Wednesday, December 28, 2005

What country is this?

A 50-year-old man was dragged from a car he was driving and severely beaten Monday night by a group of at least 15 teens and young men after he honked at them to get out of the street they were blocking.

A 17-year-old visiting relatives nearby said he called police when he saw the group grab McClain and start beating him. The boy didn't want his name published for fear that the attackers would retaliate. He said he watched the whole beating, peering through the blinds of a bedroom window.

"They just started stomping on him, beating him," he said. "They were having fun, like it was normal, like it was an everyday thing."

They were drinking, laughing and playing music, he said.

"I was in shock," he said.

Britney King and her two sisters said they saw the attackers doing flips and cartwheels off cars onto McClain as he lay in the street.

"It looked like they were having a block party," King said. "They sounded like they were having a good time."

Last year, there were four mob-style beatings in four weeks in __________, leaving one man dead and three other people seriously injured. None of the beatings was related.

David Rutledge, a 54-year-old man with schizophrenia, was robbed and beaten July 4, 2004; he later died. Six teens were charged. One was convicted and one is awaiting trial; charges against the others were dropped.

Four days after the Rutledge beating, a 14-year-old boy was kicked, punched and hit in the head with a piece of lumber after he had exchanged words with a girl on a playground. She summoned older relatives, suspected of beating the boy.

Two weeks later, a __________ man was beaten by a group of men after a girl in the neighborhood falsely accused him of indecently touching her.

And on July 29, 2004, a 16-year-old boy and his brothers were beaten by a group armed with bats, bottles, sticks and socks stuffed with canned food.

In 2002, ___________ drew national attention after the fatal beating of 36-year-old Charlie Young Jr. Young was pummeled by at least a dozen people, including children as young as 10, who used shovels, tree limbs and other weapons.

This is not a third world country. this is the inner city of Milwaukee. It makes me want to puke. Just thought all the people who keep making excuses, blaming racist Republicans, and wanting to throw money at the problem, let them see what is actually happening.

We have people STILL saying that it is not the kids fault. It is societies fault. No one forces the kids to pull someone out of a car. No one forces the kids to to leaps off of cars onto some guys head. It is all the people saying it is societies fault, the white mans fault, cuts in programs fault, slavery's fault. There is NO sense of pride or personal responsibility. They believe the government will give them everything, so they work for nothing. I teach these kids. Many kids miss 20-60 days of school each semester. Who's fault is that? They get free transportation, free lunch, free books, free pencils, paper, ect... What else do you need. Someone please tell me which program or next give-away will change this behavior?

17 comments:

Anonymous said...

If my vehicle was attacked, I would have had my doors locked, I would have mowed them down, come to a safe location further down the road, pull out my rifle that I bought at a Target and done some target practice.
Can you say Rodney King boys and girls!
TFB in LA, Calif

Anonymous said...

What does this have to do with Republican, Democrat, liberal, conservative, etc.? Where were the parents? Where were the police? Were these kids on drugs? What was the city government doing during "the Clinton years," and since? I'm sick of the violence, but I'm also sick of commentators who have all the answers before they've asked any of the right questions.

Anonymous said...

Gee... I wonder what race they were.

Anonymous said...

a bunch of caveman running around that city. state and federal government should create a task force that can deal with this. we all need to educate our children, this bunch of idiotic behavior are sometimes brought or learned where it always begins - at home or how are they raised. im sorry to say this. lesson learned - do not honk your or you will get beaten to death.

Anonymous said...

Very Nice. Milwaukee must be proud of their inner-city folks.

Anonymous said...

An armed society is a much more polite society. Go for it!

Anonymous said...

start a vigilante group of folks driving down inner city streets honking horns. When groups of people surround the car and start to beat them, then the cops who are watching arrest them all.

This is easy. There are tons of sting operations busting hookers, I don't see why equal efforts aren't made to put violent offenders away.

Anonymous said...

For conservatives who watch Faux News and listen to Drug Limbaugh, the solution is easy...blame it on Clinton. Never mind that in spite of several of Gawd's Own Party's senators having the guts to vote not to take more money from programs such as Medicare, Medicaid, and Child Support Enforcement to give another generous tax-cut to the ultra-wealthy so they can contribute it back to the G.O.P., and, oh yeah, "create" some more of those ($5.15) per hour minimum wage jobs so the idle young will take those jobs instead of the more lucrative trade of illegal drug-dealing. "F*#k off Dick" Cheney thought that this was important enough that he cut short his "photo-op" to Afghanistan, where Osama (remember him?) likely is, and where we'll soon be cutting our troop levels, to come home and cast the deciding vote that made it 51 to 50. Another MANDATE! God bless and protect our brave troops, but the "freedom" they're purportedly fighting for includes the very real likelihood that dissenting e-mails such as this one will be traced and investigated. What country is this? Indeed I wonder, I really do! When the Moral Majority and the "Christian" Coalition are finished, will our theocracy be identifiably superior to the one already in place in Iran, or the ones that will likely appear in Iraq and Afghanistan?

Anonymous said...

lets face it folks, we are becoming a third world country by our own actions.the laws are changing to protect the guilty, children suing their parents, teachers unable to control students, etc. we do not have laws here, we have rules and it's ok to break the rules. i used to be so proud of my country. now i would rather people not know i'm an american.

