What we know about Robert Aaron Long, the suspect in Atlanta spa shootings
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Robert Aaron Long: What we know about the suspect in Atlanta spa shootings - CNN - 0 views
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State and federal investigators are scrambling to learn more about Robert Aaron Long, the suspect in a string of deadly shootings at three Atlanta-area Asian spas, and his alleged motive.
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He is being held without bond in Cherokee County, where he faces four counts of murder and a charge of aggravated assault, according to the county sheriff's office. He also has been charged with more four counts of murder, Atlanta Police Department said.
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Tuesday's shootings took place at two spas in Atlanta and another in Acworth, about 10 miles west of Woodstock -- which left eight people, at least four of them Asian women, dead.
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Authorities located Long about 150 miles south of Atlanta in Crisp County. State troopers took him into custody after using a special pursuit maneuver to spin his car out of control.
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Sheriff Frank Reynolds of Cherokee County, where the Acworth shootings took place, told reporters Long "made indicators that he has some issues -- potentially sexual addiction -- and may have frequented some of these places in the past."Reynolds said those issues could be the motivation behind the shooting.
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A law enforcement source said the suspect was recently kicked out of the house by his family due to his sexual addiction, which, the source said, included frequently spending hours on end watching pornography online.
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Long purchased his gun legally at a local gun store, Big Woods Goods in Holly Springs, Georgia, an attorney for the company confirmed to CNN.
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I survived a school shooting. My kids shouldn't have to face the same danger | Ashley J... - 1 views
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Surviving a school shooting was an initiation of evil. The world didn’t look or feel the same afterward
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Despite 12 years and countless other mass shooting incidents across the country, not much has been done by our federal legislators to make anyone safer from gun violence anywhere – let alone at school.
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I clutched my eight-month-old son to my chest as the precious faces of young children murdered at school cycled across my television screen on the evening news.
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Little kids were new casualties in our country’s ongoing struggle to define itself. Its endless argument over guns appeared to be a symptom of a national identity crisis between political polar opposites – two parties so ideologically opposed that even the needless deaths of tiny innocents couldn’t bridge the divide between them.
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What sickened me most, though, wasn’t our government’s failure to prioritize people over partisanship. It was knowing that there were parents who took their kids to school and returned home eternally empty-handed.
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Survivors of school shootings like me are now raising kids of their own, worrying they will suffer similar fates. Although the psychological effects of school shootings on parents may not yet be fully known or understood, research suggests that those with loved ones who have been exposed to “assaultive violence” have a higher risk of mental health disorders.
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School shootings don’t just deprive children of their lives and innocence; they deprive parents of a sense of safety and security their parents and grandparents took for granted.
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This reality is a painful part of our collective consciousness. We send our kids to school, hoping the horror of gun violence won’t happen there, but knowing no child or school is immune.
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Both sides seem content to debate the second amendment and the founders’ intent until they run out of breath. But in the meantime, Congress must come together, in earnest, to find common ground and common-sense solutions to stop this bleeding. The consequences of inaction have become too high – and our kids are counting on them.
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Trump suggests arming teachers as a solution to increase school safety - CNNPolitics - 0 views
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"We need more security, we need more firearms on campus, we need better background checks, and we need to study more on mental health."Read MoreFred Abt, father of Parkland shooting survivor Carson Abt, said he had discussed with Education Secretary Betsy DeVos over lunch that rather than waiting for first responders to arrive, it would be more efficient to have firearms locked on school campuses.
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"I generally oppose gun control, but I support the ban on assault weapons and I support a slightly longer waiting period to purchase a gun," he wrote in his 2000 book, "The America We Deserve." "With today's Internet technology, we should be able to tell within 72 hours if a potential gun owner has a record."Trump disavowed those statements during the 2016 campaign.Polls have found, however, that most Americans blame Trump and Congress for not doing more on guns. A new Washington Post/ABC News poll released Tuesday found that 62% of respondents said Trump is not doing enough to prevent mass shootings and 77% say Congress is doing an inadequate job on the issue.
