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The story in question claims that a 60-year-old woman in an undisclosed location was walking home when a group of seven teens approached her before one hit her.

The woman, which the article claims is Beulah Montgomery, then grabbed her gun from her purse and shot in the direction where the teens were fleeing. Two of them were hit and later died a result of the gunshot wounds, the story claims.

Montgomery says that she always carries a gun after getting mugged before. ”Its a shame you can’t walk through your own neighborhood where you are supposed to feel safe without being assaulted and mistreated,” she said. “I purchased the gun hoping I would never have to use it, but I’m glad to still be in the land of the living.”

There’s several elements that point to this story being a fake. The original source, awfbase.com, appears to be a site and forum where many stories are shared, some of which appear to be legitimate or semi-legitimate. But there is a lack of any location in this story. There is no street, city, or state listed as to where the purported incident took place.

Second, the person who posted the story on the site is listed as “guy.” Not exactly reassuring.

Third, besides awfbase.com, the story has only appeared on forums and on alternative news sites that mostly aggregate stories–some of which are false.

No legitimate media entities have covered this story. With knockout game stories getting such heavy coverage over the past few weeks, a story of this magnitude would be likely be splashed across mainstream media.

So it appears the story is fake until further notice.

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The story first appeared on the 18th of this month on the site AFWBase.com”. The site appears to be a small news blog with no author names, no citations and very limited specific information on most of its “stories”. The author of the story is listed a “Guy”. No location, date, or responding law enforcement agencies are listed. The domain name uses a private registration service that hides the identity of the domain name owner. (That from "GunsSaveLives.net") http://gunssavelives.net/blog/report-of-60-year-old-woman-shooting-2-k
nockout-game-players-seems-to-be-a-hoax/#]

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Knockout Game Turns Deadly
FALSE

In November 2013, as news outlets were reporting the supposed spread of knockout game incidents in the U.S. (a "game" in which youngsters sucker-punch random strangers and attempt to knock them unconscious), a purported news story began circulating on the Internet positing that a 60-year-old woman named Beulah Montgomery shot and killed two teenagers who were attempting to make her a victim of their knockout game efforts.

Although there has been at least one legitimate recent news account of a would-be knockout game victim (non-fatally) shooting his attacker, the story about Beulah Montgomery appears to be a completely fabricated one. The article as presented includes no details of date or location or any other verifiable information (outside of the name 'Beulah Montgomery'), and the alleged shooting incident has not been reported on by any standard news outlet — even though knockout game stories have been garnering a good deal of prominent coverage in the mainstream media. This account is the exclusive province of blogs, forums, social media postings, and alternative news sites, all offering the same unsourced, detail-free story that has gone completely unmentioned by mainstream news sources, a reliable indicator that the whole thing is a hoax. http://www.snopes.com/politics/crime/montgomery.asp#R8mBjZX2cMvPfpuj.9
9

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….there is no hard data showing that it's a trend.

An important clarification: the game definitely exists, and has been around for at least a couple of years. I'm not claiming the game doesn't exist. But the idea that it's reached epidemic levels, or that it's only being played by young black people, is a fallacy. As Alan Noble writes, "Analyzing data is not as simple as watching some YouTube videos and Googling 'knockout game.'"

The stories are chilling–conjuring a world of senseless, alien violence as incomprehensible as it is reprehensible. Rightfully, we are mortified and outraged and we fear for a country in which A Clockwork Orange ultra-violence finds life in our streets. The analysis of many pundits is startling: these attacks are racially motivated hate crimes against whites by black youths and the media and our politicians refuse to identify these racist motives out of political correctness.

What goes mostly unspoken in these commentaries on the “knockout game” is the idea that these assaults are racially motivated and so white people should be wary of groups of black men. Some take this further and blame the “liberal media” for the violence, since the media allegedly hid the “truth” about the race of the criminals. If only the media would tell us when black people attack white people, we’d know to not trust them and we’d be safe, the logic goes.

But are these pundits correct? Are these crimes committed by roaming packs of black “savages” against white people?

