Posted on 06/13/2011 5:40:34 PM PDT by Altura Ct.
On the blustery morning of April 16, Hoang Nguyen and his wife, Yen, left their Dutchtown apartment to go grocery shopping, a Saturday routine. After bidding goodbye to their 25-year-old son, Kenny, the couple strolled east on Chippewa Street, crossing Spring and Giles avenues, then headed south on Grand Boulevard toward their market.
Hoang, a 72-year-old retired schoolteacher and avid painter, immigrated with his wife to St. Louis three-and-a-half years ago from their native Vietnam. The couple wanted to be closer to their daughter, Lan, who'd married an American and settled in south county. Kenny joined his parents six months later. By now the Nguyens were fixtures in Dutchtown's growing Vietnamese community and active parishioners at Resurrection of Our Lord. Recently Hoang had begun taking English classes at the International Institute of St. Louis nearby.
The Nguyens ticked off the items on their shopping list — fish, vegetables, noodles — filling their pushcart with grocery bags. Security-camera footage shows the diminutive husband embracing a friend at the cash register as his 59-year-old wife laughs nearby.
When the Nguyens left the grocer at about 10:30, they took a shortcut home through the alley that parallels Chippewa to the south. They'd been taking this route for months; though it made Yen nervous, the alley's gradual slope made it easier for her elderly husband to maneuver their pushcart.
Midway down the alley, Nguyen's cart stopped suddenly — seemingly for no reason. "It was like it was a sign saying we shouldn't go that way," Yen says in hindsight. When Hoang got the wheels moving again, they looked up and saw two young men and two young women approaching.
Moments later, one of the men charged.
Hoang stepped in front of his wife to protect her, she recalls. The man grabbed Hoang's jacket as he pleaded for mercy, shouting, "No, no, no!"
"Jason" considers himself a typical fourteen-year-old. "I got a good family background," he asserts by phone from his mother's house in St. Louis County, on a morning when he decided to skip school after oversleeping.
Jason, who asked RFT to use a pseudonym, recently moved to the county from south city, where he attended Fanning Middle School, near Grand Boulevard and not far from the Nguyen household. It was during his middle-school years that he was introduced to Knockout King.
"I always hit 'em hard," he says. "If you don't hit 'em hard, they don't go far."
Jason is talking about a ritual — those who participate call it a game — that has been adopted by young teens across the St. Louis area. Once an elusive phenomenon that flew under the local radar, the game exploded onto the collective consciousness with the media reports that followed the attack on Hoang Nguyen.
Along with a generalized sense of fear, there was befuddlement: What would drive a young person to sucker punch a defenseless stranger purely for sport?
"It was just a little game," says Jason. "We used to walk to where a lot of people be at and hit 'em. If one of the homeboys didn't knock him out, then the other would come. Whoever knock him out would be king."
The rules of Knockout King are straightforward, according to Jason and other former players interviewed for this article. A lead attacker is chosen from among a group of boys, usually young adolescents. Next a target is picked out. Then the attacker either charges the unsuspecting victim or motions for his attention. When the target turns or lifts his head, the attacker strikes. If the victim is felled by the punch, the group usually scatters. But if the target withstands the blow, other members of the group may follow up with their fists to finish the job. "Some people kick, but I ain't used to kick," says Jason. "I just punched."
Jason says he began playing when he was about eleven and that his group once knocked out five people in one night. Did victims ever lose consciousness? "Probably," he concedes. "I would think about it afterward, but then the thoughts go away, like it never happened."
For some victims of the assaults, the memories eventually fade away as well.
Others find it harder to forget.
Harder for 80-year-old Rafael Quiroz, who was hit on the back of his head last year while standing on a corner of Michigan Avenue in broad daylight. The blow knocked him to the ground and bloodied him. "Physically he's OK now, but mentally he won't go on walks like he used to," says Quiroz's granddaughter, Lucy Rosales.
Harder for John Stuhlman, 36, who was hit in the head last year while walking home from work, leaving him with dizzy spells that persisted for two weeks. "I freaked out and took off down the street, and he tried to chase me," recalls Stuhlman, who now avoids walking the streets late at night. "He was upset because I didn't fall down. He even said something like, "I hit you, and you fall down.'"
Harder for John Henry Muhrer, 35, who was assaulted by a group of kids in near Tower Grove Park a few years ago. The lead attacker distracted him by tossing a small bike in his path, then swooped in. "He hit me pretty hard," says Muhrer. "Never saw it coming."
