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Shootings Quotes

Browse 26 quotes about Shootings.

Shootings Quotes

“Only a few days after my encounter with the police, two patrolmen tackled Alton Sterling onto a car, then pinned him down on the ground and shot him in the chest while he was selling CDs in front of a convenience store, seventy-five miles up the road in Baton Rouge. A day after that, Philando Castile was shot in the passenger seat of his car during a police traffic stop in Falcon Heights, Minnesota, as his girlfriend recorded the aftermath via Facebook Live. Then, the day after Castile was killed, five policemen were shot dead by a sniper in Dallas. It felt as if the world was subsumed by cascades of unceasing despair. I mourned for the family and friends of Sterling and Castille. I felt deep sympathy for the families of the policemen who died. I also felt a real fear that, as a result of what took place in Dallas, law enforcement would become more deeply entrenched in their biases against black men, leading to the possibility of even more violence. The stream of names of those who have been killed at the hands of the police feels endless, and I become overwhelmed when I consider all the names we do not know—all of those who lost their lives and had no camera there to capture it, nothing to corroborate police reports that named them as threats. Closed cases. I watch the collective mourning transpire across my social-media feeds. I watch as people declare that they cannot get out of bed, cannot bear to go to work, cannot function as a human being is meant to function. This sense of anxiety is something I have become unsettlingly accustomed to. The familiar knot in my stomach. The tightness in my chest. But becoming accustomed to something does not mean that it does not take a toll. Systemic racism always takes a toll, whether it be by bullet or by blood clot.”

GriefRaceDespairAnxietyRacismPoliceMourningSympathyBiasLaw EnforcementAfrican AmericansBlack Lives MatterRace RelationsPolicemenGunsWhitesShootings
Author:Clint Smith
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“When a person denies his conscience for too long, it can become seared. That person becomes susceptible to receiving and accepting all sorts of harmful and evil things. This is true for both believers and unbelievers. A seared conscience will open a person up to demonic spirits and activities.”

EvilConscienceDemonsWhyClear ConscienceEvil SpiritsShootingsGood ConscienceWhy Is There Evil
Book:ONE: Unfolding God's Eternal Purpose from House to House
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“The third shooting happened at a kosher grocery store abut twenty minutes from my house. Antisemitic screeds found in the attacker’ vehicle and in their social media postings told a different story, as did the tactical gear they wore, the massive stash of ammunition and firearm they brought along, and security camera footage showing them driving slowly down the street, checking addresses before parking and entering the market with guns blazing. The real targets, authorities surmised, were likely the fifty Jewish children in the private elementary school at the same address, directly above the store – huddled in closets, listening to their neighbors being murdered. Reporting within hours of the attack gave surprising emphasis to the murdered Jews as “gentrifying” a “minority” neighborhood This was remarkable, given that the tiny Hasidic community in question, highly visible members of the word’s most visible members of the world’s most consistently persecuted minority, came to Jersey City fleeing gentrification, after being priced out of long-established Hasidic communities in Brooklyn. The “context” supplied by news outlets after this attack was breathtaking in its cruelty. The sole motivation for providing such “context” in that moment is to inform the public that those people got what was coming to them. People who think of themselves as educated and ethical don’t do this because it is both factually untrue and morally wrong. But if we’re talking about Hasidic Jews, it is quite literally a different story.”

ChildrenNew JerseyJewsAntisemitismGentrificationShootingsJustificationsJews And Blacks
Book:People Love Dead Jews: Reports from a Haunted Present
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“Write one more stanza—now. Set the page ablaze with the anger in the hollow ache of our bones— anger for the new hate, same as the old kind of hate for the wrong skin color, for the accent in a voice, for the love of those we’re not supposed to love. Anger for the voice of politics armed with lies, fear that holds democracy at gunpoint.”

LoveWritingPoetryPoemHatredAngerLgbtqShootingsPulse Nightclub
Book:How to Love a Country
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“She was familiar with a certain type of American crazy. Gun crazy was normal to her, shooting-kids-at-school or putting-on-a-Joker-mask-and-mowing-people-down-in-a-mall or just plain murdering-your-mom-at-breakfast crazy, Second Amendment crazy, that was just the everyday crazy that kept going down and there was nothing you could do about it if you loved freedom; and she understood knife crazy from her younger days in the Bronx, and the knockout-game type of crazy that persuaded young black kids it was cool to punch Jews in the face. She could comprehend drug crazy and politician crazy and Westboro Baptist Church crazy and Trump crazy because those things, they were the American way, but this new crazy was different. It felt 9/11 crazy: foreign, evil.”

AmericaPoliticsViolenceCrazinessAmericansGun ViolenceShootingsAmerican Way
Book:Two Years Eight Months and Twenty-Eight Nights
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“the fact that a police officer on TV said what used to be a fist fight or road rage is now a shooting, and what used to be a domestic dispute is now a gun rampage, and what used to be a tardy or disruptive student is now a school shooter, the fact that the police aren’t much better themselves, the fact that what used to be an arrest or a warning is now a split-second execution”

ViolenceGunsEscalationShootings
Book:Ducks, Newburyport
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“One of the arguments that authoritarian governments use to ward off the call for greater political freedom is to argue that American-style democracy is no guarantee of good policy.... Over the years, I’ve grown used to these arguments, and my response has rarely wavered: Sure, we might make dumb choices sometimes, but we will defend, to the end, the right to make choices at all, because we believe that our collective conscience, freely expressed, will eventually lead us in the right direction. When it comes to guns, it is getting harder to muster that argument abroad. Every new shooting, every new failure of will and citizenship, slashes another hole in our credibility as a way of life.”

GovernmentAmericaDemocracyPolicyUnited States Of AmericaCredibilityAuthoritarianismGunsShootingsGun Policy
Author:Evan Osnos
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“You whom I could not save, Listen to me. Can we agree Kevlar backpacks shouldn’t be needed for children walking to school? Those same children also shouldn’t require a suit of armor when standing on their front lawns, or snipers to watch their backs as they eat at McDonalds. They shouldn’t have to stop to consider the speed of a bullet or how it might reshape their bodies. But one winter, back in Detroit, I had one student who opened a door and died. It was the front door to his house, but it could have been any door, and the bullet could have written any name. The shooter was thirteen years old and was aiming at someone else. But a bullet doesn’t care about “aim,” it doesn’t distinguish between the innocent and the innocent, and how was the bullet supposed to know this child would open the door at the exact wrong moment because his friend was outside and screaming for help. Did I say I had “one” student who opened a door and died? That’s wrong. There were many. The classroom of grief had far more seats than the classroom for math though every student in the classroom for math could count the names of the dead. A kid opens a door. The bullet couldn’t possibly know, nor could the gun, because “guns don’t kill people,” they don’t have minds to decide such things, they don’t choose or have a conscience, and when a man doesn’t have a conscience, we call him a psychopath. This is how we know what type of assault rifle a man can be, and how we discover the hell that thrums inside each of them. Today, there’s another shooting with dead kids everywhere. It was a school, a movie theater, a parking lot. The world is full of doors. And you, whom I cannot save, you may open a door and enter a meadow, or a eulogy. And if the latter, you will be mourned, then buried in rhetoric. There will be monuments of legislation, little flowers made from red tape. What should we do? we’ll ask again. The earth will close like a door above you. What should we do? And that click you hear? That’s just our voices, the deadbolt of discourse sliding into place.”

ChildrenPoetryGriefViolencePoemSafetyBulletsGunsShootings
Author:Matthew Olzmann
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