Here’s the fascinating thing about this “spreading” trend: nobody seems to have any evidence that it’s spreading, or that it’s racially motivated, or that black youths are the ones typically responsible, or that whites are typically targeted. This hasn’t stopped Mark Steyn, Thomas Sowell, and Matt Walsh from describing this specifically as a crime committed by blacks against whites, or Alec Torres at NRO from say it is “evidently increasing [in] popularity.” Most sources claim that it is spreading, and a number of sources claim that it is racially motivated. But how do they know? Where are they getting their data from?

These “reports” are actually newspaper reports, not police reports, so they don’t give us a reliable picture. Yet, Torres is confident enough to conclude: “Most of the victims have been whites and Asians, and attackers tend to target Jews, immigrants, and the elderly in particular. Most of the attackers have been African American.”

Strangely, Torres quotes multiple times from " Knockout King: Kids call it a game. Academics call it a bogus trend. Cops call it murder" ( http://www.riverfronttimes.com/2011-06-09/news/knockout-king-elex-murp
hy-hoang-nguyen-dutchtown-murder/), which article explains quite clearly why sweeping claims about rising incidences of the “knockout game” and the racial identities of the perpetrators and victims are bogus.

Given that 4.3 million violent attacks were reported by U.S. citizens in 2009, according to the National Crime Victimization Survey, Males [a research fellow at the nonprofit Center on Juvenile and Criminal Justice] says reporters should know better than to highlight a handful of random attacks by kids and call it journalism. It’s the same thing as plucking a few instances of attackers with Jewish surnames who beat up non-Jews and declaring it a “troubling new trend,” he argues.

Jason, from St. Louis County, says two white friends were part of his punch-out crew. One Dutchtown woman, agreeing to speak on the condition that her name not be published, says police caught her son, who is white, playing Knockout King. "It’s not a black thing, it’s a kid thing,” the woman says. “It’s teenage kids trying to be cool. My son’s as white as can be."

What we don’t have evidence for is the claim that this “game” is becoming increasingly popular or that it is part of a larger problem of black mob violence which the media is ignoring. To support such absurd claims we need to turn elsewhere, away from the experts and the data, to a man who has made a name for himself peddling a book which purports to show that a covert race war is being waged by blacks against whites all across the country, and the knockout game is just one weapon in their arsenal. http://www.patheos.com/blogs/christandpopculture/2013/11/the-knockout-
game-myth-and-its-racist-roots/]

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If you look for every example of crimes committed by black people in every American city over the last three to five years, you’ll find enough examples to make it sound like a lot of crime, because America is a violent country with a lot of crime, a lot of poverty and a lot of impoverished minority neighborhoods located conveniently close to much wealthier white neighborhoods (and business districts where everything is also owned by white people).

But this epidemic of racial crime isn’t an epidemic. It’s barely a blip. According to the FBI, there were 575 crimes motivated by anti-white bias in 2010, nationwide ( http://www.fbi.gov/about-us/cjis/ucr/hate-crime/2010/tables/table-1-in
cidents-offenses-victims-and-known-offenders-by-bias-motivation-2010.xls). There were 545 anti-white crimes in 2009 ( http://www2.fbi.gov/ucr/hc2009/data/table_01.html) and 716 in 2008 ( http://www2.fbi.gov/ucr/hc2009/data/table_01.html) [That's out of 4.3 million violent attacks in 2009, remember]. There were more than 2,000 crimes motivated by anti-black bias in each one of those years. Of course, the book insinuates that all black-on-white crime is racially motivated, but even by that standard things are looking pretty rosy in America right now.

The violent crime rate has been plummeting since its peak in the early 1990s, which now looks like the crest of one of America’s periodic (and slightly mysterious) waves of violent crime. (In the long term, the homicide rate has been steadily falling for hundreds of years ( http://blogs.berkeley.edu/2010/06/16/a-crime-puzzle-violent-crime-decl
ines-in-america/). We are genuinely much more civilized now than we used to be.) Back when this country actually had race riots, and not just large gangs of kids briefly fighting and scaring white people on summer nights, there were … actual race riots, motivated by racial tensions. It’s absurd to imagine a secret pandemic of black-on-white violence motivated by anti-white racism that the media and all of our law enforcement agencies conspire to keep secret for reasons of political correctness. There would have to be hundreds upon hundreds of thousands of crimes that no one is reporting in order for the current violent crime rate to come close to matching what it was a generation ago. There can’t be an epidemic of black crime that coincides with the least amount of total crime in America since the 1960s.

