Uh oh, blaming the victims alert ahead...
I think that's a gross generalization. I don't know much at all about those people and cannot make assumptions. They could be ISIS wannabe terrorists. They could be SJWs who have had it with white punks with guns wanting to enforce an apartheid, they could be lazy ACABers who are completely self-interested in their lives of criminal enterprise.
I don't know if they are part of a movement -- save I read the one shooting survivor was a medic for BLM demonstrations. Otherwise there's a skater boi and a dad. They are there in the streets with a kid with a gun. They could be there to loot or riot for all I know and not really give a rat's ass about politics or so-called movements (as if a given movement acts of one mind and one set of shared interests: you can't get liberals to focus on anything, always some animal rights or climate nut job has to chime in). I have no information to effectively make those assumptions the way you seem to be convinced.
And if someone has a criminal record and if that has any bearing, that's for the judicial system to decide. Someone having a criminal record doesn't automatically make them guilty of anything in the future.
That was pretty bizarre, IMO. I did see that.
To break polarization, I do wonder if a third perspective will make it better or worse. I hope better to break this binary, this-or-that-only loop. The superautomated mail sorting of people and who they are, what they are for, what their motivations are, and what they represent.
Now granted, I think a huge problem with American politics today is that people have become more single-issue voters -- whether that's guns, terrorism, God, gays, Blacks, etc. So fragmenting the political coalition landscape could lead to encouraging more of that, where people hold their noses at the offensive things a candidate does just because the politician supports their pet issue. And just look at Italy for a system where having more political parties isn't necessarily better.
But just two is a false binary.
It is unfortunate. But do you think it's deliberate on behalf of the people who feel such injustice?
Mentally, as a white dude, I can look at George Floyd or Breonna Taylor or Ahmaud Arbery or Jacob Blake and think, "What does that have to do with you?" I can make that separation. And while all black people aren't the same, are we to presume that every time someone like an Ahmaud Arbery gets killed they take it so personally ... so much that they no longer can concentrate and spend days in tears and grief over it. Are you saying that's faked? That when LeBron says he's so sick of it that he's just reacting that way for show?
There's a lot of people who experience that as real and personal and tragic. Even if you do not.
The fact is what you feel isn't what they feel. As much as I can try to empathize, I have no idea what it's like to be a black person who has carried the weight of an American legacy of racism to make them feel every rap with a billy club, every bullet fired by a cop at an unarmed boy, etc. Their grief is real. They aren't making that sh*t up for show or to gain sympathy points.
And as much as you can point at statistical plot charts, that is a rational approach. A logical argument. That doesn't fly for someone who feels a visceral, emotional reaction laden with a lot of cultural history and generational trauma. Does it make their experience of the same events any more or less correct or appropriate? Is it for us to judge if someone should be allowed to feel the way they do?