That's just half of the reported mass shooting violence over the weekend.
There were 10 mass shootings from Feb. 17 through Feb. 19 – the most of any weekend so far this year, according to data from the Gun Violence Archive. That’s considering all shootings from Friday to Sunday in which four or more people were shot, not including the shooter or shooters.
Mark Bryant, executive director of the Gun Violence Archive, said 10 mass shootings in a single weekend is "certainly high for this time of year." Research suggests gun violence in the U.S. typically increases during the warmer months.
Mass shootings in 2022 reached their peak in mid-July, when the U.S. witnessed 15 mass shootings over a regular weekend, according to Gun Violence Archive data. Over the long July Fourth weekend (Friday through Monday), there were 20.
This past weekend, there were two mass shootings in Georgia and Missouri and one each in Indiana, Illinois, Tennessee, Louisiana, South Carolina and Mississippi. All together, 13 people were killed and 46 injured.
At least 15 of the victims were children and teens, according to a USA TODAY review of related police and local news reports. Information on all victim ages was not immediately available.
It was not immediately clear if the firearms used in the shootings were obtained legally.
Mass shootings in 2023 outpace 2022
There have been 82 mass shootings this year, compared to 59 at the same time last year, according to data from the publicly sourced nonprofit database.
Police officers work at the scene of a shooting that occurred during the Krewe of Bacchus parade in New Orleans, February 19, 2023. - New Orleans Deputy Police Chief Hans Ganthier said five people were shot, including a young girl, all of whom were taken to the hospital.
'More guns everywhere'
Daniel Webster, director of the Johns Hopkins Center for Gun Policy and Research, said the mass shootings underscore ongoing inaction from state and federal lawmakers.
"Instead, state lawmakers have pushed Right to Carry laws that either eliminate the need to get a license to carry concealed guns or make getting such a license very easy," Webster said. "But the 'more guns everywhere' approach has been found to increase violent crime and does nothing to reduce mass shootings."
Webster noted almost all of the states that witnessed mass shootings over the weekend – expect for Illinois and South Carolina – do not required a license to carry concealed loaded guns.
So much stupidity, bluster and bravado coming from both putin and biden today, with their competing speeches on the war on Ukraine.
All of the bullshit about fucking nato and the "free world" are nonsense. Who is free if they oppose amerikkka ? Fuck off. Biden accusing putin of trying to "starve the world" ?! What the fuck ? How many countires have malnourished populations due to the "normal" workings of amerikkkan imperialist captialism ? Give me a fucking break.
And putin and his garbage about Ukraine being a "nazi" country and how he was going to fucking "liberate" it , all the while using nazi tactics and basically trying to commit genocide against a sovereign nation. He can fuck off also.
This was a tale of two fucking bully assholes. Fuck them both . "Free world" my fucking ass.
For years the fucking cowardly capitalist press in peru and around the world have been braying about the so-called "death" of the revolutionary organization "Sendero Luminoso" , or The Shining Path in english.
They also falsely claim that the "remnants" of the group are now "narco-terrorists".
So which is it , are they dead or narcos ? And why does it happen that whenever there is political unrest in peru due to corruption in government and the people rise up, the Shining Path are blamed, despite their claims of them being "dead"? Which is it ? I've read reports of hammer and sickle flags being found where the group operates, so why the fuck would a narco gang give a fuck about that ? There are too many lies and unanswered questions , and all of the statements come from the assholes in power .
Maybe the 7 dead cops Shining Path took out recently and the military who come under attack have some answers ? Fuck imperialism.
NEWARK, NJ, January 30—Workers across the U.S. are taking to the streets to rally against the murder of Tyre Nichols after the release of bodycam footage showed Nichols's brutal, deadly beating by Black Memphis cops. Progressive Labor Party members (PLP) joined a rally in Newark in solidarity with Tyre Nichols and the countless names of workers slain by this murderous system. This latest murder confirms a trend of Black-led liberal fascism where we see cities with a Black democratic ruling class government are becoming the new faces of terror against our class.
Now, the workers’ anger confirms a) the shallowness of identity politics as a tool to divide us, and b) reforms don’t work.
