Oxnard Murder

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Illuen
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Oxnard Murder

Post by Illuen »

Now, if you talk to me very often, you probably saw me in a rage around Valentines Day, when I saw this news article (and related articles).
Lawrence King, who self-identified as gay, was shot in the head by McInerney during a class on February 12. King was declared brain dead on February 13 as a result of the shooting. He was taken off life support at St. John's Regional Medical Center on February 14 and died shortly afterward. McInerney, has been charged with first-degree murder and a hate crime in the shooting. McInerney could face up to 24 years to life for the murder charge and an added three years for the hate crime addition.
I was really angry because this was not covered on any "large" news media outletl; it ran on local/state news and the gay news circuit, but hardly anyone I had mentioned it to heard about it. Thankfully, I am not the only one who is upset over this, and Ellen Degeneres, I've recently learned, has talked about it on her show, trying to send a very important message.

http://www.tmz.com/tmz_main_video?titleid=1437079313

I'm kinda ashamed that I didn't make a topic about it sooner, but I do hope that now at least a few more people will hear about the whole thing, because it is a gigantic tragedy in my eyes, and even though I've dealt with this kind of mentality before, it is heartbreaking to see a child so young have so much hate for another human being.
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Jazzy
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Re: Oxnard Murder

Post by Jazzy »

I read about this, but I'm fairly certain it didn't end up on the BBC. I think I read it either in the Los Angeles Times or the New York Times, purely by chance; I was reading something else in one of them, it was linked at the side, and I wondered where Oxnard was.

It's a horrible story - I normally stay clear of school shooting stories, because they make me so angry. Even putting aside the fact that this was a hate crime (which is absolutely awful), the fact that people can be shot dead at school and it can go practically unreported is really depressing. Actually, the news in general at the moment is enough to make anyone lose their faith in people's good nature - anyone else see today that Israel's threatening Palestine with a "holocaust"? I mean, really, they of all people...did they learn nothing from World War Two?
Fjorab_Teke
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Re: Oxnard Murder

Post by Fjorab_Teke »

It was actually on CNN for a little while, and I posted about it on LJ and MySpace (I crosspost between them). I was mightily upset. It made me feel so dirty for being a Christian even though I'm a liberal one, because I think conservative Christians in general help fuel this kind of "kill the gays" attitude. Even if some conservatives don't advocate killing them, they're still promoting the hate by saying they're sinners who are corrupting society by their "choice." :(

I was thinking of posting about it here too, but there was another post about two years ago here about homosexuality, and I didn't want to stir that fire again. I was even ready to shed a new "analogy" since we couldn't figure out a good one. I think left-handedness is a good analogy, since it's ingrained but someone could be "other-handed" if they practiced it enough, to APPEAR to prefer that hand instead...but in private they'd still be able to do things better with the hand they naturally are better with. The right-handed/left-handed population split is similar in proportion to sexual orientation. And most people have some dexterity either way, much like there are so many people who have some bisexual tendencies but can hide those or just generally prefer one gender significantly over the other. And there are so many things that are designed for the right-handed majority. But I don't think that people are going to go "OMG you're left-handed! You don't deserve special rights; you can do things right-handed just like the rest of us! It's obviously a choice and you're rebelling just for the heck of it!"
Last edited by Fjorab_Teke on 01 Mar 2008 05:47 am, edited 1 time in total.
Jazzy
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Re: Oxnard Murder

Post by Jazzy »

Did you know that they pretty much did used to do what you said? My grandma grew up in post-WW1 Germany and she was left-handed, but was forced to write with her right hand. It happened in plenty of countries around that time. All the words for right have positive associations (right itself having connotations of justice, being correct, etc, and the Latin being "dexter", as seen in "dexterity", skilful) and words for left have negative ones (the French "gauche" meaning "clumsy", the Latin "sinistra" giving us "sinister", etc). Nowadays, however, they wouldn't dream of making German left-handed children write with their right hand; perhaps in fifty, a hundred years time people will stop attempting to impose sexualities on others in the same way. This idea even shows up in linguistics to some extent - in Esperanto, a far newer constructed language, the word for left just means "the opposite of right".
nanabobo567
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Re: Oxnard Murder

Post by nanabobo567 »

I would have been annoyed by the fact it got no coverage as well, if it weren't for the fact that I don't keep up with non-recreational news anymore. It's too depressing.
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Twofold Black
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Re: Oxnard Murder

Post by Twofold Black »

Jazzy wrote:Did you know that they pretty much did used to do what you said? My grandma grew up in post-WW1 Germany and she was left-handed, but was forced to write with her right hand. It happened in plenty of countries around that time.
I have a friend who is fifty or fifty-five, and a brother of hers who I believe is around her age went through this in Catholic boarding school. I don't know if his experience is typical, but it broke him. He was never quite right afterwards. It's very chilling and sad, the way she tells it. (And it is possible something genuinely terrible did happen in his brain, since laterality is a neurological phenomenon having to do with which side of your brain has the superior reaction time and which side you therefore prefer to build certain kinds of pathways in.) So possibly the metaphor holds after all.
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