‘No One Saw a Thing’: When a Midwest Town Banded Together to Kill the Town Bully

Post by persistent » Fri, Aug 09, 2019, 10:34 PM UTC

jcims wrote: post #29

dwheeler wrote: post #10

> frontier justice came for McElroy courtesy of the residents of Skidmore (population 440 at the time of the crime). Shaken by the man’s ability to evade jail even after being convicted of a near-fatal attack on a grocery store owner... Belkin also details Skidmore’s plague of subsequent violence ... the series persuasively contends that these crimes indicate that the McElroy episode taught younger Skidmore generatio…

This is my prevailing theory as to why minority enclaves in metropolitan areas tend to have higher violent crime. It's not socioeconomic as much as it is folks being forced to mete out justice on their own.

Post by persistent » Fri, Aug 09, 2019, 10:39 PM UTC

parsnips wrote: post #152

persistent wrote: post #151

Earlier quoted context omitted.

Are you sure this isn't just a bias of yours? Urban areas in the United States have a lower rate of fatal injuries due to violence than do rural areas. Perhaps this is not what you meant by "violent crime"? I know the output of these reports is difficult to interpret but see [1]. The top decile of per-capita violent deaths are rural counties, not urban ones. 1: https://wisqars.cdc.gov:8443/cdcMapFramework/output/m588…

Great, now run the numbers on per capita per square mile and get back to us.

Post by rocqua » Fri, Aug 09, 2019, 10:43 PM UTC

vkou wrote: post #36

harimau777 wrote: post #31

Earlier quoted context omitted.

Regardless of whether or not vigilantism is ever justified, I don't think that killing someone that has made a credible threat which law enforcement has shown they are unable to protect you against is equivalent to killing motivated by racism.

Lynching has always been driven by people reacting to what they believe was a credible threat, that law enforcement has failed to protect them from. In the historic case, that 'credible threat' was 'race mixing', uppity ______s, jews that were too well off for their own good, etc. When you let the most violent members of a small town community unilaterally decide what is, and what is not a credible threat, that is ex…

Post by rocqua » Fri, Aug 09, 2019, 10:48 PM UTC

habitue wrote: post #97

PeterisP wrote: post #89

Earlier quoted context omitted.

Rule of law is essentially about process for resolving disputes. In this case, it doesn't seem to be any dispute - it seems that the community had came to a consensus (almost unanimous if we discount McElroy himself and his wife Trena) about what how they wanted things to be.

Rule of law is not only about the practice of resolving disputes, though that's important, it's also about the belief that the process is what is used to handle criminals like McElroy. If that belief is shaken, it's much more damaging than if the system itself is a bit inefficient or corrupt but people still believe in it.

Post by wtdata » Fri, Aug 09, 2019, 10:52 PM UTC

LyndsySimon wrote: post #148

idoubtit wrote: post #111

Earlier quoted context omitted.

> if the justice system cannot help you then you have to take things into your own hands. If you apply this rule strictly, then the mobs could first hit the police. In many countries, police officers are violent and have a de facto impunity when they break the law. In the US, the police kills more than 1000 citizens each year, especially black men and teenagers. They very rarely face jail, not even loosing their job.…

> If you apply this rule strictly, then the mobs could first hit the police. In many countries, police officers are violent and have a de facto impunity when they break the law. Advocates of our Second Amendment - the right to keep and bear arms - understand this. This idea was the primary reason for the Second Amendment's inclusion in the Bill of Rights. In the words of Tench Coxe: > Who are the militia? Are they no…