Instead, workers need to join PLP. Smashing the racist, fascist police terror that robbed Tyre’s life is a pillar of our Party’s work.
A Black cop is still a kkkop The protest was led by the liberal reformers in the city of Newark and had more local government officials than workers present. This can only be explained by the historical contradiction of this period–where identities are primary to the capitalist ruling class to divide and exploit workers and squash rebellion more intensely. Tyre Nichols, Carl Dorsey, Manuel Esteban Paez Terán or Tortuguita, and Keenan Anderson are victims of the liberal fascist state ruled by Black and Latin politicians and cops.
“See, us Black people are suffering everywhere,” one woman said. Monique Rodwell, mother of the Rodwell-Spivey brothers, assaulted by police in 2020 and friends of PLP replied, “it’s not just Black people; it’s poor people.” Another educator with us noted, “the protests stopped once Biden got in office. He’s the same one that introduced the 1994 Crime Bill.” This is someone that has been in our base for years and a former student of a comrade in Newark.
We were not strong enough in numbers to provide leadership at this rally but we do plan to organize a worker-led response to the murder of Tyre and the rise of liberal fascism in the near future. When liberal fascists are forced to face the rage of the working class and manage to get away, we as communists cannot stop organizing. For every Tyre there are masses of workers killed by racist police terror around the world that don’t make the headlines. Fighting for Alex Flores, for Shantel Davis, Raymond Chaluisant we didn’t stop. And we won’t stop until masses of workers around the world see that police brutality is as vital to capitalism, as communist revolution is to workers!
Liberal fascism unleashes killer kkkop gangs In the aftermath of the George Floyd worldwide movement led by Black workers, liberal fascist mayors and politicians misled workers with the most revolutionary potential, funneling our class’ rage into the ballot box, while also unleashing a viscious wave of racist police terror.
Black mayors from Atlanta, Washington, DC, and Newark painted Black Lives Matter slogans on the same streets where they send their killer kkkop special units to spill workers’ blood. These units–from the Jump Out Boys in Newark that killed Carl Dorsey and threatened the Rodwell Spivey family to the Executioners in Los Angeles to the Memphis Scorpion Unit that killed Tyre Nichols – are essentially a kkkop murder inc., a persistent nationwide element using corruption and intimidation tactics to cement their control over the Black and Latin working class communities they cannot profit without.
Like Newark, Memphis is a model for Big fascists to pour in their finance capital. For Bank of America, Citigroup, and JPMorgan Chase, extracting superprofits from the guaranteed racist super-exploitation and super-neglect of a majority Black and Latin workforce is a winning formula! These parasites are the largest beneficiaries of extra payments, commonly known as a “Black Tax,” placed on such municipalities forced to take loans to close gaps in budgets unmet by taxing such low wages (Bloomberg, 09/29/22). Tennessee, the state where Memphis is located, is on par with the lowest minimum wage across the U.S. $7.25.
The answer of fascist U.S. President Jim Crow Joe Biden has been to betray workers by riding the wave of workers’ anger into office. Once elected, Biden assured finance capitalists that there would be no effort to defund the police (itself a liberal reform) under his administration.
Today, U.S. police forces represent the third largest military expenditure globally; as former New York City mayor Bloomberg called it, the NYPD is one of the world’s largest armies. Expect the Biden administration to opportunistically milk the Nichols tragedy to stoke their political momentum for the 2024 election. As we go to press, Kamala Harris–a former prosecutor who sent hundreds of workers to prison– hopes we will forget that when announcing that she will attend Tyre’s funeral.
Fight fascism with communism Under capitalism, there can be no justice for workers against racist killer kkkops. Their job is to serve and protect the ruling class, especially the Big Fascists–the liberal politicians and finance capitalists. For decades, these Big Fascists have wielded the lethal power of the police with near impunity to clear cities of Black and Latin workers for gentrification. At the same time, these liberal fascists push reforms to keep workers invested in the system–from voting to hiring more Black and Latin cops. Tyre Nichols brutal slaying shows that neither works. Only with organized worker fightback with international communist leadership like PLP will we finally realize communism and smash racist police terror once and for all.