The point, of course, isn’t to make an argument supported by statistics. It’s to marshal all available anecdotal data to support the paranoid white conservatives’ gut feeling that this country is on the brink of Charlie Manson’s Helter Skelter. http://www.salon.com/2012/08/13/why_conservatives_obsess_over_flash_mo
bs_and_race_riots/]

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At the epicenter of this narrative is Colin Flaherty, a writer for WorldNetDaily who probably has a Google alert set up for "black suspect." He's made it his life's work to report any single crime perpetrated by a black person in the U.S. against a white person. In a recent blog post, he lists as evidence six separate crimes in Philadelphia over the course of two years, which share nothing in similarity except for the fact that they involved black people.

Imagine if another national "journalist" started doing the same for, say, any crime committed in Alabama, or any arson charge in the country. People would start to think Alabama was going through a crime epidemic, or that arson was becoming all the rage with criminals. That would be ridiculous, because it's ridiculous to assume that a few unrelated counts of arson make arson an epidemic. But when you inject race into the equation, it conveniently aligns with the assumptions of people who happen to be racist. That's the sort of twisted logic that justifies why more than half of the U.S. prison population is made up by black and Hispanic people, even though they comprise a quarter of the total population.

Crime happens to every type of person, and is perpetrated by every type of person. What makes the false narrative of the knockout game—or any "black mob violence" story—crop up every year is the fact that some people will always believe the color of someone's skin predisposes him to commit a crime. When a few YouTube videos are able to convince terrified white folks that young black people are dangerous, they may as well assume that all cats can play the keyboard. http://www.slate.com/blogs/weigel/2013/11/25/why_the_knockout_game_tre
nd_is_a_myth.html]

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Before almost anyone else was talking about the “knockout game,” Colin Flaherty was reporting on it and other incidences of what he calls “black mob violence” for WorldNetDaily, the notoriously deceptive, far-right news and opinions site. His schtick is simple: every time he finds a report of black “mob” violence or black on white violence, he writes about it.

His articles purporting to prove this epidemic of black racial violence are incredibly, basically absurd. And that absurdity, the lengths Flaherty is willing to go to support his assertion about the secret race war can really only be interpreted as bigotry. Flaherty deceives his readers to sell his book, peddling the classic white fear of the savage, violent, black man, mixed in with a little contemporary rhetoric about how the “liberal,” politically correct media is covering up for black thugs. This narrative fits nicely into the larger perception that Obama has created a nation of entitled, lazy, and violent blacks.

The most basic flaw in his argument is that his entire project is one big stacked evidence fallacy. If you only cite examples of black crime, of course you’ll conclude that there’s a national racial crime wave! Using that “logic” I can prove that any group is waging a secret race war (it is interesting to note that Robert Spencer of JihadWatch uses a very similar method to argue that Muslims are dangerous). On top of that egregious error, Flaherty entirely ignores all other characteristics of the crimes: social class, education, setting; nothing else matters except race to him. Any respectable criminologist would scoff at such a methodology, not because they want to be politically correct, but because it’s a gross reduction of the factors that actually contribute to crime.

Flaherty regularly stacks and exaggerates the evidence (see *, **, and ***, below).

Colin Flaherty and his project have been cited repeatedly to support the claim that the “knockout game” is really about racial violence against whites. He’s been cited to this end not just in far-right publications like WND, or FrontPageMag, but in the National Review Online, one of the most respected conservative journals, and one that I like to recommend. His conspiracy is extremely racist, as Flaherty reduces everything down to the color of the criminal’s skin, regardless of the facts. He consistently distorts the truth in order to portray black people as the savage, animalistic, and Other.

We need to be honest and accurate about these crimes, neither sharing the hysteria and racial fear-mongering nor trivializing the reality of these crimes. This isn’t easy to balance. We have the right to be concerned about random violence and the authorities have the responsibility to protect us and prosecute violent criminals. But we also have the responsibility to tell the truth about our neighbor and the world. http://www.patheos.com/blogs/christandpopculture/2013/11/the-knockout-
game-myth-and-its-racist-roots/]

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* Colin Flaherty has been spending the past couple of years at WorldNetDaily spreading the idea of a "pandemic" of "black mob violence." It's paid off for him. To create that impression, though, Flaherty has an extremely broad definition of "black mob." According to Flaherty, one does not have to be black -- or even human -- to be part of a "black mob."

