Violence marred the annual Halloween celebration in San Francisco's Castro district Tuesday when seven people were shot in the 2200 block of Market Street just as the event was drawing to an end, police said.
The shooting occurred near Sullivan's Funeral Chapel about a block away from the main stage of the party that drew thousands of revelers, police said.
Police heard the shots and ran toward 2255 Market to find two women and five men on the ground, two with life-threatening injuries. One suffered a gunshot to the head. The victims were transported to San Francisco General Hospital. The other five suffered nonlife-threatening injuries. Police also said they received reports of at least one stabbing and one report of a possible sexual assault.
Were they anti-gay attacks, perhaps? Not a word about it.
We are given only the vaguest possible clues. Nothing about the shooters -- and only second hand information that "the victims" were "young":
"This is tragic," [San Francisco Supervisor] Dufty said. "I'm disappointed. All along we've been concerned about an increase in the climate of violence, especially among juveniles." He said his information was that all the victims were young.
Dufty had said the objective of Castro leaders was to encourage people to visit the district, but to end their nights at bars or clubs in their hometowns or in other San Francisco neighborhoods. By his own estimation, only 10 percent of those at the Halloween party are from the neighborhood.
"There's not a lot of support for this annual even in the community," Dufty said. "And now this really begs the question, who are we doing this for?"
I'm baffled.
In another account, two people were being questioned, while only "some" of the victims were described as "innocent":
Two people were being questioned early Wednesday in the shooting, though it was not immediately clear if they were suspects or witnesses, said police spokesman Sgt. Neville Gittens. No arrests had been made, and the motive was unknown, he said.
[...]
Two people were taken to San Francisco General Hospital with life-threatening injuries, including one with a gunshot wound to the head, Gittens said. Five others were found at the scene with non-life-threatening injuries, and at least two more possible victims later were identified, he said.
"We've had a couple of people going into hospitals on their own, and we need to verify whether they were victims of that shooting," he said early Wednesday.
At least some of the victims were innocent bystanders, according to witnesses.
The plot thickens. One of my problems is that I just want to know what happened, and it often feels like there's a vast conspiracy not to tell me.
This makes me engage in speculation about the meaning of statements like this:
Officials and members of the gay community also said the party had begun attracting gay bashers, and many gays and lesbians stopped coming.
So, considering that the Castro is one of the world's largest and most famous "gayborhoods," were the shooters gay bashers or were they not?
In an identity politics driven world, whether they were gay bashers depends on a lot of factors. At minimum, these factors would include:
the sexual preference of the victims;
the sexual preference of the shooters.
I notice the references to other hometowns and "other San Francisco neighborhoods," so I'm wondering to what extent that might be relevant.
But there's no hard information on the hometowns or the neighborhoods of the victims, much less the shooters, so there's not much to go on. In fact there's nothing. Apparently no one in a crowd of thousands saw the shooter empty his gun. (Or, at least, no reporters have asked any eyewitnesses what they saw -- and that's despite the unavoidable relevance of identity politics to the shooting of ten people in a gay neighborhood.)
However, based on my experience with identity politics, I'm tempted to assume -- even without any evidence -- that the victims probably weren't gay, and that the shooter definitely wasn't. Normally, I wouldn't be making any such assumptions, but I find myself thinking that if a gay man had gone off his rocker and emptied his gun into the crowd as the witness alleged, that fact would have been known, discovered, and reported, and by now there'd be a chorus of blame. While a gay shooter would be far more blameworthy than a non-gay shooter from "other" neighborhoods (the reasons why are very complicated and beyond this post), the blame would not be limited to the shooter. Rather, I suspect there'd be outrage over the existence of gay gun owners, who'd be vilified collectively as self-loathing hypocritical Republicans who'd created the climate that led to the shooting.
In any case, we are all to blame for tolerating guns.
The altercation involved two groups of young people, ages 15 to 25, officials said. At least one of the groups was from San Francisco, police said.
After someone threw a bottle, hitting someone in the other group, a person in the second group opened fire, shooting as many as nine times, police said.
San Francisco police believe at least one gang was involved in the shooting, which is being investigated by the department's gang task force.
Nine people were shot, but police said only two were taken by ambulance to San Francisco General Hospital: a woman whose head was grazed by a bullet and a second victim who was hit in the knee.
Several others were treated at the scene, including a woman who was not shot but injured when she was trampled by the crowd.