More here:
http://www.riverfronttimes.com/2011-06-09/news/knockout-king-elex-murphy-hoang-nguyen-dutchtown-murder/
Aikido: dodge, throw, stomp, repeat.
Slavery was part of it but not even close to the reason. The real issue was centralized power or States power or local power.
It is actually easy to prove. Lincoln put off the emancipation proclamation and even then, made it effective only in Confederate states. The reason was he knew the soldiers did not see it as freeing slaves.
The fact is they called themselves “Union”, I don’t think I ever heard of them calling themselves the slavery abolishers.
Nor did the Confederates call themselves fighters for slavery. They were fighting for freedom from an all powerful federal government.
Your saying it is nonsense is itself nonsense.
If that story don’t give you the willies, I don’t know what will.
Open carry is legal here, so I may start wearing my Glock when I mow the lawn...
If you fear for your life and are not a willing participant and don’t see a way out without using force, you can do that.
Read up on disparity of force.
It’s not something I’d ever encourage someone to want to do, or be excited about doing. But when multiple assailants are facing you and you believe you are in imminent danger and fear dying or permanent bodily injury, you are able to defend yourself. If it’s 4 against one you are at a disadvantage and 4 of them can permanently injure or kill you, so use of the firearm against them is reasonable under disparity of force standards. It is even more warranted if you are old and they are young, if you are disabled, if you are smaller, if you are female and they are male.
“For this, slaves fought to be free?”
Not very many fought at all for any reason.
NB Forrest. You may have heard of him.
I refer you to post 42.
What the hell are words on paper going to do for you standing over 4 unarmed dead bodies with a pistol? A corpse can't really confess to planning to mug you now can it?
I have my doubts that Forrest said that. He was a great general but Robert E. Lee and Stonewall Jackson were probably the best.
An interesting fact which few people know is Lee and Grant both acquired slaves from their wives when they married. Robert E. Lee freed his. Grant kept his and didn’t free them when the war ended. He only did so with the 13th amendment. I guess you have heard of Lee and Grant.
Look, not wanting to argue here.
If you read before, once you are down one to one, if they are not armed with a gun, disparity of force is no longer in effect. Further you may not have killed the other three, or even had to shoot the others. You are trying to stop the threat so it doesn’t automatically mean they all are dead.
And I would hope you follow the advice given in my carry class, to always have a recording device running on your belt when you are out in public. I have a great digital recorder that I can plug into my USB port on my laptop and save the files.
I agree it is complicated.
However, slavery was at the root of every single conflict between the sections that eventually accumulated to the point where war broke out. Prior to the breaking of the Union, almost every other national organization split along sectional lines, specifically over the issue of slavery. The origin of the Southern Baptists. In the 1860 election, the Democrat Party, one of the last national institutions, broke over slavery.
I do not claim southerners (mostly) fought to protect slavery. I do claim those southerners, the Fire-Eaters, who schemed and plotted for a generation to cause secession had as their primary goal the extension and expansion of slavery. IMO, they were evil people.
However, once war was underway most southerners fought primarily to defend their homes, quite understandably. I cannot fault them for this. I blame the evil dudes in the previous paragraph.
Most Union men, throughout the war, fought primarily to preserve the Union. A relatively few, mostly from New England, fought intentionally to destroy slavery.
My original post was with regard to those who claim “slavery had nothing to do with the war.” I think they’re full of cr*p. I did not say slavery was the primary issue at stake, especially in the early part of the war, much less the issue for which most men on either side consciously fought. Do you disagree?
Well if I shoot three, wouldn't I just be better off killing the fourth? I'm serious here. I think you'd be even worse off with Tyrone taking the stand talking about how you shot his best friends "the aspiring athletes, honor students who were just on their way to his Auntie's house" when you started blasting.
And I would hope you follow the advice given in my carry class, to always have a recording device running on your belt when you are out in public.
What about two-party consent states for audio recording? I think I would move to Vermont before I started carrying a Batman utility belt (cellphone,pistol, recorder) anyway.
It’s not racism it’s probability, actuarial tables, statistics. Facts are stubborn things.
What kind of value system exists here?
^^^^^^^^^^^^^^^^^^^^^^^^^^^^^
Clockwork Orange values.