Whites can be part of Flaherty's "black mobs" too. He wrote in an Aug. 21 WND column about the Australian man in Oklahoma. But one of the accused killers in the Oklahoma case, Michael Jones, is most definitely not black -- a fact that ultimately turned out to be very inconvenient to Flaherty and others at WND.

WND originally headlined its "news" article on the Oklahoma shooting "Police: Black Teens Kill White Man 'For Fun,'" complete with a picture of a black man misidentified as Jones and a declaration that Australian baseball player Chris Lane was killed in Oklahoma "by three black teenagers who simply 'wanted to see someone die.'"

After WND realized its error, it scrubbed the article of references to the alleged killers' race and changed the headline to "Police: Teens Kill Baseball Player 'For Fun'" (while, of course, failing to alert readers that the article was altered).

Flaherty wasn't the only WND writer who was too busy race-baiting to care about the facts. Erik Rush wrote in his Aug. 21 WND column that "22-year-old Australian Christopher Lane was gunned down by three black youths in Duncan, Okla." He goes on to essentially blame Obama for Lane's death.

And hours after changing its headline, WND was still promoting its "news" article on the killing via Twitter with the original race-baiting headline.

Flaherty wrote in an Oct. 1 WND article about a "mob of black motorcyclists". Flaherty did name one biker suspect, Christopher Cruz, but didn't pass racial judgment on Cruz for some reason. Regarding the other named suspect, Flaherty contorts himself to pretend he's not really Hispanic:

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Despite initial reports that one biker sustained minor injuries, later it was learned the rapper Jay Meezee is hospitalized and may be paralyzed after the SUV allegedly ran him over. Meezee's father is a prominent Boston-area Hispanic evangelical minister. But his son's appearance and music are racially ambiguous: The lyrics -- and his frequent appearances on black radio -- are full of N-Bombs and contain stories of prison, drug addiction, violence and life "in the hood."

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So Meezee is no longer a Hispanic because his "appearance and music are racially ambiguous" and -- horrors! -- uses the N-word? That's apparently the way it is in Flaherty's world.

The picture WorldNetDaily used to promote Colin Flaherty's latest attempt at race-baiting -- under the headline "Pack of black youth terrorize city" -- sure looks scary enough, with its wild-eyed central figure wielding a weapon surrounded by menacing-looking dark-skinned types. The picture was used again with Flaherty's article.

Just one little problem, though: The picture does not illustrate what Flaherty is writing about, which is "black mob violence" in Raleigh, N.C. In fact, the people in the picture aren't American, nor are they technically black. The picture is, in fact, of gang members in an indigenous Aborigine community in Australia, and it apparently first appeared in a 2006 Sydney Morning Herald article.

WND's photo does not include a credit that would accurately identify where the photo came from, or of what is actually of. WND apparently stole the photo from the Sydney newspaper's website, believing that they looked scary enough to illustrate a race-baiting article about "black mobs." This demonstrates just how far Flaherty and WND will go in its race-baiting -- pretending that scary-looking dark-skinned foreigners are really "black mobs" in the U.S. http://www.huffingtonpost.com/terry-krepel/worldnetdailys-rainbowcol_b
_4139918.html]

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** Flaherty is a marginal media figure whose main contribution to American literature is a 2011 self-published memoir titled Redwood to Deadwood: A 53-year Old Dude Hitchhikes Around America Again. He caught WND’s attention with 2012’s White Girl Bleed a Lot: The Return of Racial Violence and How the Media Ignore It, also self-published, which argues that “black-on-white” attacks have gone through the roof and the only reason you don’t know about it is because the “liberal media” has colluded to keep the story under wraps.

Flaherty catalogues episodes of “black mob violence” with the obsessive care of a true connoisseur. Though he began by writing exclusively about black-on-white attacks, he has lately branched out into covering black-on-black violence, though he rarely bothers to note the race of the victim and always mentions that of the perpetrators.

