Every "accidental" gun death, especially children, horrifies me ~ but this reaches a new level of horror for me ~ not "heat of the moment", not "anger", not "fear", not "stand your ground" ~ not even "accidental" ~ it was just ... BOREDOM ~ I canNOT wrap my mind around this ~ ~ Sooz

Tuesday, Aug 20, 2013 08:24 AM CDT
Oklahoma teens kill baseball player because they “were bored”
One of the teens told police: 'We were bored and didn't have anything to do, so we decided to kill somebody.'
By Associated Press

OKLAHOMA CITY — An Australian man attending an Oklahoma college on a baseball scholarship was shot and killed in what police described Monday as a random act of violence by three “bored” teenagers who decided to kill someone for the fun of it.

Christopher Lane, 22, of Melbourne, was found dead Friday while visiting the town of Duncan, where his girlfriend and her family live. Three boys, ages 15, 16, and 17, are in custody and face a court appearance Tuesday afternoon.

Duncan Police Chief Danny Ford said Monday a woman called 911 after she saw Lane stagger across the road and fall to the ground in the south-central Oklahoma town of about 24,000 residents. Ford said Lane, who was staying with his girlfriend and her family in Duncan, had jogged past a home where the three boys were staying. He said the shooting appeared to be completely random.

Autopsy results are pending. Ford wouldn’t say how many times Lane was shot.

Ford said the 17-year-old has given a detailed confession to police but that investigators have not been able to locate the weapon.

“They saw Christopher go by, and one of them said: ‘There’s our target,’” Ford said. “The boy who has talked to us said: ‘We were bored and didn’t have anything to do, so we decided to kill somebody.’”

“They followed him in the car to that area, shot him in the back and drove off,” Ford said.

Ford told the television station KOCO in Oklahoma City that one of the teens said they shot Lane for “the fun of it.”

He said the district attorney is expected to file first-degree murder charges Tuesday, and all three will be arraigned at Stephens County District Court. It wasn’t known whether the three will be charged as adults or as juveniles.

Sarah Harper, Lane’s girlfriend, told the Australian Broadcasting Corp. that the two had returned to the United States from Australia only last week.

“He didn’t deserve any of this,” Harper told the network. “It’s heartbreaking that it was such a random choice those guys made that drastically altered so many lives in the process.”

Lane attended East Central University in Ada, about 85 miles west of Duncan. He started 14 games at catcher last year and was entering his senior year.

“He was an absolute joy to coach,” baseball coach Dino Rosato said in a statement issued by the school. “Chris was an extremely well-respected teammate. … He set a great example for all of his teammates, but more importantly for the younger players. He was a mature student-athlete who his teammates could look to for advice and support.”

Witnesses rushed to help Lane after hearing a shot Friday and seeing him stagger and collapse on a road in Duncan.

“He was face down on the ground and he was shot in the back,” builder Richard Rhodes told Australian broadcasters near a roadside memorial at the scene. “I had another lady stop and we tried CPR on him. And he passed away right here.”

The chief told the Duncan Banner that police detained the three boys near a car and had retrieved a dismantled shotgun from the vehicle but that Lane had been shot with another gun that had not yet been found. He said police have had “problems” with two of the three juveniles previously. He did not elaborate.

Peter Lane told Australian broadcasters there was no explanation for his son’s death.

“It is heartless and to try to understand it is a short way to insanity,” he said.

http://www.salon.com/2013/08/20/oklahoma_teens_kill_baseball_player_out_of_boredom_ap/

I normally do not favor the death penalty, but in this case...maybe.

It is totally horrifying. It's unfortunately been happening for years with the homeless. Teens' sport killings. I think some gang initiations involve killing for sport, too.

fucking animals.

Not sure that's legal.

I loathe everyone/everything associated with Fox <anything> ~ I'm being "gentle" when I say they are nothing more than dishonest creepy cheap-shot con men/charlatans ~ ~ emphasis/bolding below and "live links" to more/corroborating info in the original ~ Sooz

Fox News Says Three Teens Committed Murder Because There Is Too Much Facebook And Abortion
By Igor Volsky on August 21, 2013 at 2:55 pm

On Tuesday, prosecutors charged two teenagers who allegedly shot and killed 22-year-old Christopher Lane — an Australian student in Oklahoma — for the “fun of it” with first-degree murder and a third with acting as an accessory. Conservative media has seized on the case to pressure President Obama and civil rights leaders who spoke out against the murder of Trayvon Martin to similarly address the death of Lane, implying that they are less interested in Lane’s murder because he was white, while his attackers are black.

