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Originally Posted by pax
Anyway. On that film, there were several different types of shoot situations, including one with a child who looked to be around 10 years old who first shot someone else, then started shooting toward the viewer.
That was a "shoot" scene.
It shook me up.
But -- is someone less dead when shot by a child rather than adult?
The youngest multi-victim school shooter was 11 years old.
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It's human, and a good thing, to be shaken up by that.
But there's a "teachable moment" here, I think, and it has to do with our tendency to classify people,
a priori, as "good guys" or "bad guys."
It's sort of a giveaway that Blaine Cooper, in that phone conversation, expresses outrage that the people shown on the targets are "real gun owners:" he's basically assuming that people who don't fit some stereotype are automatically "good guys," and that it's
wrong to train cops to overcome their own stereotyping in this regard.
Many of the posters in this thread are making the same assumption. We might try turning this on its head by picturing the sorts of people we
do think it's OK to put on targets. People who are dressed in certain ways, perhaps? (Think hoodies here...) People of color, perhaps, especially Arab-looking people?
Again, I realize I'm on delicate ground with this, but I think there's a lot of unconscious racism and classism underlying the outrage over these targets.