Flaherty has become popular in white nationalist circles. Several articles from his WND series have been picked up by American Renaissance, a white nationalist hate group that promotes pseudo-scientific studies and research that purport to show the inferiority of blacks to whites.

In July, Flaherty appeared as a guest on the Lowell, Mass.-based Malevolent Freedom Radio, a white nationalist show whose motto is “embrace white culture” and whose logo is the Schwartze Sonne, or black sun, a Nazi occult symbol. Telling Malevolent Freedom host Dean Anderson that he’s not part of “the [White Nationalist] movement,” Flaherty declared, “I’m just a guy that likes to write … I just have my eyes open. My attitude is, I’m going to tell you what’s happening now, and if you want to freak out about it, I really don’t care.” http://www.splcenter.org/blog/2012/10/23/worldnetdaily-now-peddling-wh
ite-nationalism/]

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*** In addition to having decided to make racial fear-mongering his profession, Flaherty’s also a sloppy aggregator. He gets wrong the simple details of the stories he’s abusing to make his argument, and he also seems to invent facts from thin air. Some examples from his column on a series of random incidents in Minneapolis ( http://www.wnd.com/2012/06/black-on-white-link-found-in-minneapolis-vi
olence/), which became a chapter of his silly book: A woman who was badly beaten by a group of teenage girls is said to have been attacked by “a gang of 20 black women.” The number of attackers appears nowhere in the linked story. (He also seems to intentionally omit the stated motive for the attack, which wasn’t anti-white animus but a missing pair of sunglasses.) “In September of 2011, a crowd of 1,000 black people rioted through downtown fighting, stealing, destroying property,” he writes. There’s no way of knowing how many people were in the crowd, but it doesn’t look to me like 1,000. In the book he seems to have changed the number to 800 ( http://whitegirlbleedalot.com/chapter-10-11-minneapolis/), though he still has no possible way of counting. (The person who uploaded video of the crowd’s brief marauding wrote of “a few hundred.”) Flaherty says “a group of black people attacked a mobile alcoholic beverage cart in Minneapolis,” but there’s no such thing as “mobile alcoholic beverage carts” in Minneapolis. The thing attacked was a bunch of people on one of those stupid group bicycles with a beer keg ( http://www.pedalpub.com/). This is all pretty basic stuff, and my folks always taught me that if you’re going to use a bunch of random incidents to try to convince people of the existence of a secret nationwide pandemic of racial violence, it’s best to get the details right.

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This belief in an epidemic of black-on-white crime that the press and law enforcement conspire to keep secret is an old one, and crazies have been sending newspapers mimeographed manifestos on the subject for years. It’s a common topic of discussion at white supremacist message boards and in the comments sections of newspapers, which are often indistinguishable from white supremacist newsletters. It was the sort of crap Ron Paul’s famous newsletters would cover, back when he was trying to win the “rednecks” over to the libertarian cause. The sort of people who obsess over this shit are of course older, white and likely already terrified of America’s urban areas and black neighborhoods. They are also sort of hilarious, in a creepy way: Their primary argument is that they are and you should be constantly petrified, and yet they also think that they are Tough Realists.

What’s changed since the days when Ron Paul was profiting from fear-mongering is that as soon as Barack Obama was inaugurated, this gutter-right meme started popping up in the conservative mainstream. This is largely thanks to the shamelessness of Matt Drudge, whose Drudge Report semi-regularly becomes a clearinghouse for every single example of violence committed by young black people than he can find ( http://www.salon.com/2011/06/01/drudge_race_panic/). From Drudge, the obsession with scary black people moved to Rush Limbaugh, who connected it directly to Obama. It’s now a common trope at the Daily Caller, on “The O’Reilly Factor” and in the syndicated columns of (black) conservative “scholar” Thomas Sowell ( http://www.buzzfeed.com/mckaycoppins/in-conservative-media-a-race-war-
rages).