But Fox News contributor Keith Ablow took the narrative even further toward the absurd, during an appearance on the network, suggesting that America’s disrespect for life, third-term abortions, and Facebook pushed the three teens to allegedly kill Lane.

“We do have an epidemic of disconnectedness,” Ablow said, responding to a leading question from anchor Shannon Bream. “We have people saying they have hundreds of friends on Facebook, when those aren’t friends and we have people text messaging when in fact they are not reaching out to anybody, because they are sending their thoughts and feelings in the air, if you will”:


Watch it:


Ablow, who is part of the network’s A-Team, has a long history of wild and unsubstantiated claims. He has previously said that enthusiasm of Anthony Weiner’s sexting partners can be blamed on feminists, access to contraception, and gender equality in the military, suggested that same-sex parents of transgender youth need “psychological evaluations” and charged that working moms are “anti-gender” and “despise the parts of themselves” drawn to motherhood.

http://thinkprogress.org/media/2013/08/21/2505801/fox-news-suggests-that-facebook-abortion-pushed-teens-to-kill-for-the-fun-of-it/

“We do have an epidemic of disconnectedness,” Ablow said

And then he demonstrates!

The flat-line "thinking" by "white conservative media" doesn't lessen the level of horror ~ but it does take it in a new direction ~ ~ Sooz

Thursday, Aug 22, 2013 12:29 PM CDT
No, Chris Lane is not Trayvon Martin!
The white conservative media thinks it's found its "Trayvon Martin in reverse, only worse." Are you kidding me?
By Alex Seitz-Wald

The white conservative media believes it has its own Trayvon Martin in the case of Chris Lane, an Australian baseball player who was killed in Oklahoma, where he had been studying, by three black teenagers in an apparently random act of violence (note: there’s actually some question as to the race of one of the three teens, the driver, who faces lesser charges).

Rush Limbaugh called it “Trayvon Martin in reverse, only worse.” The Drudge Report, where black-on-white crime always gets top billing, has been prominently featuring news about the case for several days. Former Tea Party congressman Allen West weighed in, tweeting, “3 black teens shoot white jogger. Who will POTUS identify w/this time?”

Jesse Jackson tried to extend an olive branch, tweeting that he was “Praying for the family of Chris Lane.” But armed with that, Fox News is now demanding that President Obama weigh in, just as he did for Martin’s case. “I thought it was at least good of Jesse Jackson to step up,” Fox and Friends host Brian Kilmeade said today. “I haven’t heard anything from Al Sharpton [or the White House],” he added. His colleagues agreed.

(For what it’s worth, White House spokesperson Josh Earnest told reporters yesterday that he wasn’t familiar with the case.)

As the right sees it, the president’s silence confirms the narrative shared by everyone from Glenn Beck to Allen West to Maine Gov. Paul LePage to Sean Hannity — that Obama is racist against white people, and that the media is, too, or at least duped into doing the bidding of allegedly racist black leaders like Sharpton, or something.

It’s incredible that in 2013 we’re really arguing about this, but from Henry Louis Gates to Travyon Martin — when the conservative media made George Zimmerman the Real Victim of the supposed anti-white lynch mob — we should expect nothing else. And it’s equally striking, yet also not particularly surprising, that Fox and Limbaugh and the rest really don’t seem to comprehend why the Trayvon Martin case became a thing.

It’s not that difficult to understand so we’ll spell it out: It was not only that a light-skinned Zimmerman killed an unarmed black teenager — but also that police didn’t do anything about it. The killing was horribly tragic, as is Lane’s senseless murder, but if Zimmerman had actually been arrested for the shooting, the sad reality is that far fewer Americans would know his name. But that’s not what happened. Instead, police let Zimmerman go under Florida’s “stand your ground” law. It smacked of institutional, state-sponsored racial favoritism of the worst kind. It was only after public outcry that state prosecutors took over the case and pressed charges. Some could argue that Zimmerman didn’t need to be convicted for justice to be done, but he did need to stand trial.

