protect yourselves against violence” and
responded to a Trump tweet in June about “protesters, anarchists, agitators, looters” by saying, “Send them to Texas we will show them why we say don’t mess with Texas.”
Citing those tweets, analysts at a thinktank that monitors domestic terrorism classified the shooting as an act of
“violent far-right” domestic terrorism. But Perry has not yet faced any criminal charges, and a local prosecutor in Texas said the incident was
still under investigation.
Both Reinoehl and Perry have claimed they were acting in self-defense when they opened fire and that they felt their own lives were in danger.
In Kenosha in August, a 17-year-old carrying a rifle he was not old enough to legally possess
shot and killed two people, Joseph Rosenbaum and Anthony Huber, and seriously injured a third at a
volatile late-night protest. His lawyer has argued the teenager, who came to Kenosha from Illinois, was
also acting in self-defense.
In Louisville, the photographer
Tyler Gerth was shot and killed at a downtown park where protesters gathered. The alleged shooter, Steven Nelson Lopez, was homeless and had a history of severe mental illness, and had
reportedly been asked to leave the park earlier because of his behavior. Many of the protesters in the park were armed and on edge, and returned fire when Lopez started shooting,
local news outlets reported.
In Las Vegas, Jorge Gomez was
wearing body armor and carrying several guns when he was shot to death by Las Vegas police at a protest in June. Before he was shot, several protesters told Gomez they disapproved of him being armed, and even a journalist questioned him about why he was holding his gun in his hand with his finger on the trigger,
the Las Vegas Sun reported. Las Vegas police officer Shay Mikalonis was shot in the head during the same protest, and reportedly
remains paralyzed from the injury. Officials have said the 20-year-old Las Vegas resident charged in the shooting had not been participating in the protest before the attack, the
Las Vegas Review-Journal reported.
Other law enforcement officers have been injured in non-fatal shootings this year, including two Los Angeles sheriff’s deputies
shot in Compton while sitting in their patrol car in mid-September, and two Louisville
police officers shot in late September during a protest over the
lack of serious charges against police officers in Breonna Taylor’s killing.
James Scurlock, a Black Lives Matter protester with an infant daughter, was shot to death in Omaha in May after a
confrontation with a white bar owner outside the man’s bar.
Other demonstrators died when cars drove through or rammed into crowds of Black Lives Matter protesters.
Summer Taylor, a Black Lives Matter protester who worked in a veterinary clinic, was killed in such an incident in Seattle. So was
Robert Forbes, a black protester from Bakersfield whose sister recalled him demonstrating decades earlier over the brutal police beating of Rodney King. In St Louis,
Barry Perkins, a father of two, was killed after being
dragged and run over by a FedEx truck during a protest in May.
Killings amid political unrest
In addition to the people killed while demonstrating, at least 14 more Americans have been killed in other incidents linked to political unrest this summer, including seven people shot during alleged looting of businesses, among them
David Dorn, a retired police officer shot during the robbery of a pawn shop in St Louis; two California law enforcement officers murdered by an alleged anti-government
“Boogaloo” extremist, one person found dead in a
pawn shop in Minneapolis that had been set on fire; an
eight-year-old shot to death in Atlanta; and a
Louisville restaurant owner who was
shot dead by the national guard.
Some of those killings remain unsolved.
One of two fatal shootings of young black men in Seattle’s self-declared “Capitol Hill Autonomous Zone” was not politically motivated, according to ACLED’s
review of details in the case, but the June shooting of
Antonio Mays Jr, a 16-year-old, was found to be connected to the broader unrest. A Seattle Times
review of footage linked to the chaotic scene of the shooting suggested that some people in the protest zone might have believed they were under attack when they fired their guns at the stolen Jeep Mays and another young teenager were driving into the zone.
David Dorn, a 77-year-old retired St Louis police officer. was shot and killed at a pawn shop on 2 June 2020. Photograph: Scott Bandle/AP
Jessica Doty-Whitaker, a white woman, was shot to death early one July morning in Indianapolis. Her fiance
told media outlets that her shooting had been preceded by a tense argument with some passerby about the use of a racial slur and the statements, “Black Lives Matter” v “All Lives Matter”. While they walked away from that confrontation, the fiance said, someone opened fire later and the 24-year-old mother was killed. Indianapolis police have not verified those claims or released any details about the circumstances of the shooting, and no one has been charged, but ACLED categorized the shooting as potentially politically motivated.
Victor Cazares Jr was described by friends and family as a
supporter of Black Lives Matter. On 1 June, a day of widespread protests across the country, he was shot to death outside a neighborhood grocery store in Cicero, Illinois, that he was reportedly trying to protect.
While a Chicago resident was quickly charged in the shooting death of another man,
Jose Gutierrez, that same day in Cicero, the Cicero police department did not respond to requests for comment about whether anyone had yet been charged in Cazares’s death.
“He was just standing there making sure that everybody is OK,” Cazares’ sister told the
Cicero Independiente. “He wasn’t there to cause any violence. He didn’t even have a weapon.”