Supervisor Bevan Dufty, whose district includes the Castro neighborhood, said two additional shooting victims took themselves to Kaiser Hospital in South San Francisco and another brought himself to General Hospital for treatment.
He described the victims, including the one who was trampled, as eight men and two women, all in their teens or early 20s. All are expected to recover, he said.
Commenter Rhodium Heart speculates that the failure to mention race is evidence that the troublemakers were not white. I don't know about that, but I do think there's a double standard with hate crime. Had the victims been gay, and the shooter white, I think it's more likely that a hate crime would have been charged. It makes no sense to say that only white people hate homosexuals, but then, identity politics is another form of nonsense upon stilts.
posted by Eric on 11.01.06 at 10:19 AM
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Comments
Way too often the mainstream media thinks that its job is too obscure and prevent the real facts from coming to light.
For example, if a spokesperson for the police, repeated in the media, that an incident is "not terrorism related," that usually means the opposite. It usually ends up meaning that the shooter was Muslim, most likely an Arab or North African migrant, and it was a little free lance jihad activity.
Likewise, when the media absolutely refuses to give any identifying details of the physical appearance of the perpetrator -- especially when the perp is at large -- that usually means that the shooter was African-American. Caucasian criminals we get the details in depth.
Us racist yay-hoo newspaper readers apparently can't handle the truth that sometimes a black man is a criminal and, on very rare but still detectable occasions, a Muslim in the USA is a free lance terrorist.
I just wish the media would go back to reporting the facts. Might help them survive in the electronic world.
RH, if that's true, what if the victims had been gay and the shooter white? Would the presence of a white shooter make it more likely that this would be seen as a hate crime? Is there some unwritten rule that only whites are capable of hating homosexuals?
Poring over all the quotes you sited Eric, I was steadily coming to the conclusion that lacking the absolute accusation of a hate crime combined with the lack of the race of the shooters, it was pretty clear that it probably WAS a hate crime commited by some minority or other.
It seems if you want to know what really happened in a news story, all you have to do is look at what they AREN'T saying.
Mick · November 1, 2006 09:16 PM
It's not that the media will use the word "white" when the perp is white. It's that we get all sorts of physical description adjectives. Tall short young old middle-aged blonde dark-haired bald thin overweight muscular tattooed mustachioed bearded unkempt "looks like John Mark Karr" whatever. We get a picture from the narrative. When we don't, that usually means something.
Rhodium Heart · November 1, 2006 11:59 PM
Responding to Eric's question "Is there some unwritten rule that only whites are capable of hating homosexuals?"
To the mainstream media, the answer is unequivocally: YES. Have you ever read a mainstream media paper or hear a broadcast news station talk about how poorly gay marriage polls among African-Americans? But it does! Or how little stink is made of the fact that homosexuality is a capital crime in the (non-Israel) Middle East?
A hate crime is not a hate crime unless the perp is a white male. Race, sex or sexual proclivities of the victim are irrelevant. Only the white-maleness of the perp.
Rhodium Heart · November 2, 2006 12:04 AM
"Have you ever read a mainstream media paper or hear a broadcast news station talk about how poorly gay marriage polls among African-Americans?"
To add to this, I read an article about this same type of poll not too long ago with the author stating that the reasons were "religious in nature and not due to bigotry". Yet if whites sited religious reasons for their opinions they were double lambasted. Heck, Im not sure but I may have seen that article here. Did you post about that before Eric?
Mick · November 2, 2006 08:30 PM
I live in southwest Houston. Whenever some heinous crime occurs here, on the news we hear "anyone with a hint of who did this contact this number", but we don't hear physical descriptions which might help us tip them off.
The Anti-Idiotarian Rottweiler
Don?t bang your head!
Way too often the mainstream media thinks that its job is too obscure and prevent the real facts from coming to light.
For example, if a spokesperson for the police, repeated in the media, that an incident is "not terrorism related," that usually means the opposite. It usually ends up meaning that the shooter was Muslim, most likely an Arab or North African migrant, and it was a little free lance jihad activity.
Likewise, when the media absolutely refuses to give any identifying details of the physical appearance of the perpetrator -- especially when the perp is at large -- that usually means that the shooter was African-American. Caucasian criminals we get the details in depth.
Us racist yay-hoo newspaper readers apparently can't handle the truth that sometimes a black man is a criminal and, on very rare but still detectable occasions, a Muslim in the USA is a free lance terrorist.
I just wish the media would go back to reporting the facts. Might help them survive in the electronic world.