The Dadeville Alabama mass shooting

 

 Alexis Dowdell had been anticipating her Sweet 16 birthday party for months, but she never expected to end her night holding her dying brother in her arms. He had pushed her out of the way of gunshots.  The party was held on the night of April 15 at Mahogany’s Masterpiece dance studio. Many attendees were students at the Dadeville High School. Festivities were interrupted around 10:30 p.m. by a hail of gunshots into the crowd of teenagers and young adults.

Witnesses told the police they heard screaming from the venue as the shots rang out. Family members of the victims told local senior pastor Ben Haynes that an argument at the party sparked the shooting.

Four people were confirmed dead. According to CNN, one victim was 17-year-old Shaunkivia “Keke” Smith, a high school senior who was poised to attend the University of Alabama in the fall. Another identified victim was 18-year-old Philstavious Dowdell, the older brother of the birthday girl. He was headed to play football at Alabama Jacksonville State University on scholarship. A father posted to Twitter that his son Marsiah Collins, 19, was also a victim and was supposed to be headed to LSU.

The fourth victim was 23-year-old Corbin Holston, whose mother told AL.com he was not a party attendee. She said he showed up at the event to make sure everyone was okay after he received a concerning call from his relative who was there.

Reports say 28 people sustained injuries related to the shooting. Fifteen of the injured are teenagers, four are stable, and five are in critical condition, according to a hospital spokesperson.

 

 Six suspects have now been arrested over the mass shooting at a “Sweet 16” birthday party that left four people dead and 32 injured in Dadeville, Alabama.

On Thursday, authorities announced that three more suspects were taken into custody including a 15-year-old who has not been named due to his age, Johnny Letron Brown, 20, and Willie George Brown Jr., 19.

The arrests bring the total number of people arrested over the shooting to six after the earlier arrests of Wilson LaMar Hill Jr, 20, and brothers Ty Reik McCullough, 17, and Travis McCullough, 16.

All six have been charged with four counts of reckless murder.

 

 

• Four deceased victims; over two dozen wounded . . . all black.
• Six alleged perpetrators arrested . . . all black. None were invited to party.
• Firearms used: pistols; no semi-auto rifles, especially no “AR” or “AK” platform

As best determined thus far, it was gang-bangers, or gang-banger wannabes, from out of town and uninvited that showed up when word spread about the party on social media. Someone dissed someone else, among the gang-bangers, the pistols came out, and they started shooting at each other.

Doesn’t fit the Disarm America Gun Grabber, or the BLM narrative any more than the ongoing carnage in cities like Chicago does.

 

 In America, while most violent crime is intra-racial (white on white or black on black, for example), in cases in which blacks and whites have violent interaction, blacks are overwhelmingly the perpetrators, not the victims.  The media routinely ignore these facts, since they don’t fit the narrative. In fact, the media have a general tendency not to even mention the race of perpetrators of crimes if those perpetrators are black. The people harmed most by this narrative failure are not white Americans, but black Americans, who are predominantly the victims of black crime.

 Black Americans are twice as likely as white Americans to die by firearm. Gun violence is the number one killer of all American children and Black children in particular represent a disproportionate share of youth gunshot victims. 

Understanding the facts about interracial crime presents different solutions than the lies we hear about the prevalence of white-on-black violence. Those solutions include encouraging fatherhood in the home. Only 37% of black children are living in a home with their biological parents; 72% of black fathers aren’t married to the mother of their children; and only 4.2% of black children grow up in areas with a poverty rate below 10% and over half of black fathers present in the community.

But such discussions never take place if we focus on a lie: the lie that black victims are disproportionately the victim of white evils. Those who promulgate that lie victimize all Americans, black and white.  This carnage is out of sight, out of mind for most of the country. If these children had been white, there would have been a national revolution. The media ignore the routine killings of black children just as assiduously as the race activists do and for the same reason: They were not mowed down by alleged lethal white hate. In fact, the lethal-white-hate narrative that has entranced Democratic politicians and the press for the last two weeks is false: Blacks commit hate crimes nationally at more than twice the rate of whites.

 

Those young, white and woke BLM supporters who filled the streets, masked, chanting and angry, in legitimate protests over the Minneapolis police killing of George Floyd by a white police officer aren't venting much public, organized outrage over Black children being slaughtered.  They shouted so loudly and passionately about defunding or abolishing the police, but aren't they also concerned about the lives of Black children being taken in street gang wars across the country?  It's possible they're just terrified and sad and don't know what to do without leaders to herd them. They might need a safe space, even though the children being shot to death don't have a safe space.

Or, could it just be that the protesters, so silent now, see no political advantage for the November elections in drawing attention to the Black children, some as young as 1, who are killed?  When it comes to the lives of Black children taken in street violence, what's clear is that the white woke world has no skin in the game.