“White Girl Bleed a Lot” is a dumb, self-published book by a guy no one’s ever heard of, but he’s made himself an expert on one of the right wing’s favorite, and currently most useful, myths. With people like Sowell promoting him, Flaherty might soon find himself moving up in the right-wing media world. Unless a flash mob gets to him, obviously. http://www.salon.com/2012/08/13/why_conservatives_obsess_over_flash_mo
bs_and_race_riots/

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According to the FBI, there were 575 crimes motivated by anti-white bias in 2010, nationwide ( http://www.fbi.gov/about-us/cjis/ucr/hate-crime/2010/tables/table-1-in
cidents-offenses-victims-and-known-offenders-by-bias-motivation-2010.xls). There were 545 anti-white crimes in 2009 ( http://www2.fbi.gov/ucr/hc2009/data/table_01.html) and 716 in 2008 ( http://www2.fbi.gov/ucr/hc2009/data/table_01.html) [That's out of 4.3 million violent attacks in 2009, remember]. There were more than 2,000 crimes motivated by anti-black bias in each one of those years.

There would have to be hundreds upon hundreds of thousands of crimes that no one is reporting in order for the current violent crime rate to come close to matching what it was a generation ago.

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This belief in an epidemic of black-on-white crime that the press and law enforcement conspire to keep secret is an old one, and crazies have been sending newspapers mimeographed manifestos on the subject for years. It’s a common topic of discussion at white supremacist message boards and in the comments sections of newspapers, which are often indistinguishable from white supremacist newsletters. It was the sort of crap Ron Paul’s famous newsletters would cover, back when he was trying to win the “rednecks” over to the libertarian cause. The sort of people who obsess over this shit are of course older, white and likely already terrified of America’s urban areas and black neighborhoods. They are also sort of hilarious, in a creepy way: Their primary argument is that they are and you should be constantly petrified, and yet they also think that they are Tough Realists. What’s changed since the days when Ron Paul was profiting from fear-mongering is that as soon as Barack Obama was inaugurated, this gutter-right meme started popping up in the conservative mainstream.

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The point, of course, isn’t to make an argument supported by statistics. It’s to marshal all available anecdotal data to support the paranoid white conservatives’ gut feeling that this country is on the brink of Charlie Manson’s Helter Skelter.

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“There is no evidence supporting this as a huge, viral number of attacks," Mike Males, senior researcher for the Center on Juvenile and Criminal Justice, told the Christian Science Monitor. "I’ve heard of incidents of this so-called 'knockout game' dating back to 1996. It’s not new. What is important to realize is this tiny 'knockout' pattern is part of a stronger pattern of random violence against strangers in this country."

“If there ever was an urban myth, this was it,” Jersey City police spokesman Bob McHugh, told the New York Times.

Even Kelly isn't sure the problem is widespread.

“We’re trying to determine whether or not this is a real phenomenon,” Kelly said on Friday. “I mean, yes, something like this can happen. But we would like to have people come forward and give us any information they have.” http://news.yahoo.com/is-the-knockout-game-real-155323595.html]

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Knockout game: Videos of the teen attacks go viral; the crime’s not viral

Here’s an example of how an incident can be magnified beyond it's real dimensions to stir panic, hate, and terror that is both longlasting and widespread.

The “Knockout King” or “Knockout Game” has been playing out for more than a decade on streets in New York, New Jersey, Michigan, Chicago, St. Louis, and now Washington D.C. in small numbers. But videos of the incidents have gone viral on the Internet, creating the illusion these things happen more often than they do.

“What is important to realize is this tiny ‘Knockout’ pattern is part of a stronger pattern of random violence against strangers in this country,” adds Mr. Males.

Two women were separately assaulted in Washington last week on Nov. 14 and 15. Police are calling both attacks simple assaults and have not indicated that they were related to the knockout game. http://www.csmonitor.com/The-Culture/Family/Modern-Parenthood/2013/112
0/Knockout-game-Videos-of-the-teen-attacks-go-viral-the-crime-s-not-viral

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I think it may be time to take a hard look at how we engage, or disengage, teens when this kind of antisocial and violent behavior takes root in our communities.

“Cities with high populations of teens with good community engagement traditionally have much less teen crime,” Males says. “Conversely, cities like St. Louis have been cited as an epicenter for the so-called Knockout Game and that city has a very high youth poverty rate with very poor teen engagement.”

Males says the place to begin our defense against Knockout and other random acts of violence by teens is by starting with “troubled families” and also with teens individually to teach empathy.

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