In regards to "old people are out of touch and cranky", that's no excuse to yell racial slurs at someone. Just because old people can be like that, and often are, it doesn't give them a free pass to do that shit anywhere. Most people know to be decent in public.
In case you're equating the responsibility of a fast food worker and an aged care worker - sure, you're gonna be a massive asshole and go to jail for beating elderly people under your care. But this was a Dunkin' Donuts, where a man was confronted with unprecedented racial abuse, not an aged care residence. The guy got racially denigrated in his own place of work by a dickhead, somewhere that a reasonable amount of people don't blow up and sling racial epithets at him. If he worked in aged care and some racist asshole under his care said something to him, the circumstances would be different - I'd still empathize with the guy for lashing out at racist abuse, but "talk shit, get hit" doesn't work when the person you're hitting relies on you and the power you have over them to live their lives.
They serve food and drink, so by all means they could be the ultimate arbiter of someone's date if circumstances dictated. But the responsibilities of being a Dunkin' Donuts manager and being an aged care worker are inherently different, and when you have a person provoking hostility for no other reason but to be hurtful and rude, people are going to react differently whether they're in a Dunkin' fucking Donuts or Shady Pines Residence for the Distinguished Senior.
Yeah, old people are racist, and that would seep out in places where the oldest and most frail of our population are placed to live out their final years. That doesn't mean that what the deceased did was at all excusable, and while the loss of life is unfortunate, there is a clear difference between "aged care nurse kills senior under their care in fit of rage" and "fast food manager reacts to racial abuse because someone got a burnt bear claw and watery coffee".
Also, halo's comment is true about Australia. In the late 2000's, there were a spate of drunken assaults at a popular pubbing spot in Sydney that killed people.
Two of the effects these killings had were pub lockout laws - which I don't entirely agree with, since they're state wide vs. the localised nature of the assaults - and the wider proliferation of information regarding the effects of blunt force trauma to the head.
There was an attempt to rebrand the term "king hit" to "coward punch" - which I disagree with again, not because it isn't a well-intentioned step to reduce violence, but because slang proliferates for its sound and popularity and the attempt to hamfist "coward punch" through the media was very noticeable and annoying - and people who punched on and killed people at King's Cross faced the full brunt of their charges as an example.
Like guys would punch people in the back of the head or just sucker punch them, and not only would the impact cause irreversible damage to their soft tissue, skull and brain, but the afflicted would fall over due to the force and hit their head again on the cement. It was the second impact that tended to kill them.
The bulk of these punishments were put into effect at the time, with the occasional news story to this day about a coward punch manslaughter where the perpetrator goes to jail. Otherwise, the King's Cross news all but vanished after this whole debacle happened. But yeah, the police cracked down hard on physical assault, especially in regards to public assaults between strangers in which one of them is killed by a strike. To this day, you can get jailtime for fucking up a stranger under the influence of alcohol, or due to disproportionate anger or what have you. That's how it is in Australia - I don't disagree with the increased criminality of violent assault in the wake of what I've just said, but I have my own beliefs on whether someone should be allowed to walk free in the face of an attack they were goaded into.
I empathize with this person, and I imagine that they didn't go out ready to throw hands or kill anybody. To walk free after this, I imagine they would have been significantly apologetic and traumatized over the whole ordeal. While my prior comment was made in anger, and I acknowledge that my viewpoint is informed by my own values and my own anger, my viewpoint is the same - I don't blame a person for lashing out against unnecessary racial abuse, and while the loss of human life is unfortunate on a basic human level, I do think that the deceased was in the wrong. If he hadn't used racial slurs multiple times, even after being given the option to back down and walk away - hell, even downgrade his abuse if he was dead set on venting at this manager - he doubled down on the racial slurs and was attacked in a fit of rage. This was completely avoidable, and I imagine no-one wanted things to end up this way.
What a garbage post. Assault is worse than throwing racial slurs at people. Want to know how I know this? One person died from assault and the other person is alive and well. One guy got a major slap on the wrist for assault and the other guy would likely have faced zero legal consequence if he wasn't assaulted.
How does this need to be explained to people?
The fact that it was an old guy he punchedales it even worse. You're punching someone who is obviously more vulnerable.
Two years of house arrest is a joke. Dude should be behind bars for a decade.
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just tell them all your base doesn't belong to us because we were getting stoned...they'll understand-Ken156