Stand up Kaepernick and play some ball!

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The Colin Kaepernik ‘Take a Knee’ protest rages on in America but for an Englishman like me who enjoys American Football it’s hard to really back the players for keeping this going. I get that Black Americans still receive racism in American society by cops and the occasional police brutality but only 256 unarmed Black Americans were killed by cops in 2015 out of around 33,000 gun homicides in total across America in 2015. According to the U.S. Bureau of Justice Statistics, from 1980 to 2008, 84% of white homicide victims were killed by white offenders and 93% of black homicide victims were killed by black offenders. So white are more likely to be killed by non whites in America. Does that mean racism against whites by some groups? Two thirds of gun fatalities in America are actually suicides, most common in the states that have the most guns. Farmers and vets have surprisingly high suicide rates. There were 372 mass shootings in the US in 2015 alone, killing 475 people and wounding 1,870. The term mass shooting in America is defined as a single shooting incident which kills or injures four or more people, including the assailant. 50 toddlers a year shoot adults in America! But is Kaepernik right that cops are somehow targeting black Americans disproportionately in unlawful killings in America? Well blacks are being shot dead at a rate that's 2.5 times higher than whites, that’s a fact. But here’s the problem - nearly 50% of convicted murderers in the US are African Americans from just 13% of the population. The point is that if African Americans are more likely to be involved in violent crime - both as perpetrators and victims - then the higher rate of police shootings may not be surprising. But Kaepernik and the liberals don’t like that statistic and don’t want to talk about it as it highlights very high levels of black criminality. They just point to YouTube at the admittedly shocking looking videos of unarmed black Americans being killed by white cops all across the national media. But what they don’t show you is the unarmed white guys being shot by cops and, more importantly, the 80 or so of the 400 unarmed blacks shot being shot by, yes, black and Latino cops. One brave piece of research even said that black cops were more likely to shoot at black perps as white cops are terrified of the repercussions of shooting black men. What we do know is it’s a warzone in the ghetto and just a look can get you killed. Gangs are a far bigger problem to Black American than the cops. American cops have always been trigger happy in that chaos, for white perps, Latino perps and blacks. Kaepernik needs to play some ball next season and deal with it. What I do know is that very few extremely privileged professional American athletes are shot by the police and none have been killed that I know of.