The Liberal Gun Club Forum

YankeeTarheel wrote: Sat May 09, 2020 9:45 am You know, the asshole in the truck with the shotgun ready to shoot is wearing body armor, but if someone shot him in his very exposed crotch, abdomen, or hit either femoral artery on the inside of his thighs, or his lower aorta, all of which are exposed in his "tough guy" stance he'd be just as dead as heart or head shot.

Now, as we watch the disturbing footage of Ahmaud’s murder, bearing the collective weight of living in a country that allows men of color to be murdered with impunity time and again, legislators must find the courage to change the laws that enable these tragedies.

Even though the video shows the attackers appearing to lay in wait for Ahmaud before instigating a physical confrontation, the pair claimed that they shot Ahmaud in self-defense. Prosecutors initially found the shooters’ claims credible, and relied on Georgia’s law granting immunity from prosecution to someone who claims self-defense to justify the lack of an arrest—even though Georgia’s law also explicitly prohibits use of the self-defense law by someone who provokes violence.

White assailants have long used stand your ground laws—which generally allow a person to not retreat from a conflict when the ability to do so safely exists—to justify attacks against black victims. An analysis of Florida stand your ground cases found that a defendant is twice as likely to be convicted in a case that involves white victims compared to those involving non-white victims.

DispositionMatrix wrote: Sun May 10, 2020 11:20 am I used to do this back before I bought my house and when the rest of the neighborhood was being built.
https://video.twimg.com/ext_tw_video/12 ... mp4?tag=10

YankeeTarheel wrote: Mon May 11, 2020 9:28 am And, naturally, the bigots in the WH, including Barr, are more concerned with finding a way to free the traitor Flynn and are virtually silent on this. Even Dubya would have had his AG look into it and would have condemned it, as he basically said Timothy McVeigh got his just desserts when he was executed.

When John William King was executed in April 2019 for the horrid, brutal murder of James Byrd, Jr, I cannot find ANY statement from THIS White House about that crime. Nothing. Nada.

Midway, GA (May 10, 2020) – On Sunday, May 10, 2020, the GBI arrested Rashawn Smith, age 20, and charged him with Dissemination of Information Relating to Terroristic Acts. He was taken into custody in Midway, GA and will be booked into the Liberty County Sheriff’s Office.

This investigation was conducted with the assistance of the FBI & Liberty County Sheriff’s Office.

On Saturday, May 9, 2020, at approximately 11:55 PM, the GBI was made aware of a Facebook post that contained a threat to future protests related to Ahmaud Arbery.

So there wasn’t any clear evidence tying Arbery to any burglary other than the McMichaels claim that they saw him at a construction site and assumed he was a burglar. Furthermore, there is nothing to justify the McMichaels’s pursuit. I’ve heard from some that there exist videos of Arbery burglarizing other houses, if so, where are they? Why haven’t they been presented to police? Even if these videos exist, that still doesn’t justify the pursuit of someone by others who did not witness the crime of which they’re accusing Arbery. That’s an incredibly important detail in Georgia law as it relates to citizen’s arrests. There was no evidence of Arbery committing a crime on the video necessitating the pursuit and confrontation.

I think the McMichaels should be tried in a court of law and receive the due process they, by all appearances, denied Arbery. I strongly and consistently dislike mob rule, rage mobs, mob-anything that makes decisions about lives and rights. I also strongly and consistently support due process, which is why this case needs to go to trial. People who oppose the theft of due process via proposals like “red flag laws” should stringently speak out in cases where due process is denied and justice unserved.

Georgia Attorney General Chris Carr on Monday tapped a new lead prosecutor in the murder case of Ahmaud Arbery — the fourth since the young black man was killed in February while jogging in Glynn County, Ga.

Joyette Holmes, district attorney of the Cobb County Judicial Circuit and the first black woman to serve in that position, is taking over the case following a video of the shooting that went viral after it was posted online last week. The footage ignited national outcry and a cascade of questions over why no arrests were made in the 10 weeks since Arbery's Feb. 23 killing.

Two white men, a father and son, were arrested Thursday in connection with the killing and face murder and aggravated assault charges. The arrests came two days after the Georgia Bureau of Investigation took over the case from local authorities.

Also on Monday, the U.S. Department of Justice confirmed it was considering whether to charge Gregory McMichael, 64, a retired police detective, and his son Travis, 34, with federal hate crimes.

In a statement on the Cobb County district attorney's Facebook page, Holmes said, "Our office will immediately gather all materials related to the investigation thus far and continue to seek additional information to move this case forward."

In a statement, the state attorney general thanked Atlantic Judicial Circuit District Attorney Tom Durden, who had led the case since mid-April, but added the "case has grown in size and magnitude since he accepted." Carr said that "another office is better suited from a resource perspective to now handle the case."

Benjamin Crump, an attorney for the Arbery family, praised the Holmes appointment and urged her to be "zealous in her search for justice."

"In order for justice to be carried out both effectively and appropriately in the murder of Ahmaud Arbery, it is imperative that the special prosecutor has no affiliation with the SE Georgia legal or law enforcement communities," the statement said.