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We're fighting hard for you and we will not stop... I just grieve for you, I feel so -- to me, there could be nothing worse than what you've gone through."
Armed Correlations: Gun Ownership and Violence : The New Yorker - 0 views
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Obama on Gun Control Petition: 'We hear you' - 0 views
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Politics Makes Morons of Us All | Mother Jones - 1 views
www.motherjones.com/...politics-destroys-math-ability
motivated reasoning science numeracy bias politics reasoning
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Kahan ran the exact same test with the exact same data, except this time the question was about gun bans and crime levels. Half of the time, he presented data suggesting that a gun ban increased crime, while the other half of the time the data suggested that a gun ban decreased crime. And guess what? Among the subset of test subjects who were very good at math, they suddenly got really stupid if they didn't like the answer they got.
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But in another sense, it really doesn't matter at all. These days, even relatively simple public policy issues can only be properly analyzed using statistical techniques that are beyond the understanding of virtually all of us. So the fact that ideology destroys our personal ability to do math hardly matters. In practice, nearly all of us have to rely on the word of experts when it comes to this kind of stuff, and there's never any shortage of experts to crunch the numbers and produce whatever results our respective tribes demand.
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How big a deal is this? In one sense, it's even worse than it looks. Aside from being able to tell that one number is bigger than another, this is literally about the easiest possible data analysis problem you can pose. If ideologues actively turn off their minds even for something this simple, there's really no chance of changing their minds with anything even modestly more sophisticated. This is something that most of us pretty much knew already, but it's a little chilling to see it so glaringly confirmed.
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No Consolation For Kalashnikov | Issue 59 | Philosophy Now - 0 views
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The legendary AK 47 assault rifle was invented in 1946 by Mikhail Kalashnikov. It was issued to the armies of the old Warsaw Pact countries and has been used in many conflicts, eg by the North Vietnamese Army (NVA), Soviet soldiers in Afghanistan, and even this year by Al Qaeda operatives in Iraq.
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Whatever interpretation one puts on those two conflicts, almost no-one sane would condone the use of the AK 47 in killing civilians, for instance Shiites in Iraq.
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Mikhail Kalashnikov has come to have some doubts about his invention. He told The Times in June 2006, “I don’t worry when my guns are used for national liberation or defence. But when I see how peaceful people are killed and wounded by these weapons, I get very distressed and upset. I calm down by telling myself that I invented this gun 60 years ago to protect the interests of my country.”
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Weapons research produces in the first place not guns, bombs, bullets and planes and the various command, control and communications hardware and software needed to use these things, but plans, blueprints and designs – knowledge and know-how. Unless these useful plans are lost or destroyed, they can be implemented or instantiated many times over, and thus project unforeseen into the future.
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If any one person invented the atomic bomb, it was Leo Szilard. It seems he had the idea, and he made great efforts from 1935 until 1942, when the Manhattan Project was set up, to get the research done that would show whether an atomic bomb was possible; how to make one; and if need be, to provide the basis for actually making one.
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This perception was greatly strengthened when Hahn and Strassmann discovered nuclear fission in Berlin in 1938. So Szilard, worried about the Nazis getting an atomic bomb, thought that the Allies should do the research to see if and how one could be made, in order to deter or otherwise prevent the Nazis from using one.
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As far as Szilard and a good number of other atomic scientists were concerned there was no longer a rationale for the bomb project. Szilard, Philip Franck and others wrote The Franck Report in June 1945, which among other things advocated a demonstration of the power of the atomic bomb by dropping one on an uninhabited island. The Franck Report was ignored.The project was not abandoned, of course, and two of its products were used on Japanese cities, to kill mostly Japanese civilians.
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The point of this example is to show how scientists lose control of their work when they take part in weapons research – they lose control of it in other settings besides, but this case is the most problematic.
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One way out of the dilemma is to refuse to do war research under any circumstances. I’d like to endorse this option, especially as it does not imply that we should judge Kalashnikov, Szilard, Watson-Watt and other well-intentioned researchers harshly, since we can argue that the dilemma has only become evident recently.