On the same day that the first Black woman police chief, Cerelyn Davis, fired the five Memphis cops, the Newark police force under Black Mayor Ras Baraka’s leadership walked away scott-free for murdering another Black worker, Carl Dorsey, in 2020. Politicians at the rally praised Davis, the murderer-in-chief, for swiftly penalizing the cops that killed Tyre. When agents of the capitalist state are disciplined, our class must beware that this is not a victory but a sign of developing fascism.
However, locking a few cops up will never smash racist police terror. Only when workers recognize capitalism as the sham it is and commit to building an internationalist, communist, worker-led state will racism, sexism, and exploitation be eradicated from the face of the earth
As any and every u.s. president is and must be, biden is a fucking arrogant aggressive imperialist prick.
The u.s.a. will threaten anyone who they feel opposes them, no matter how big or small, and they will defend the war crimes of israel no matter how heinous.
Yes, russia invaded Ukraine, but the fucking amerikkkans pushed and fucking pushed to make it happen, so they could have their proxy war and try to weaken their imperialist rivals, all the while Ukraine and it's citizens are paying the price. That being said, Ukraine must prevail , and both the russians and amerikkkans can fuck themselves.
President Joe Biden’s Feb. 7 State of the Union address offered no real surprises.
Like any loyal imperialist politician, Biden included the obligatory pro-war rhetoric. He blamed Russian President Vladimir Putin for the Ukraine war, calling it “a murderous assault, evoking images of the death and destruction Europe suffered in World War II.” And, he added, “Putin’s invasion has been a test for the ages.” (whitehouse.gov)
The ages! That’s a long time.
Biden then went on the offensive against China, saying “if China threatens our sovereignty, we will act to protect our country. And we did.” Again, he promotes the lie that an unarmed, unpiloted balloon from China — and now a few “unidentified flying objects,” from who knows where — had to be shot down, because they somehow threatened the most powerful empire in human history.
The bulk of Biden’s message was a lot of bravado and blather — bravado about the low official unemployment rate, economic recovery bills, cutting into Big Pharma’s billions in profits (slightly) and trying to force a 15% minimum tax on corporate earnings. This tax rate is still pathetically low; as Biden admitted, a nurse or a teacher pays a much larger percentage of their income in taxes.
And the president reassured any nervous billionaires that “I’m a capitalist.” That puts him in the same class camp as Disney, Yahoo, Microsoft, Dell, Amazon, Twitter, Google, Intel, Meta and other monster corporations that have announced huge layoffs this year, even as Biden tries to take credit for “creating” millions of new jobs all by himself.
He wanted to make it clear that he was for a “kinder, gentler” capitalism, and that “Capitalism without competition is not capitalism. It is exploitation.”
What Marxists know, and what millions of workers are coming to realize, is this: You’re either on one side or the other. You can’t be a capitalist and be “the most pro-union president you’ve ever seen.” Capitalism, competitive or otherwise, is by definition a system rooted in exploitation.
Phony liberalism
There were bits and pieces of Democratic Party liberalism, such as the calls for Congress to pass a law enshrining reproductive rights, to pass the pro-labor PRO Act and to pass the Equality Act, to protect the LGBTQ+ community from discrimination. But there was no mention of the spate of anti-trans bills in state legislatures.
The parents of Tyre Nichols were in the audience, and Biden decried the police killing of their son. But he made the point that “most cops are good, decent people.” The record shows that these “good, decent” cops and their associations (which arenot real unions) usually line up behind the “few bad apples” and try to block any charges or disciplinary action against them.
The speech had more hot air than a weather balloon.
There was a promise to “end cancer as we know it.” What makes that possible? “With democracy, everything is possible.”
Garbage! In fact the capitalist mode of production, with its pretense of democracy, has spawned private, for-profit health care — the biggest obstacle to ending cancer, COVID-19 and other life-threatening conditions.
Biden’s speech had two contradictory aims: to prove, on the one hand, that he is a loyal servant of the capitalist ruling class, while on the other hand to convince the working class that he is doing all kinds of things that benefit them.
The capitalists can decide if Biden is the best person to carry out their dirty work for another four years. Some seem to prefer someone like Florida’s ultraright, ultrabigoted Gov. Ron DeSantis.