Likewise with Henry Louis Gates, the famed black professor who was arrested while he was trying to get into his own home in Cambridge, Mass., after he misplaced his keys. That’s not how police are supposed to operate, and that’s why Obama weighed in.

Lane’s murder is an entirely different matter. It’s disgusting, but the police did their job. They arrested three suspects, and vowed to try to throw the book at them. That’s how it’s supposed to go. Murder is sadly quotidian in a gun-soaked America, and this is, sadly, another, if particularly senseless, one.

If you want to actually understand race relations in this country, you need to understand the difference between these cases. But the right prefers to live behind a veil of intentional ignorance where the only kind of racism that exists today is black people disliking white people.

http://www.salon.com/2013/08/22/no_chri ... on_martin/

Michael Jones is white. The very fact that the media reports it as three black teens, when it is two black teens and a white teen appears to be trying to make this issue something it isn't.

The "conservative media" has no honor or integrity and knows no shame ~ they will intentionally manipulate and falsify and misinterpret anything to cast doubt and blame on Obama ~ they are either irreparably stupid or purely evil ~ either/or ~ or maybe both ~ ~ Sooz

The right seizes on Christopher Lane's killing
By Steve Benen - Mon Aug 26, 2013 11:02 AM EDT

Shooting deaths in the United States may be tragically common, but when three Oklahoma teenagers shot and killed Australian baseball player Christopher Lane 10 days ago, the circumstances were gut-wrenching. The suspected killers, ranging in age from 15 to 17, later said they murdered Lane because they were simply "bored and didn't have anything to do."

Since the terrible incident in the town of Duncan, however, U.S. conservatives have decided Lane's death is a political opportunity. This is especially true of Fox News, whose White House correspondent, Ed Henry, who had this exchange last Wednesday with White House Deputy Press Secretary Josh Earnest:


Note the specific wording of Henry's question: "three African American young men." In reality, one of the alleged shooters is black, one is white, and one is of mixed racial heritage. But for the Fox News correspondent, this became "three African American young men."

The back-and-forth continued as you might expect it to -- the White House spokesperson said it "sounds like a pretty tragic case" and added some related thoughts on the importance of reducing gun violence. Ed Henry, unsatisfied, wanted an explanation as to why President Obama commented on the Trayvon Martin case, but not this one.

And almost immediately, the rest of the conservative media began pushing the same line, almost as if it were coordinated. In the blink of an eye, the murder was the right's new rallying cry to express a racial/political grievance -- if the shooting of an unarmed black teenager was a national controversy, then the shooting of an unarmed white baseball player should be, too.

In one especially jarring instance, Drudge published a piece on this Friday carefully omitting the mugshot of the white assailant, showing only the other two suspected shooters. The racial subtext was so obvious, it was no longer a subtext at all.

It was part of a much larger push, which quickly started ignoring relevant details.

Adam Serwer had a great piece on this.


The degree to which conservative media have gotten the details wrong matters. The right has said there were three black shooters, which isn't true. Conservatives have said the violence appears to be racially motivated, but to date no evidence has emerged to substantiate the claim.

And the right sees Lane's slaying as obviously comparable to the Trayvon Martin shooting, but this too is misleading.

Let's not forget what made the Martin case a national issue: it wasn't just the fact that an armed black teen was killed, but also the fact that his shooter wasn't arrested and went uncharged for months. In contrast, Lane's shooters were immediately found, taken into custody, and charged.

To see the Lane tragedy as "Trayvon Martin in reverse" is to put one's far-right blinders on too tight.

But there can be little doubt that this will continue. Oklahoma Gov. Mary Fallin (R) yesterday urged Obama to publicly express his feelings on the incident, and conservative Washington Post columnist Kathleen Parker offered this rather twisted perspective yesterday:


I find this hopelessly bizarre -- and the timing only adds insult to injury -- but if the last several days are any indication, these attitudes from the right will only grow more intense.

http://maddowblog.msnbc.com/_news/2013/08/26/20197642-the-right-seizes-on-christopher-lanes-killing?lite