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Another possibility is to deny that weapons research must take place within history, as a good Marxist might put it. That is, as I would put it: Perhaps weapons research is not an activity that must take account of historical contingencies.
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We must acknowledge that there is no such thing as an inherently defensive weapon, something that can only be used for the morally acceptable purpose of responding against an aggressor. Doing weapons research for defensive systems is therefore not morally acceptable, as any weapons might feasibly be used as part of an unjust war of aggression.
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Kalashnikov’s preferred description of what he did when he designed the AK 47 is something like “providing the means for liberation,” or “defending my country,” not “providing the means to kill innocents.” However, he acknowledges that the latter description applies to his situation equally well. Nevertheless, J might try to portray her actions as something like “provide the means for deterrence,” the idea being that what she is helping to create is intended to deter, and hence prevent harm rather than cause it.
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You might say that this is utopian, and it would never work, but then it might console Kalashnikov, who, after all, was a Marxist, and perhaps also a utopian.
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Guns, Germs, and The Future of Us - Wyatt Edward Gates - Medium - 0 views
medium.com/...-the-future-of-us-3dd7029eaf85
nation nationalism in-group moral imagination border war fascism
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ared Daimond’s seminal work Guns, Germs, and Steel has many flaws, but it provides some useful anecdotes about how narrative and consciousness shapes human organization progresses
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Past critical transformations of thought can help us see how we need to transform ourselves now in order to survive the future.
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something both ancient and immediate: the way we define who is in our tribe plays a critical role in what kind of social organization we can build and maintain
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You can’t have a blood family of 300 million, nor even a large enough one to do things like build an agrarian society
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In order to have large cities built on agrarianism it was necessary not only to innovate technology, but to transform our very consciousness as it related to how we defined what a person was, both ourselves and others
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Instead of needing to have real, flowing blood with common DNA from birth, it was merely necessary to be among the same abstract family organized under a king of some kind — a kind of stand in for the father or patriarch. We developed law and law enforcement as abstract disembodied voices of the father. This allowed total strangers without any family ties to interact in the same society in a constructive and organized way. Thus: civilization as we know it
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Those ancient polities have developed finally into the Nation, a kind of tribe so fully abstracted that you can be of any blood and language and religion and still function within it.
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So, too, are all other forms of human separation — and the opposition and conflicts they spawn — illusory in nature. We moved beyond blood, but then it was language or religion or fealty that made it impossible to work together, and we warred over that
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we’re told these borders mean everything, that they are real and urgent and demand constant sacrifice to maintain.
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We’re stuck in a mode of thinking that’s no longer sensible. There isn’t a reason for borders. There never really was, but now more than ever we have no utility for them, no need for them
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What humanity has to do is wake up to the reality of post-tribalism. This means seeing through all these invented borders to the truth that we are all people, we are all fundamentally the same, and we can all learn to live with one another.
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It was the idea of necessary conflict based on blood that preceded the fights that appeared to justify the belief in that blood-based conflict.
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Nations have saturated the entire globe. There are no more frontiers. It’s all Nations butting up against one another.
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We are all people of a similar nature and we do have the option to relate to one another as people for the sake of saving our shared homes and futures. We all hunger and thirst and become lonely, we all laugh and weep in the same language. Stripped of confounding symbols we are undivided.
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There are a lot of people upset about the illusion of borders. They want a different reality, one in which there are Good Tribes (their tribe) and Bad Tribes (all the other ones).
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There are no firm foundations for defining this tribe, however, so he’s left to cobble together some kind of ad hoc notion of in- and out-group. Like a magpie he collects ways of dividing people as appeals to his caprice: race, sex, Nation, etc., but there’s no greater sense to it, so it’s all arbitrary, all a mess.
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No amount of magical thinking from conservatives can change the reality of globalism, however; what one Nation does to pollute will affect us all, and that is according to the laws of physics. No political movement can change those physics. We have to adapt or perish.