Workers need to break with both the Republicans and the Democrats and fight for a system that puts human needs before profits. Socialism, not capitalism, can unleash human potential to a point where, if not “all,” many more “things are possible.”
I kept forgetting it was "superbowl sunday", unlike millions of others who were glued to the halftime show and the stupid fucking commercials. I still don't know who won or even who the fuck was playing.
Seriously though, hearing people get all fucking hyped about some shittyass "musical" performers doing the halftime thing is pathetic, but even more disgusting are the idiots who get excited about some lame fucking "edgy" commercials that will be played trying to sell you shit you don't need from someone who doesn't need any more of your hard earned money.
There are people in every country who believe in "supporting our troops" unquestioningly. This is brute ignorance and a bullying brainless mentality. I need to know what exactly "our" troops are fucking doing before they can have my support.
These russian fighters are doing what some serbs did during the war in Bosnia, and that is they are siding with what's right vs. injustice. I really appreciate this story, and the sacrifice these young people are making . The consequences could be fatal. This is courage.
They Are Russians Fighting Against Their
Homeland. Here's Why.
Michael Schwirtz
Soldiers with the Free Russia Legion training in the Kyiv region in Ukraine, Feb. 7, 2023. (Lynsey Addario/ The New York Times)
DONBAS REGION, Ukraine — The soldier knelt in the snow, aimed a rocket launcher and fired in the direction of Russian troops positioned about 1 mile away. He was set up at a Ukrainian firing position and looked just like the other Ukrainian troops fighting south of the city of Bakhmut in one of the most brutal theaters of the war.
But he and his comrades are not Ukrainian. They are soldiers in a Ukrainian military unit made up entirely of Russians who are fighting and killing their own countrymen.
They have taken up arms against Russia for a variety of reasons: a sense of moral outrage at their country’s invasion, a desire to defend their adopted homeland of Ukraine or because of a visceral dislike of Russia’s president, Vladimir Putin. And they have earned enough trust from Ukrainian commanders to take their place among the forces viciously fighting the Russian military.
“A real Russian man doesn’t engage in such an aggressive war, won’t rape children, kill women and elderly people,” said one Russian fighter with the military call sign Caesar, ticking off atrocities committed by Russian soldiers that motivated him to leave his native St. Petersburg and fight for Ukraine. “That’s why I don’t have remorse. I do my job, and I’ve killed a lot of them.”
Nearly a year into the war, the Free Russia Legion, as the unit is called, has received little attention — in part to protect the soldiers from reprisals by Russia, but also because of reluctance within the Ukrainian military to highlight the efforts of soldiers whose home country has done so much harm to Ukraine. Several hundred of them are concentrated in the area around Bakhmut, in eastern Ukraine, officials said; they are always grouped with their own but are overseen by Ukrainian officers.
In interviews, some Russian soldiers said they were already living in Ukraine when Russian forces invaded last year and felt an obligation to defend their adopted country. Others, often with no military experience, crossed into Ukraine from Russia after the war began, moved by a sense that the Kremlin’s invasion was profoundly unjust.
“We haven’t come here to prove anything,” said one soldier with the call sign Zaza. “We’ve come here to help Ukraine achieve the full withdrawal of Russian forces from Ukrainian territory and the future de-Putinizaton of Russia.”
Fearing retaliation against relatives and themselves, none of the soldiers interviewed agreed to be identified by name or to provide specific details about their biographies. Last week, the Russian prosecutor general’s office filed a suit with the country’s supreme court to have the Legion declared a terrorist organization.
Zaza, a skinny blond who looks barely out of high school, would not even give his age, saying only that he was under 20. After Russian forces invaded, he said, he could not keep his mouth shut. His outspokenness and anti-war posts on social media got him in trouble with his university’s administration, then with police. When officers from Russia’s security service showed up at his front door in the fall, he said, he decided it was time to leave.
He said he walked across the border into Ukraine and signed up to fight.
“At such a young age, it is a little early for me to talk about my political opinions and worldview, because these are just forming now,” he said. “But when your country has been taken over by one bad man, you need to take things into your own hands.”
At the start of the war, Ukrainian law prevented Russian citizens from joining the armed forces. It took until August to finalize legislation that would allow the Legion to legally join the fight, Andriy Yusov, a spokesperson for Ukraine’s military intelligence service, said in a statement.
