Ken Berwitz
Hillary Clinton met Monday with a collection of parentswhose African-American children have died in shootings at a local Chicago cafe,discussing their loss and outlining her criminal justice reform and gun controlplans.
The two-hour gathering included the mothers of Trayvon Martin, Jordan Davis, Michael Brownand Tamir Rice. All African-American women who lost their young children inshootings, the group formed a “motherhood” in the wake of theirlosses.
Martin was the 17-year-old Floridian who was killed in 2012by former neighborhood watch captain George Zimmerman. Zimmerman\’s acquittalsparked protests across the country. Davis was a 17-year-old African-Americanhigh school student killed in a 2014 shooting that started with a complaintabout loud music. Brown was the 18-year-old African-American killed in 2014 bya white police officer in Ferguson, Missouri. And Rice was the 12-year-oldAfrican-American killed by police in Cleveland, Ohio.
According to the women, Clinton did not make any explicitpromises to them, but did pledge to stay engaged in their causes and work oncriminal justice reform. All of them women described the meeting as productiveand said Clinton appeared earnest and trustworthy.
-Trayvon Martin was the young thug wannabe, serving his third suspension from school that year (one of which involved authorities finding women\’s jewelry in his locker that he could not explain), who was shot while physically attacking neighborhood watch member George Zimmerman. The eye witness accounts that Martin was on top of Zimmerman and beating him when the shots were fired, along with Zimmerman\’s head lacerations, is what caused a mixed-race jury to acquit him;-Jordan Davis was shot to death by Michael Dunn, a 45 year old IT guy who objected to the loud music Davis and his friends were playing on their radio at a Jacksonville, Florida gas station. Dunn was convicted of murder and sentenced to life imprisonment without the possibility of parole.-Michael Brown was the 18 year old thug who had just robbed a Ferguson, Missouri convenience store, physically attacked the owner/clerk who tried to stop him, was sky-high on marijuana (toxicology results showed he was at about 2 1/2 times the legal limit to drive a car in Colorado), was walking in the middle of the street when initially addressed by Police Officer Darren Wilson, and then shot while, among other things, trying to grab officer Wilson\’s gun. Based on the autopsy results, and the eye witness accounts which squared with those results (as opposed to the 100% fraudulent “Hands up, don\’t shoot” fable concocted by his lying friend dorian johnson), a grand jury refused to indict officer Wilson;-Tamir Rice was a 12 year old boy, shot and killed in a Cleveland park. Police received a report that someone was waving a gun in the park, and when they approached, Rice, who then had the gun in his waistband reached for it, and was shot dead. The gun turned out to be a toy – but one with the orange markings showing it to be a toy removed, so it looked identical to a real gun.
While it is true that all four of these young men were Black, it is also true that there is no evidence to indicate the shootings were racial in nature:
-No witness in any of the four incidents has claimed that the shooters made any comments of a racial nature (unless you include NBC\’s doctored tape of George Zimmerman talking to a police dispatcher, which was intended to make it seem as if the incident was racial – for which NBC apologized and supposedly fired the personnel who did the doctoring).-None of the shooters, so far as I know, had any history of racial animosity, nor belonged to any racist groups.-In any event, these shootings happened at different places for different reasons, and the shooters were half police, half not police. They had exactly nothing to do with each other besides the fact that, anecdotally, all four were Black. Clinton could as easily have picked four White shooting victims and met with their mothers instead.
So why was Hillary Clinton meeting with these mothers – other than to pander to the #blacklivesmatter crowd, which does not care whether there was a racial component to the shootings if they can create one on their own?
I don\’t know of any at all.
One last thing: since this meeting took place in Chicago, let me tell you about a young Black male whose mother she might also want to meet with.
Excerpted from an article at CBS News – Chicago:
A 9-year-old boy was fatally shot Monday afternoon in theGresham neighborhood of Chicago, reportsCBS Chicago.
Police said the victim was found fatally wounded in an alleyaround 4:15 p.m. He had been shot multiple times in the upper body.
CBS Chicago reports that family members identified thevictim as Tyshawn Lee. They described him as a nice child who liked to playball and video games.
CBS Chicago reports that shortly before the shooting, anumber individuals were in the alley and an argument erupted, followed byseveral shots, according to Dean Andrews, the Chicago Police Department\’s chiefof detectives.
Tyshawn Lee was not a thug. He wasn\’t waving a real or toy gun. He wasn\’t blasting a radio loud enough to precipitate an argument that turned fatal. As we now understand it, he was just a 9 year old kid, shot dead for the “crime” of being in the line of fire when other people started shooting guns at each other.
But the downshide is that Hillary Clinton visiting young Tyshawn Lee\’s mother might cause people to look at this ugly, senseless crime and think about how much gun violence there is in Chicago, even with its stricter-than-strict gun control laws…which might, in turn, cause them to think about how meaningless gun control legislation is to people with illegally obtained guns (do you think the guns that killed young Tyshawn were legally obtained?) And that might embarrass Clinton confidante/Chicago Mayor Rahm Emanuel.
So I\’m not expecting any visit to the Lee household from Ms. Clinton.