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a key part of it is a simple lack of imagination. He just doesn’t realize there’s an option to not have borders, because his entire consciousness is married to the idea of of-me and not-of-me, Us and Them, and if there is no Them there can’t be an Us, and therefore life stops making sense
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What has to be true if there are no tribes? We have no need to discriminate among who we may love. Loving and caring for all people as if they were blood family is the path forward
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There needs to be a new story for us to share. It’s not enough to stop believing in the old way of borders, we have to actively seek out a new way of thinking and speaking and living that reflects the world as it is and as it can be.
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there are others who have more tangible investments in borders: Those who have grown fat off the conflicts driven by these invented borders don’t want us to see how pointless it all is. These billionaires and presidents and kings want us to keep fighting against one another over the borders they so lazily define because it gives them a means of power and control.
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We have to be ready for their opposition, however. They’ll do what they can to force us to act as if their borders are real. We don’t need to listen, though we do need to be ready to sacrifice.
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Without a globally-coordinated response we can’t resolve a globally-driven problem such as climate change. If we can grant the humanity of all people we can start to imagine ways of relating to one another that aren’t opposed and antagonistic, but which are cooperative and aimed at harmony.
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This transformation of consciousness must happen in our own hearts and minds before it can happen in concert.
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the Nation has already been shown to be unnecessary because of social globalism. Pick a major city on earth and you’ll find every kind of person living together in peace! Not perfect peace, but not constant and unavoidable war, and that is what counts.
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We can’t keep pretending as if borders matter when we can so clearly see that they don’t, but we can’t just have no story at all, there must be a way of contextualizing a future without borders. I don’t know what that story is, exactly, but I believe it is something like love writ large. Once we’re ready to start telling it we can start living it.
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Trump says Second Amendment is 'under very serious attack' in Virginia ahead of gun-rig... - 0 views
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“Your 2nd Amendment is under very serious attack in the Great Commonwealth of Virginia,” the president tweeted.
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Pro-gun activists have challenged that order. But a Richmond Circuit Court judge upheld Northam’s order, denying a lawsuit brought forth by the Virginia Citizens Defense League as well as gunowners of America seeking an injunction against the Democratic governor's ban.
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Republicans decried the legislation as an assault on the Second Amendment. They said the bill was aimed at appeasing special interest groups and donors such as Democratic presidential hopeful Michael Bloomberg. GOP senators said the new laws would entrap innocent people and do nothing to stop bad actors.
The staggering scope of U.S. gun deaths goes far beyond mass shootings - Washington Post - 0 views
www.washingtonpost.com/...gun-deaths-per-year-usa
gun deaths effects impact analysis research psychology bias
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Why your brain loves procrastination - Vox - 0 views
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Roughly 5 percent of the population has such a problem with chronic procrastination that it seriously affects their lives.
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Conventional wisdom has long suggested that procrastination is all about poor time management and willpower. But more recently, psychologists have been discovering that it may have more to do with how our brains and emotions work.
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Procrastination, they've realized, appears to be a coping mechanism. When people procrastinate, they're avoiding emotionally unpleasant tasks and instead doing something that provides a temporary mood boost. The procrastination itself then causes shame and guilt — which in turn leads people to procrastinate even further, creating a vicious cycle.
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For example, psychologist Tim Pychyl has co-authored a paper showing that students who forgave themselves for procrastinating on a previous exam were actually less likely to procrastinate on their next test. He and others have also found that people prone to procrastination are, overall, less compassionate toward themselves — an insight that points to ways to help.
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But psychologists see procrastination as a misplaced coping mechanism, as an emotion-focused coping strategy. [People who procrastinate are] using avoidance to cope with emotions, and many of them are unconscious emotions.
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they found our brain processes present self and future self differently. We think of future self more like a stranger.
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I used to procrastinate, and now I don't, because I got all these wicked strategies. And it’s every level: some of it’s behavioral, some of it’s emotional, some of it’s cognitive.
