February 21, 2013

Graphic murders... and the graphics they inspire.

The Pistorius case doesn't seem the least bit complicated, but check out the complexity of the graphics the newspapers act like we need to comprehend the miserable scene:



AND: Another article — with another graphic — has the headline: "Image shows dark side of Oscar Pistorius, who keeps a pistol within arm's reach of bed and applied for an arsenal of gun licenses only weeks before the shooting death of Reeva Steenkamp." The graphic is a photograph that labels these items: TV remote, AC remote, designer watch, set of keys, handgun. That's a dark side?! Seems to me it's a pretty normal set of items. The message is: Be hysterical on the topic of guns, because somebody is a murderer. How about the detail of the bloody cricket bat? Seems like he was killing her with or without a gun, so this is a particularly gratuitous effort provoking irrationality about guns.

30 comments:

F said...

Clearly that diagram is wrong -- she has her legs crossed and he has feet. Wrong crime scene.

peacelovewoodstock said...

This case cries out for a good Taiwanese animation.

This is not it: http://tinyurl.com/abdwddv

TML said...

Yeah, wasn't he legless when he approached the door?

Eric the Fruit Bat said...

They left out the part where she came in through the bathroom window.

edutcher said...

It's like "The Running Man" home game.

madAsHell said...

Are we to conclude that he not only shot through the door, but he shot her in the back as well?

MayBee said...

So he was so afraid of burglars he shot without looking into the tiny toilet area, but he left his balcony door open?

That doesn't make sense.
Also, he was afraid there was someone in his bathroom and he didn't check the well-being of his girlfriend?
What if someone had come in the balcony door to rape poor Reeva? He didn't check!

Shouting Thomas said...

Have the Japanese guys who produce the funny, clunky animations about news events covered this one?

Sorun said...

The first graphic I saw (probably in Daily Mail) was him carrying her down the stairs after he blungeoned her with a cricket bat. She then escaped into a downstairs bathroom where he shot her through the door.

Completely damning, but quite different than this graphic. So who's right? DM or the NY Post?

bagoh20 said...

17 minutes between shot 1 and the other three. Oh my. That's premeditated. His defense is shot to hell.

Anonymous said...

Too bad it wasn't a leftist in that bathroom. Or a few of them.

Imagine if he could have wiped out the head of Planned Parenthood, Rahm Emmanuel, and David Gregory. "By accident", of course.

Sigh.

@Shouting Thomas:

Those were Taiwainese, not Japanese. You are clearly racist and must be re-educated at an Obama camp.

Seig Heil, Mein Obama!

Anonymous said...

p.s. this is Sotuh-friggin'-Africa.

His lawyers were too dumb to pin this on a darkie? For crying out loud, those savages rape and murder everywhere, for no reason. The entire country's a wreck because of them.

just find one of Obama's sons. Heck, the darkie committed some crime....

SJ said...

WTF? One shot, followed by three more shots 17 minutes later?

What happened in between those two events?

Separate from the question of whether Pistorius thought he was shooting at an intruder or thought he was shooting at his girlfriend...

If the person that he intended to shoot at did not die rapidly, why did he wait 17 minutes to shoot again? If dead, why shoot again, at a later time?

Anonymous said...

The whole alibi is a crock of course.

On the other hand, looking at the evidence before trial, you'd a thought that OJ was guilty as well. Weren't we surprised to fnd it was a one armed man that did it?

Or am I conflating three pieces of fiction.

Jane the Actuary said...

Pistorius claims he was legless but the prosecution says he had his legs on - part of the premeditation. Strange point to get hung up on, though.

This is all silly, though -- I mean, it just defies belief to imagine that he shot at an intruder hiding in the toilet, through the door, and at the same time, he completely forgot about the fact that his girlfriend could have been in the bathroom, and he was so panicked that he didn't hear her and she didn't hear him . . .

no -- guilty as sin. Sorry, dude -- and, really, top atheletes, who really have to have top levels of focus, ought to have enough impulse control not to do things like this.

SJ said...

@whores,

your screed sounds like demented racism.

Except for one small detail: by levels of violence/murder reported by Police, South Africa is much worse than the United States.

I don't know the racial makeup of crimes in South Africa. However, in the United States, most victims of crime are Black, and live in dense urban areas.

Criminals in the U.S. are also disproportionately Black, also. (At least, among those who commit crimes and have been identified...)

I think Blacks who live in rural areas in the U.S. are victims of crime less often whites who live in rural areas in the U.S. I don't have good data on which race commits crime more often in rural areas...