“There was a large number of Russians who because of their moral principles could not remain indifferent and were searching for a way to enter the ranks of the defenders of Ukraine,” Yusov said, explaining the military’s motivation to create the unit. “All legionnaires have come with a huge desire to stop Putin’s horde and free Russia from dictatorship.”
The group operates under the umbrella of Ukraine’s International Legion, a fighting force that includes units made up of American and British volunteers, as well as Belarusians, Georgians and others.
It is not easy to join, Russian soldiers said. They have had to submit an application and undergo an extensive background check that includes polygraph tests. Only then can they enter basic training. As Russian passport holders, they are inevitably met with distrust. There have been several attempts by Russian spies to infiltrate the Legion, Yusov said.
In a pine forest in the Kyiv region last week, a group of new Russian recruits nearing the end of a three-month basic training course practiced tactical retreats, firing mortars and basic combat medicine. They exemplified the international hodgepodge that has come to define much of Ukraine’s war effort: Russian soldiers trained on a French-made 155 mm mortar and carried American-made M16 rifles.
“It’s better than a Kalashnikov,” one of the soldiers said of the M16. “I’ve fired about 1,000 rounds and haven’t had any problems yet.”
The sounds of small-arms fire and heavy artillery echoed through the forest, and an instructor threw a dummy grenade near a small group of soldiers to gauge how they would react. Most of the soldiers will occupy positions back from the front lines, working in artillery or air reconnaissance units using drones.
Though the instructors were all Ukrainian, all spoke in Russian. In interviews, some of the recruits tried to speak a few words of Ukrainian but quickly switched back to their native language.
“After about one or two months as they’ve settled in, they start to use small phrases like ‘thank you’ or ‘fire,’” said one of the instructors, who declined to provide his name.
The soldiers said they struggled to explain their decision to family back in Russia. Reports of atrocities committed by Russian troops, including the butchering of civilians in the Kyiv suburbs of Bucha and Irpin, are dismissed as foreign propaganda in their homeland.
“They don’t understand the whole truth,” said a 32-year-old soldier with the call sign Miami, who said his parents had urged him to fight on the Russian side. “They’re told that bad people live here, and they believe it. They don’t believe that the second-biggest army in the world could kill regular people.”
Back at the front in eastern Ukraine, the shelling never stops for long. Russian forces have been hammering away at Ukrainian positions, trying to dislodge them around Bakhmut in advance of an expected offensive push to take all of the eastern region known as the Donbas.
On a recent visit to a firing position, the precise location of which The New York Times is withholding for security, the ground rumbled, and artillery shells crisscrossed a clear sky. That day, Russian forces had launched a volley of grad rockets that blanketed the area, wounding several civilians but sparing the soldiers.
“They’re striking everywhere,” a panting Russian soldier said as he took cover in a dugout in a neighborhood of small, snow-covered cottages.
Soldiers in the Legion said that they were continuing to hold the line, but some have already begun to think beyond the immediate battle, and even beyond the war in Ukraine, to what comes next.
“My task is not just to protect the people of Ukraine,” said Caesar, 50. “If I remain alive after this phase and all Ukrainian territory is liberated, I will absolutely continue fighting, with a weapon in my hand, to overthrow this Kremlin regime.”
Caesar, who has earned a reputation as a kind of eccentric sage within the Legion, said he was an avowed Russian nationalist. Yet he nonetheless believes that modern Russia has gone off the rails, particularly when it comes to invading Ukraine, he said.
He was once a member of the Russian Imperial Movement, which the United States has declared a violent extremist group, but said he broke with it in part over its support for Russia’s annexation of the Crimean Peninsula in 2014.
A senior Ukrainian military official involved with overseeing the Legion said that Caesar “had spent a long time searching for a path he felt was ideologically correct,” adding that Ukrainian officials had found no reason to distrust him.
Caesar, who moved his wife and four children to Ukraine over the summer, said he did not believe he was fighting against fellow Russians, but “scoundrels and murderers” who have no nationality.
“I’m sitting before you, an example of a Russian man, and an example of a man that Tolstoy and Dostoyevsky wrote about,” he said. “That’s the kind of man I am. Not them. They aren’t Russian.”