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Whenever we face a task, we’re not going to feel like doing it. Somehow adults believe that their motivational state has to match the task at hand. We say, "I’m not in the mood." Our motivational state rarely matches the task at hand, so we always have to use self-regulation skills to bring our focus to it. So at first it will be, "Okay, I recognize that I don’t feel like it, but I’m just gonna get started."
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We know from psychological research by [Andrew] Elliot and others that progress on our goals feeds our well-being. So the most important thing you can do is bootstrap a little progress. Get a little progress, and that’s going to fuel your well-being and your motivation.
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mplementation intentions take the form of "If, then." "If the phone rings, then I’m not going to answer it." "If my friends call me to say we’re going out, I’m going to say no." So you’ve already made this pre-commitment.
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OHIO rule: only handle it once. And I’m like that with email. I look at that email and say, "I can reply to it now, or I can throw it out," but there’s not much of a middle ground. I’m not going to save it for a while.
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We [think] that people will make less procrastinatory choices now because they’ll realize that "It’s me in the future we’re talking about here. I’m going to be under the gun."
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Roughly 5 percent of the population has such a problem with chronic procrastination that it seriously affects their lives
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Conventional wisdom has long suggested that procrastination is all about poor time management and willpower. But more recently, psychologists have been discovering that it may have more to do with how our brains and emotions work.
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Procrastination, they've realized, appears to be a coping mechanism. When people procrastinate, they're avoiding emotionally unpleasant tasks and instead doing something that provides a temporary mood boost. The procrastination itself then causes shame and guilt — which in turn leads people to procrastinate even further, creating a vicious cycle.
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But psychologists see procrastination as a misplaced coping mechanism, as an emotion-focused coping strategy. [People who procrastinate are] using avoidance to cope with emotions, and many of them are unconscious emotions.
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Recently we’ve been doing research that relates to the work on "present self"/"future self" because what’s happening with procrastination is that "present self" is always trumping "future self."
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He’s shown that in experimental settings if someone sees their own picture digitally aged, they’re more likely to allocate funds to retirement. When [the researchers] did the fMRI studies, they found our brain processes present self and future self differently. We think of future self more like a stranger.
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The people who see the present and future self as more overlapping have more self-continuity and report less procrastination.
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e [think] that people will make less procrastinatory choices now because they’ll realize that "It’s me in the future we’re talking about here. I’m going to be under the gun."
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Our motivational state rarely matches the task at hand, so we always have to use self-regulation skills to bring our focus to it. So at first it will be, "Okay, I recognize that I don’t feel like it, but I’m just gonna get started."
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Implementation intentions take the form of "If, then." "If the phone rings, then I’m not going to answer it." "If my friends call me to say we’re going out, I’m going to say no." So you’ve already made this pre-commitment.
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OHIO rule: only handle it once. And I’m like that with email. I look at that email and say, "I can reply to it now, or I can throw it out," but there’s not much of a middle ground. I’m not going to save it for a while.
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When Correctional Officers Carry Shotguns, The Result is Death And Mayhem - The Huffing... - 0 views
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Guards inside prisons shouldn't have guns. That's pretty much an accepted fact. Except in Nevada—and the results are mayhem and death.
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“Neither could affect an effective offensive,” McNeill recalled. “It was like some awkward and quirky dance, then 'BOOM.'”
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the same tiny pellets that sport shooters use to blow apart clay pigeons and that hunters use to kill birds and rabbits.
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Ramos fired a warning shot, but the prisoners kept scuffling. Then he fired three live rounds. When he stopped, the left side of Arevalo's body was loaded with shots. Perez lay motionless and bleeding on the floor, near a shower bag and a towel. He had at least 30 pellets in his face, 30 in his neck and as many as 200 in his chest and arms.
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lowest ratio of guards to prisoners of any correctional system in the country—only about one security staffer for every 12 inmates, according to the Association of State Correctional Administrators.
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The state defines this method as a “non-deadly” use of force, but a shotgun loaded with pellets can easily draw blood from as far as 50 yards away.