"We implore District Attorney Joyette Holmes to be zealous in her search for justice, as she works to hold all of those responsible for the unjustifiable execution of an unarmed young Black man in broad daylight," Crump added.

DispositionMatrix wrote:

NegativeApproach wrote: Wed May 13, 2020 5:19 am I hope they get found guilty, but I'm doubtful. They're well connected in the "good ol boy" network.

K9s wrote:

NegativeApproach wrote: Wed May 13, 2020 5:19 am I hope they get found guilty, but I'm doubtful. They're well connected in the "good ol boy" network.

Nah, they are big fish in their little pond, but they have no powerful friends in the capitol.

They will be sacrificed so the governor can claim he fought racism and he can argue that he isn't a racist. However, if the GOP could ignore this incident (they did before the video became public) and if they thought they wouldn't suffer economic boycotts, they would have let it go.

No one is fooled and no one is an "undecided voter" here. This is the governor who ran on an incredibly racist anti-immigrant platform but sorta pretends he isn't "anti-black" racist.

kronkmusic wrote: Thu May 14, 2020 12:23 am

K9s wrote:

NegativeApproach wrote: Wed May 13, 2020 5:19 am I hope they get found guilty, but I'm doubtful. They're well connected in the "good ol boy" network.

Nah, they are big fish in their little pond, but they have no powerful friends in the capitol.

They will be sacrificed so the governor can claim he fought racism and he can argue that he isn't a racist. However, if the GOP could ignore this incident (they did before the video became public) and if they thought they wouldn't suffer economic boycotts, they would have let it go.

No one is fooled and no one is an "undecided voter" here. This is the governor who ran on an incredibly racist anti-immigrant platform but sorta pretends he isn't "anti-black" racist.

Economic boycotts didn't stop them from passing the strictest anti-abortion bill in the country. The entire film industry warned them they'd lose business if it passed, and it passed anyway. Entire productions closed up shop and retreated back to CA, multi-year contracts were cancelled, and a significant portion of major talent is still refusing to film there even though a judge ruled in favor of an injunction to prevent enforcement of the law. And it's not just film, businesses across several industries have and are still reporting difficulty recruiting talent to the state. I feel bad for Atlanta, they've spent decades building themselves up as an international, forward-thinking metropolis, "the new south", and the ideologues in the state will rip that all away.

The Department of Justice announced Monday it is considering whether to bring federal hate crime charges against two white men who shot and killed Ahmaud Arbery, a 25-year-old Black man, while he was jogging through a suburb in Glynn County, Georgia, earlier this year.

In a gruesome video that only recently surfaced, Gregory and Travis McMichael, a father and son, are seen shooting Arbery in the street with a shotgun and a .357 Magnum on Feb. 23.

A Justice Department spokesperson said the agency was “assessing all of the evidence to determine whether federal hate crime charges are appropriate.”

The former police detective whose actions in the fatal shooting of Ahmaud Arbery in Georgia were defended as a citizen's arrest was stripped of his law enforcement certification and power to arrest a year before the deadly encounter, according to personnel records acquired by The Washington Post.

In the body camera video obtained by Action News Jax on Monday, Bryan tells police he tried to ‘block’ Arbery as the McMichaels chased him.

“When I see him, I knew, hate that people were getting broken into out here, you know. So, I hollered at them and said, ‘Y’all got him?’ And he just kept running. He was full blown running,” Bryan said to police. “… They got down to the end down there somewhere, must’ve past him. Because I pulled out of my driveway, was going to try to block him. But he was going all around. I made a few moves at him, you know. And he didn’t stop.”

The Justice Department brought federal hate crimes charges Wednesday in the death of Ahmaud Arbery, charging a father and son who armed themselves, chased and fatally shot the 25-year-old Black man after spotting him running in their Georgia neighborhood.

Travis McMichael and his father, Gregory, were charged along with a third man, William “Roddie” Bryan, with one count of interference with civil rights and attempted kidnapping. The McMichaels are also charged with using, carrying and brandishing a firearm during a crime of violence.

The case is the most significant civil rights prosecution undertaken to date by the Biden administration Justice Department and comes as federal officials have moved quickly to open sweeping investigations into troubled police departments as civil rights takes center stage among the department’s priorities.

The indictment charges that the McMichaels “armed themselves with firearms, got into a truck and chased Arbery through the public streets of the neighborhood while yelling at Arbery, using their truck to cut off his route and threatening him with firearms.” It also alleges that Bryan got into a truck and then chased Arbery, using the vehicle to block his path.

Arbery, 25, was killed on Feb. 23, 2020, by three close-range shotgun blasts after the McMichaels pursued him in a pickup truck as he was running through their neighborhood. Arbery had been dead for more than two months when a cellphone video of the shooting was leaked online and a national outcry erupted.

The Georgia Bureau of Investigation took over the case the next day and swiftly arrested Travis McMichael, who fired the shots, his father, and Bryan, a neighbor who joined the pursuit and took the video. The three men remain jailed on state murder charges and are due back in court in May.

The men charged with murdering Arbery won’t face hate crime penalties at the state level because the law was changed after the killing.

Georgia Attorney General Chris Carr said the state case remained a priority, and he commended “this positive development and the continued push to get answers for Ahmaud’s family, community and our state.”