This last detail kind of gives the lie to a purely-racial explanation.

Hagar said...

I think we should be a bit careful about believing any of this, at least until it shakes out some more at the trial.

Remember the Zimmermann case? It turned out it went down a bit different than first reported.

How did the bat get bloody, but Steenkamp had no marks on her?

I do not keep firearms close to my bed because I want to be sure I am fully awake before I start shooting. And I don't drink much, nor do I take odd "supplements," but I stiil have some fairly strange dreams at times.

Sam L. said...

"...so this is a particularly gratuitous effort provoking irrationality about guns."

It's what they do.

Biff said...

For a whole host of "particularly gratuitous effort[s] provoking irrationality about guns," a great source of it is in British television dramas over the last twenty years or so. Via Netflix and Amazon Prime Streaming, I've become a fan of a few British shows for guilty pleasure, since they tend towards 90 minute episodes, and therefore put a little more effort into plotting and character development than their US counterparts.

I'm continually amazed at the number of times that otherwise strong, decent characters in these shows freeze or go belly up the moment that a criminal acts aggressively. It feels so out of character. On those rare occasions when a character does try to intervene or challenge a criminal, they are universally lectured about the foolishness of their actions by their neighbors and the police afterwards (assuming they survived the encounter). The clear message is that the proper response to any crime is to stand by, hunker down, and wait for the prompt, efficient response by the firm, yet gentle, authorities.

Don't even get me started with how anyone with a military background is portrayed as a PTSD sufferer or a preposterously stuffy caricature of dated Victorian values, or how anyone in a rural area who hunts quail is treated as either a doddering fool or a time bomb waiting to explode. Anytime someone pulls their grandfather's shotgun from 1910 out of the closet to chase some rabbits, you'd think they had pulled the pin on a live grenade in a scholbus.

It's obvious how England's bien pensants expect their subjects to behave. Absurd.

Methadras said...

Right, because applying for an arsenal of weapons clearly points that he wanted to kill her with just the 9mm. Fucking idiots.

Methadras said...

Shouting Thomas said...

Have the Japanese guys who produce the funny, clunky animations about news events covered this one?


I think those are chinks that do that, not the japs. Although the slanty eyes and sloped heads will fool anyone.

Methadras said...

SJ said...

WTF? One shot, followed by three more shots 17 minutes later?

What happened in between those two events?

Separate from the question of whether Pistorius thought he was shooting at an intruder or thought he was shooting at his girlfriend...

If the person that he intended to shoot at did not die rapidly, why did he wait 17 minutes to shoot again? If dead, why shoot again, at a later time?


How can one possibly surmise the gap in shooting. Even the neighbor bears a 1 hour gap between when he thinks there was arguing, but can't state the nature of what the argument is about. However if you look at the timeline of 2 and 3am, you can probably fashion that it wasn't arguing but yelling when he realized that he shot his girlfriend on accident and panic ensued which may have caused the vocal commotion that would and could have easily been mistaken as arguing.

traditionalguy said...

The final mitigating factor may be that Pist-off-orius once saw a hoodie on someone in the neighborhood.

And how many times has he had to tell his fiance to put the damn lid down on the commode so he doesn't fall in stumps first?

Anonymous said...

This is SOUTH AFRICA, where something like 50 people are murdered every day! Hard to imagine that having a gun shows one's dark side.

MayBee said...

He shot her in the hip first. He would have heard her scream from inside the toilet roomat that point.. But he didn't stop shooting.

MayBee said...

It's also been reported her iPad was on, and on the floor. That would have provided some light and a clue the girlfriend was awake.

Charlotte C said...

The investigating officer has just been taken off the case. Seems he's been indicted on seven charges of attempted murder, and being drunk on duty...

Rosalyn C. said...

It's hard to imagine that his testimony that he was not wearing his prosthetics wouldn't be refuted by the angle of entry of the wounds.

SJ said...

@Methedras,

I'm assuming that the timing between the gunshots was deduced from testimony given by the neighbors.

Possibly the neighbors that also heard the argument.

However, all this depends on the newspapers giving a fairly-accurate report of what they have been told by Police. And the Police not lying to the papers about what they found. (And the neighbors/Pistorius not lying to Police.)

Isn't detective work fun?

Charlotte C said...

Possibly the neighbors that also heard the argument
Latest reports have the neighbour, who heard shouting, as living 600 metres away from Pistorius.