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Can Santorum Win in November? - NYTimes.com - 1 views
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If one were to invent a Republican politician whose background and beliefs were ideally suited to a general-election campaign against Barack Obama, that dream candidate would share a number of qualities with Rick Santorum.
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He would hail from the Midwest – a region filled with recession-battered swing states where the president’s support is weaker than in the country as a whole. He would be a Catholic rather than an Evangelical or a Mormon, because the Catholic vote swings back and forth between the two parties in ways that other religious demographics don’t. He would have a strong personal and biographical connection to blue-collar whites, a bloc of voters whose support President Obama has always had difficulty winning. His record would be conservative enough to excite the Republican Party’s base, but leavened with enough moderation and even populism on economic issues to reassure anxious middle-income voters that the Republican Party doesn’t just exist to serve Wall Street and the rich.
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Santorum checks all of these boxes, while Mitt Romney – his Michigan ties and attempts to play the tribune of the middle class notwithstanding – decidedly does not. Which is why, as Romney flails and Santorum rises, a few pundits have found themselves tiptoeing toward what seems like the most counterintuitive of all possible conclusions: The possibility that the long-shot former senator from Pennsylvania, not his supposedly more electable rival, might stand a better chance of winning in November.
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This idea seems laughable if you assume that most swing voters are fiscal conservatives and social moderates, allergic to culture-war appeals and pining for a dream ticket of Michael Bloomberg and Olympia Snowe. But as New York magazine’s Jonathan Chait has explained, there’s more than one kind of “moderate” in American politics:
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There are, very roughly speaking, two kinds of swing voters. One kind is economically conservative, socially liberal swing voters. This is the kind of voter you usually read about, because it’s the kind most familiar to political reporters – affluent and college educated. But there’s a second kind of voter at least as numerous – economically populist and socially conservative. Think of disaffected blue-collar workers, downscale white men who love guns, hate welfare, oppose free trade, and want higher taxes on the rich and corporations. Romney appeals to the former, but Santorum more to the latter
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That’s because the former senator has the instincts of an activist, rather than of a president or statesman.
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a Rust Belt background would be a potential advantage for a Republican presidential candidate. But a Rust Belt background that includes an 17-point repudiation from the Pennsylvania electorate that knew Santorum best looks more like a liability instead.
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both Catholicism and social conservatism are potential assets in a campaign against a president who has spoken condescendingly about Middle Americans who “get bitter” and “cling to guns or religion.” But a Catholic conservatism that manifests itself in campaign-trail critiques of contraception promises to alienate many more voters (female voters, especially) than it attracts.
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All things being equal, a populist style that’s at odds with the Acela corridor’s attitudes and values can often play well in the heartland. But no presidential candidate can succeed without a modicum of favorable media coverage, and so a successful populist needs to be able to disarm elite journalists (as Huckabee so expertly did, schmoozing on The Daily Show and elsewhere) as often as he alienates them. And nobody has ever used the word “disarming” to describe Rick Santorum’s approach to politics.
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his political persona is worlds away from the Washington-New York definitions of “middle-of-the-road.” But a mix of social conservatism and economic populism has a great deal of general-election potential – especially in a contest against a president whose style of liberalism can seem professorial, condescending and aloof.
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Whether the topic is social issues or foreign policy, his zeal exceeds his prudence, and as a result his career is littered with debating society provocations (referencing “man-on-dog” sex in an argument about gay marriage, using his doomed 2006 Senate bid to educate Pennsylvanians on the evils of Hugo Chavez, etc.) that have won him far more enemies than friends. His passion for ideas and argument often does him credit, but in a national campaign it would probably do him in.
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Science Confirms: Politics Wrecks Your Ability to Do Math | Mother Jones - 1 views
www.motherjones.com/...-politics-makes-you-innumerate
politics science math motivated reasoning numeracy reasoning
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According to a new psychology paper, our political passions can even undermine our very basic reasoning skills. More specifically, the study finds that people who are otherwise very good at math may totally flunk a problem that they would otherwise probably be able to solve, simply because giving the right answer goes against their political beliefs.