Grant only ever owned one slave personally. He freed him in 1859, at a time when he could probably have sold him for $400+, possibly quite a bit more, at a time when this was a year’s average income in the USA, and when Grant was desparately in need of money. Perhaps $30,000 in today’s terms.
Julia Grant had several slaves to whom she may or may not have held title. Some contend her father retained legal ownership and merely directed them to work for her. The records aren’t clear.
What is clear is that the 13th Amendment didn’t free them. They were freed by Missouri state action on January 1, 1865 almost a year before the 13th was declared ratified on December 18. The 13th freed slaves only in KY (about 50k, if I remember right) and <200 in DE. All other slaves in Union states had been previously freed by state action.
I make no claim Grant was ever a strong anti-slavery man, he himself said he never had been. Which to my mind just makes his walking away from a year’s income to free a man even more admirable.
Meanwhile, Lee, who had custody if not exactly ownership of slaves freed in his father-in-law’s will in 1857, kept them, arguably in conflict with the terms of the will, in slavery for more than five years. When several ran away, he had them tracked down, dragged back and flogged, while he stood by and personally supervised.
http://radgeek.com/gt/2005/01/03/robert-e-lee-owned-slaves-and-defended-slavery/
His often vaunted opposition to slavery was along the lines of “It’s an evil, but a necessary evil, which may take thousands of years to pass away, in God’s good time.” This philosophical opinion was, of course, a great comfort to the enslaved and abused.
He was strongly opposed to abolition. This combination sounds, to a reasonable person, more like being in favor of slavery than against it, much like the politicians who are personally opposed to abortion but won’t consider doing anything at all to rein it in.
Lee: “Still I fear he (the abolitionist) will persevere in his evil Course. Is it not strange that the descendants of those pilgrim fathers who Crossed the Atlantic to preserve their own freedom of opinion, have always proved themselves intolerant of the Spiritual liberty of others?
I find it truly amazing that Lee is here concerned about the “spiritual liberty” of the slaveowner, rather than the spiritual and physical liberty of the slave. How exactly parallel to the “pro-choice” person today who says, “If you’re opposed to abortion, don’t get one. But don’t force your opinion on others.”
Yes, some states have two party consent. But there may be exceptions for recording in public places and there may be some case law that allows such evidence in self defense cases.
Here’s some more info on whether Julia and therefore US Grant ever held legal title to “her” slaves.
http://www.yandtblog.com/?p=298
One interesting point. Apparently all the Dent family slaves, including those “belonging” to Julia, freed themselves by walking away sometime during or before 1864. There was no doubt a lot of this “informal emancipation” during the latter war years. The government and military were less than enthusiastic about enforcing laws against runaway slaves, so they tended in practice to become dead letters.
So your argument is bolstered by the fact that neither Lee nor Sherman fought for slavery? Seems to me that you are arguing against yourself.
Secession has it’s root in the 10th amendment and nullification. That’s why Calhoun fought for so long to preserve the idea of the union as a union of states, not of men, such that each state had the power to nullify federal statutes that were not supported by the constitution.
Arguing that the root was slavery doesn’t get at the real root, the constitution. The argument was over a federal or a unitary system, a la that of France. The union wanted a unitary system like in France, while the south wanted a federation of states together. Both believed that the constitution supported them and their cause.
The union did win, but at what cost? They were not the same as they were before, and neither was the south.
These are largely racial attacks by young people driven half-mad by the relentless whining about Black victimization. Striking an unsuspecting white, Asian or Latino is much easier than studying, working or otherwise improving yourself. The underclass is riddled with pathological parasites. What a drain on society!
"September 6, 2005 Missouri Note: Effective immediately, Governor Perry has issued a proclamation that allows persons with concealed handgun licenses from Missouri to legally carry in Texas. Missouri residents will be required to follow Texas law while carrying in this state. This has the effect of reciprocity between Texas and Missouri since Missouri law recognizes valid licenses issued from other states including Texas."
So if I go to Missouri with my TX CHL and I'm carrying a concealed weapon, I have to obey MO laws not TX laws.
Also my FL permit is a Concealed Weapons Permit, therefore, in FL I can carry a deadly weapon, not just a handgun, defined by the FL laws. TX only allows for concealed handgun only, therefore anyone with a FL permit can only carry a concealed handgun in TX.
I hope this helps clarify reciprocity.
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