Loopydude - whether he pointed the gun at the owner or not is a point of dispute -the owner says he did, the officer says he didn’t. Obviously one of them is lying, and obviously both of them have good reason to lie - it certainly wouldn’t be appropriate for the officer to do so, so he’d want to deny it, and it certainly helps the owner’s lawsuit to portray the officer as out of control.
Secondly, he didn’t empty his gun. The article said he was carrying a gun with a 13 round magazine. He fired 6 shots (according to him) or 9 (according to the owner), 2 of which connected.
This thread has clearly devolved into an argument between those who can’t imagine that a dog could be an actual threat to a child, and those who have no problem believing such a thing. The officer decided that the threat of the unknown, barking, snarling dog was a greater threat to his children than a ricochet off a rock.
BTW, while speaking to my brother this weekend, I found out that their dog had bitten their 5 year old daughter on the face a few weeks ago. This was a dog they had from a pup, and who had been with both their kids (5 and 8) since their births. She was playing with the dog, they heard a scream, came in and she was bleeding from some puncture wounds. [sarcasm]Oddly enough, the dog had no history of agressive behavior towards children.[/sarcasm].
Finally, here’s a link to another article about the event. No real new information - just that the county attorney is starting to review the case and lawsuit:
Of course I’m biased, but from what I’ve seen of the kinds of people municipalities in states like Maine and New Hampshire (places where I grew up) attract to their police forces, my strong suspicion is the dog owner is telling the truth.
jeevmon
Agreed. As I have said in previous postings he probably trained (or even abused) the dogs to make them that way and possibly he bought those from an irresponsible breeder who was trying to produce dogs with a highly vicious nature.
As for that dog getting shot to death, I have never read of something like that occurring before. Personally, I think it was much too drastic (and much too fast). It seems most of the posters disagree with me.
With that in mind, hey let’s shoot people who come out of bars with easily discernible symptoms of drunkeness. As others have said about those “vicious” dogs - why should you have to wait for something to happen before you do something? Others have talked about the damage that dogs have done to children and people in general. Fine - shoot to kill all drunk drivers. Heck we’ve all seen the results of what those creeps have done in the past. Do we have to wait for them to kill/maim someone before we do something about it?
And with a name like “wolf_meister” I will admit I’m somewhat partial to canine creatures.