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Survey respondents performed wildly differently on what was in essence the same basic problem, simply depending upon whether they had been told that it involved guns or whether they had been told that it involved a new skin cream.
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What's more, it turns out that highly numerate liberals and conservatives were even more—not less—susceptible to letting politics skew their reasoning than were those with less mathematical ability.
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Not surprisingly, Kahan's study found that the more numerate you are, the more likely you are to get the answer to this "skin cream" problem right. Moreover, it found no substantial difference between highly numerate Democrats and highly numerate Republicans in this regard. The better members of both political groups were at math, the better they were at solving the skin cream problem.
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So how did people fare on the handgun version of the problem? They performed quite differently than on the skin cream version, and strong political patterns emerged in the results—especially among people who are good at mathematical reasoning. Most strikingly, highly numerate liberal Democrats did almost perfectly when the right answer was that the concealed weapons ban does indeed work to decrease crime (version C of the experiment)—an outcome that favors their pro-gun-control predilections. But they did much worse when the correct answer was that crime increases in cities that enact the ban (version D of the experiment).
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these results are a fairly strong refutation of what is called the "deficit model" in the field of science and technology studies—the idea that if people just had more knowledge, or more reasoning ability, then they would be better able to come to consensus with scientists and experts on issues like climate change, evolution, the safety of vaccines, and pretty much anything else involving science or data
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Kahan's data suggest the opposite—that political biases skew our reasoning abilities, and this problem seems to be worse for people with advanced capacities like scientific literacy and numeracy.
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What's happening when highly numerate liberals and conservatives actually get it wrong? Either they're intuiting an incorrect answer that is politically convenient and feels right to them, leading them to inquire no further—or else they're stopping to calculate the correct answer, but then refusing to accept it and coming up with some elaborate reason why 1 + 1 doesn't equal 2 in this particular instance. (Kahan suspects it's mostly the former, rather than the latter.)
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This new study is just one out of many in this respect, but it provides perhaps the most striking demonstration yet of just how motivated, just how biased, reasoning can be—especially about politics.
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Is Everyone a Little Bit Racist? - NYTimes.com - 0 views
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Research in the last couple of decades suggests that the problem is not so much overt racists. Rather, the larger problem is a broad swath of people who consider themselves enlightened, who intellectually believe in racial equality, who deplore discrimination, yet who harbor unconscious attitudes that result in discriminatory policies and behavior.
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The player takes on the role of a police officer who is confronted with a series of images of white or black men variously holding guns or innocent objects such as wallets or cellphones. The aim is to shoot anyone with a gun while holstering your weapon in other cases.Ordinary players (often university undergraduates) routinely shoot more quickly at black men than at white men, and are more likely to mistakenly shoot an unarmed black man than an unarmed white man.
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Correll has found no statistically significant difference between the play of blacks and that of whites in the shooting game.
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an uncomfortable starting point is to understand that racial stereotyping remains ubiquitous, and that the challenge is not a small number of twisted white supremacists but something infinitely more subtle and complex: People who believe in equality but who act in ways that perpetuate bias and inequality.
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One finding is that we unconsciously associate “American” with “white.” Thus, in 2008, some California college students — many who were supporting Barack Obama for president — unconsciously treated Obama as more foreign than Tony Blair, the former British prime minister.
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“There’s a whole culture that promotes this idea of aggressive young black men,” Correll notes. “In our minds, young black men are associated with danger.”
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Joshua Correll of the University of Colorado at Boulder has used an online shooter video game to try to measure these unconscious attitudes (you can play the game yourself).
Gun violence has sharply declined in California's Bay Area. What happened? | US news | ... - 0 views
Opinion | Will We Shrug Off Coronavirus Deaths as We Do Gun Violence? - The New York Times - 0 views
www.nytimes.com/...coronavirus-deaths.html
violence gun pandemic death liberty politization normaiization climate change ideology
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