Anonymous said...

Just like the movie: "Death Race 2000" Milwaukee residents need to score points on these inner city thugs.

Anonymous said...

This tragedy speaks volumes about
the city of Milwaukee's
"leadership".
This is a senseless tragedy caused
by dirtbags who are being enabled
by the authorities. Their are acts
of commission (the dirtbags) and
omission (the cops,police chiefs,
mayors). Unfortunately people just
look at the perpetrators as well
they should. But they also need to
demand accountability from those that allow and are responsible for an environment becoming this toxic.
I have seen this in my own city,
which is rabidly liberal. Until
both problems are addressed they are just going to nab a few here and there, also the authorities will whine about their hands being tied. ( they always have excuses)
While too much of the criminal element gets away with this stuff.
Here the press can do some good if their up to it.

Anonymous said...

Isn't there an internal contradiction here: "This is not a third world country. this is the inner city of Milwaukee." ?? :-)

I agree at least in part with the anomalous :-) poster who said he would have driven away even if he had to drive through the group of people. Samuel McClain would probably still be alive if he had done that. Stopping afterwards for target practice would be harder to justify in court. Charlie Young, the other man who was killed, in 2002, would have had a hard time justifying any violent self defense, as he could have retreated when first attacked with the egg, and we don't know for sure that anyone would have done him any further harm.

Either way, isn't it lucky that neither Samuel McClain nor Charlie Young had a gun, because then somebody might have been hurt? Just yesterday, I happened to get into a discussion of stuff like this with some people from Texas who didn't like their former governor; one of them also didn't like Suzanna Gratia-Hupp, who ran for the Texas legislature on a platform of having been in the cafeteria where all those people were shot, and won the election, and promoted the concealed carry law that did eventually pass. I pointed out that with 22 corpses lying around the place, it would be hard to see how things could have been much worse if one of the victims had been armed, but I don't think I was successful. Maybe if I had talked more about the numbers: [I have a S&W semi-auto 9mm with a 14 round magazine; if someone had had one of those, and shot the perp after he killed his 5th victim (or 6th, or 7th), and gone totally wild and emptied the other 13 rounds into the crowd, and killed one person with every shot, the death toll would still have been less than what actually happened] that might have made the point better.

It's hard to imagine a better incident to demonstrate the value of people having guns; OTOH, the ones in Milwaukee may be those examples, since in each case if the victim had been armed, the perps would probably have run, and nobody would have been injured at all. We don't know that for certain, but that does commonly happen.

Lott's great paper shows that incidents of people shooting into crowds more or less randomly decrease more than ordinary crime, when concealed carry laws are passed. I know not what theories others may have, but my guess is that thieves feel motivated to go to work because they need the money to get the next fix (I guess being strung out on withdrawal is a lot of motivation); but someone who just feels mean and wants to shoot, may be more easily deterred by fear. I assume the same would more or less apply to the murderers in these two cases, because they had no compelling need to do it, they just felt mean.

And, yes, there is probably a lot that parents and the rest of society could do differently, to promote being nice and not murdering people; today's question is, do we wait and hope that will happen, or do we take immediate steps to respond to conditions as they are, and doesn't that include being prepared (as we old Boy Scouts say) to defend ourselves when necessary? Some people seem to think that if we let people have guns, then all other plans for improvement of public safety will be dropped; this is a crazy idea and should not be allowed to get in the way of progress.

Dick Hatzenbuhler
Deering, NH
Live free and not die

Anonymous said...

In regards to the 50 year old Milwaukee man beaten to death by the "Child Mob." Wasn't midnight basketball suppose to solve all these problems?

What race was the mob and what race was the 50 year old? Sounds to me like this might be a hate crime.

Incidents like this will continue as long as we live in a society that promotes single parent families and legal action against parents for disciplining their children. Thanks to all you touchy feely liberals you have left us with a real mess to clean up.

Anonymous said...

I thought they were all playing Midnight basket ball. Speaks loudly for the "Armed Citizen"

Anonymous said...

Anonymous brings up a good point with the question about race and hate crimes. The media hasn't said a peep about it, so I'm willing to bet dollars to doughnuts that the victim was white and the youths were not. Thus, in the eyes of the media, it doesn't qualify as a "hate crime".

As a minority myself, it pains me to see our country eroding from within by our society's insistence on catering to crybaby minority groups. Arizona schools were just ranked the "dumbest" in the country, most likely because those in power feel it serves our Hispanic population better to teach them in Spanish rather than English. Hello?? This is the US, not Spain! No other immigrant (illegal or otherwise) is given this type of preferential treatment, and they are better off for it.

I didn't mean to turn this into a monologue on race. Gangs do what they do because they have no fear of the legal system. If you get caught, you just do your time in the pen with all your other good buddies. They laugh at the system, and I can't say I blame 'em.

The Game said...

I"m not sure if all the victims in the last few years were black, but I am pretty sure this last guy was black. I am confident in saying that many of the crime in the inner city is black on black...

Anonymous said...

25 or 30 years ago the bus driver our rural church hired to drive us to a White Sox game got lost and was driving around in a seriously bad section of Chicago. Chicago's Finest actually stopped us, found out the problem and escorted the bus back to the Dan Ryan. Some police care, or at least used to care. I feel for this man and his family and pray that the Great Healer will care for them.