There is no fucking doubt that a revolution is needed to sweep imperialism off the face of this stinking rotting planet.
Putin needs to fuck off, and biden can fucking well do the same. Both are imperialists, although the amerikkkans are by far the biggest threat to the planet and every fucking country on it. Do you really think that biden wants to help Ukraine ? Fuck no, it's all about weakening their rivals, russia. The u.s.a. could give a flying fuck about anyone other than their own ruling fucking class. Fuck them . And they did in fact push russia every chance they got,and now hope to weaken them through war . Would the amerikkkans put up with kkkanada or Mexico siding with russia against them ? The answer is fucking obvious. Still , this in no way justifies russia invading, raping and killing the people of Ukraine.
Fuck imperialism.
How can any decent person deny that we need a revolution to overthrow this system?!
by Bob Avakian
This is an excerpt from a talk given by Bob Avakian last year to a gathering of revcoms, which he has edited for publication.
There is a very sharp conflict now within this country over whether the history of slavery can even be talked about in any real way, with white supremacist fascists attacking and attempting to prevent any serious discussion of this, and especially its actual horrors, with public education a particular focus of this conflict. Sometimes these people will actually say that slavery was not that bad!—or they will insist: “Oh, slavery, that was a long time ago. I had nothing to do with that. That’s long gone. That’s all over. That has nothing to do with what’s going on now. Quit complaining about things that have long been done and over with.” But when you’re talking about this country, as horrific as slavery actually was, it is not a matter of slavery as just some ancient history.
In 2003, I began the speech Revolution: Why It’s Necessary, Why It’s Possible, What It’s All About talking about the “postcards of the hanging,” referring to an opening line in a song by Bob Dylan. Think about the real history of this country. Think about what was going on for nearly 100 years, after the end of the Civil War and the very brief period of Reconstruction, when there was an attempt to actually allow Black people to win some rights—which was then completely overturned and reversed with the birth of the Ku Klux Klan and systematic terror in the South, which the entire ruling class of the country went along with, and institutionalized, as part of a “compromise” that they made in the 1870s. Think about what this means: For nearly 100 years, not only were thousands of Black people lynched, but at many of these lynchings there were mass gatherings of white people, in a picnic and celebratory atmosphere. And then, when the bodies were hung and often burned, many of these white people would go and cut off body parts of the person who’d been lynched as souvenirs, in a carnival atmosphere.
Is this what Biden means when he says America has been an inspiration to the world? (He recently said that America has been an inspiration to the world for over 200 years—which includes the time of slavery, with all its very real horrors, as well as Jim Crow segregation, Ku Klux Klan terror and the thousands of lynchings to which I have referred here.)
And that's not all. Photographs were taken and postcards were made and sold all over the country—postcards of the lynchings. Think about what that says.
In terms of depravity, you can’t find anything Hitler and the Nazis did that was worse than this. You had the Nazi Dr. Mengele who went to the concentration camps and performed grotesque experiments on the bodies of the Jews who were imprisoned there. And that’s horrible. That’s part of one of the worst atrocities in the history of humanity, the whole Holocaust (the systematic slaughter of millions of Jews by the Nazis). But, again in terms of depravity, even after slavery, what was going on for nearly 100 years in this country is no less horrific—it belongs in the same category with the Nazi atrocities—while all the time we are being told that “this is the greatest country in the world, this is the leader of the free world, this is an inspiration to people all over the world.”
And the treatment of Black people in particular in the United States, as well as the whole eugenics thing that arose in this country—where you had the idea put forward that people who were declared “inferior” in one way or another, including disabled people, should not be allowed to reproduce, because it dragged down the human population—that eugenics and that genocidal racism in the United States was a model for what the Nazis did, particularly with the Jews. Just think about that, while we’re being told what a great inspiration this country has been… apparently it was a great inspiration to the Nazis.
And that’s still not all. Even with the ending of the Jim Crow system of segregation and systematic discrimination that was centered in the South but actually existed throughout this country for nearly 100 years—even with the ending of that overt legal segregation and discrimination, with all its terror—there is the continuing horrific oppression of Black people, as well as other people of color.
Today, instead of the Ku Klux Klan in their white robes and hoods, it’s the police in blue (although some of them may still be in the Ku Klux Klan) who carry out the murder of Black people over and over again, as well as Latinos and Native Americans. It is a fact that since 1960 more Black people have been murdered by police than the thousands who were lynched in the time after the Civil War up until 1960. And this, along with mass incarceration, particularly of Black people and Latinos as well, is a concentration of their overall oppression.
Finally, beginning in the 1960s there has been society-wide opposition to all this racist atrocity—opposition in which masses of Black people were joined by large numbers of white people, and others, especially youth. But, despite such massive opposition—which has repeatedly been demonstrated, once again in a huge way in 2020—the racist oppression and terror, yes of genocidal dimensions, goes on and on. Why? Because it is built into this system of capitalism-imperialism, which rules in this country and dominates in the world as a whole.
This is the reality of a country and a system that we’re told to celebrate as a great inspiration. And it is only part of the horrors of this system—as much as it is, in a real sense, a concentration of those horrors.
How can any decent person deny that we need a revolution to overthrow this system?!
Now the fucking pigs shoot a man with no legs because he wouldn't put his knife down ? Seriously, is this the only possible outcome for this situation? And not only do they kill him, but they shot him 8 fucking times ! Did they think he was going to escape and go on a mulit-state killing spree ? Fucking incompetent murderous assholes.
California police face scrutiny after killing double amputee
Published
IMAGE SOURCE,GETTY IMAGES
Image caption,
Anthony Lowe's family has accused Huntington Park police of murder
By Bernd Debusmann Jr
BBC News, Washington
The police killing of a wheelchair user who allegedly refused to drop a butcher's knife is under investigation by authorities in California.
Double-amputee Anthony Lowe, 36, who was black, was fatally shot on 26 January in the Los Angeles area.
Police say he threatened them after stabbing someone. Mr Lowe's mother said: "They murdered my son."
It comes amid renewed scrutiny of police killings after the death of Tyre Nichols in Memphis, Tennessee.
The incident involving Mr Lowe occurred in Huntington Park, and was caught on camera by bystanders.
The grainy video shows part of the confrontation with Mr Lowe holding a long shiny object and moving on the stumps of his legs away from officers. That clip does not show the shooting.
In a statement on 30 January, the Huntington Park Police Department said that officers had responded to a stabbing and the victim supplied a description of the suspect.
The suspect had allegedly left his wheelchair, approached the victim and stabbed him in the chest with a 12in butcher knife, before returning to the wheelchair and fleeing the scene.
The victim was left with "a life-threatening stab wound resulting in a collapsed lung and internal bleeding", the police statement said.
When officers caught up with Mr Lowe, according to the police statement, he "ignored the officer's verbal commands and threatened to advance or throw the knife at officers".
Police say that after two unsuccessful attempts to use Tasers to subdue Mr Lowe, they shot him.
Huntington Park Police Lt Hugo Reynaga told the Los Angeles Times that investigators had obtained video of the shooting from a nearby business, but do not plan to release the footage.
He added that Huntington Park officers do not wear body cameras.
"He tried to run away, and every time he turned around and did the motion like he was gonna throw the knife at him, they tased him," he told the newspaper.
"They were trying to give this guy the less-lethal Taser shock. And because it was ineffective, they had to go to something that was more effective."
The two officers involved have been placed on paid leave amid an investigation. They have not been named.
On Tuesday, members of Mr Lowe's family and activists demanded that the officers be held accountable for the shooting.
"They murdered my son, in a wheelchair with no legs," Mr Lowe's mother, Dorothy, said at a news conference. "They do need to do something about it."
A spokesperson for the family told the BBC's US partner, CBS, that Mr Lowe was suffering from a mental health crisis at the time of the shooting.
His sister told the LA Times that he had his legs amputated last year following an incident with police in Texas.
The Los Angeles County Sheriff's Department homicide unit is investigating the Huntington Park shooting, as they do for other smaller police departments in the area.
According to the Mapping Police Violence database, nearly 1,200 people were killed by police in 2022. Officers were charged with a crime in nine of these cases.
THURSDAY, FEBRUARY 2, 2023 AT 2:39PM
