Because, like BobLibDem, you have never owned a gun, you never had any gun training, you have never served in the military, and your knowledge of gun usage is from the movies. Right? Because otherwise you wouldn’t pursue this stupidity.
By the way, the courts and the law in this country have decided that the only reason you’re allowed to pull your gun is to shoot someone dead. If you just show the gun to scare someone (“brandishing”), shoot a warning shot, or try to “shoot someone in the leg”, you are going to jail for a looooong time.
You have a point, but I think race is probably also a part of it.
Not so much in the sense of hating people for the color of their skin, but it’s more frightening when members of alien cultures do something than it is when people who are “just like you” do it. You tend to assume you’re basically a decent guy, so people who are like you are probably not too bad either. While as for those Other Guys - there’s no limit to their potential depravity.
And I think the urban black ghetto culture is probably more alien and hence more frightening to a lot of people than the suburban white one is. And race is a part (though not the entirety) of what makes it alien.
Ah. I thought from your phrasing that you meant something more definitive than the prediction that a rational police department would not seek to charge him for this. I agree it would be counter-productive, though of course the Ferguson PD does not always eschew counter-productivity, as we’ve learned.
These are both empirical questions that I’m not certain of. From a brief bit of googling, it looks like the survey data shows something like 5-10% of the American public engages in drunk driving every year, while 80%+ believe it is morally wrong. If you assume this isn’t exclusively the same people year-after-year–which is pretty safe, since two-thirds of Americans will be involved in a drunk driving incident in their lifetimes–you reach the fact that a substantial percentage have engaged in it notwithstanding the moral prohibition.
As for copyright infringement, I agree that personal use is a big divide. And maybe as many people find personal piracy to be wrong as find drug use to be wrong. My googling seems to put the figure around 30% that find personal piracy morally objectionable. I don’t know to what extent that overlaps with people who nevertheless do it.
On the larger point, I’m certain that people who engage in theft and burglary also have rationalizations for why their conduct is not morally wrong. And, indeed, you might find interesting results if you asked people whether, say, shoplifting food from a huge chain store is immoral. I’ll bet those numbers don’t top drunk driving.
Racism and social attitudes toward poverty are hugely intertwined. Many negative stereotypes about poor people find their origin in White Supremacy.
And while I agree with your thought experiment, I wouldn’t agree with the converse (that poor white kids growing up in, say, Utah, would be subject to the same stereotypes of criminality for engaging in this conduct).
It puts the fifth guy at risk of being stabbed. Some people don’t react very much to tasers, plus the barb can stick in clothing and not be positioned to deliver the shock. These are relatively less of a problem with bullets.
Tasers are “less lethal” weapons. They don’t usually kill or seriously injure. Knives are lethal weapons, which usually require a lethal or potentially-lethal response.
Also, consider the following not particularly unlikely scenario -
Five cops have surrounded a knife wielding suspect cornered. The suspect will not surrender. They decide to try the Taser. One cop holsters his side arm, and starts to bring out the Taser. The suspect charges the cop before he can deploy the Taser.
The other four cops fire, hitting the suspect and the cop.
In a hand-to-hand situation, there is not usually enough time to be gingerly. “He who hestitates is lost” is much more likely to be true when under attack than “look before you leap”. And it is really, really difficult to rachet up and down the levels of violence employed so they match precisely to what the threat level will appear to be two hours later in an interview room, or in an newspaper colum twelve hours later - or six months later in court.
My first reaction was to question why the taser cop would be in the firing lane of the other police. That’d just be stupid. However, looking up effective ranges of tasers, they’re really not all that large; about 15-30 feet. So for this strategy to work, you’d be firing near maximum effective range, which is surely less than ideal.
What we need is one of those guns from TV that fire a net. Perfect for this situation.
Jesus christ. Is this a competition at this point: one side of the debate trying to out-idiot the other?
Edit since that was content-free: a police officer using lethal force and the Marissa Alexander case are not the same thing. Also, no court has ever said that the rule is that the only reason you’re allowed to pull your gun is to shoot someone dead, and that because that’s the rule, if you pull your gun to fire a warning shot, you’re going to jail for breaking that rule. Because jesus christ.
Felony murder rule perhaps? Is that part of the law in Mo?
Under the felony murder rule if either the cigars or the assault on the officer were deemed a violent felony then Johnson could be charged with murder in Brown’s death.
That would provide some serious incentive to admit to the cigars if it took a murder charge off the table.
That’s only true when there’s debate on whether a taser was necessary (See: “Don’t tase me bro!”). I don’t think anyone would object in an instance like this one.
Not that I’m saying one SHOULD have been used. Just that I don’t think anyone would object to one BEING used.
The rule is you don’t use a weapon to threaten. You use it to defend yourself, or you don’t use it. No brandishing*, no warning shots. Shoot to stop the attacker as effectively as possible - which means centre mass.
*This doesn’t, obviously, apply to the police in certain situations. They still shouldn’t be firing warning shots.
I’m not an expert on police procedure, but from my limited experience, I’d say this seems pretty standard (and also why there’s still so much outcry, regardless of the victim’s criminal actions).
The justification for firing a weapon is if you think your life or someone else’s life is in immediate danger - that is, the self-defense argument. If you fire a warning shot, you invalidate the “immediate danger” part, thus invalidating the self-defense part, thus going to jail. As in Marissa Alexander’s case.
Because suspects don’t always stand still and let themselves be Tase’d.
And as mentioned, you get one shot with a Taser, and you better not miss or hit a leather jacket or have the barb fall out. A person with a knife can cover 15-30 feet rather quickly, and it doesn’t take a lot of time to stab someone.
And the police will use it on some fat guy, who will die from positional asphyxia, and his grieving girlfriend will sue the city saying that he was really a good guy and the cops should have delivered a dose of Haldol via tranquilizer dart instead.
In police work the eyewitness testimony should compliment the physical evidence. If it contradicts then there is a problem. If you have one without the other then it’s a harder case to prove.
That is a very Hollywood indoctrinated viewpoint. People think that if someone is resisting 100lbs Kate Beckett just has to do a quick arm twist and the perp is contained. The real world is a lot messier.
If 5 guys try to tackle someone with a knife someone is getting stabbed. I guess that’s not a bad deal for 4 of them. Actually it could be much worse than that. I watched a video that I thankfully can’t find that showed a guy running around stabbing officer after officer that tried to subdue him. He was also dodging gunfire. The officers in this country are better trained I hope but it showed how dangerous a guy with a knife can be. Now there have been instances where an officer saw the opportunity to disarm or subdue a knife wielder. In the moment he saw an opportunity and he takes. But that is probably not going to happen most of the time. You refuse to drop a knife you are going to get shot.
Everyone does not have Tasers. Tasers are to subdue non-compliant suspects. Not to combat someone who is attempting to use deadly force.
Not quite true. A police officer is allowed to draw his weapon and a much lower threshold. A cop does not have to wait for the moment before shooting to draw his weapon.
In addition to the fact that this isn’t relevant to a policing dynamic, you’re totally through the looking glass on your larger point.
The fact that you can’t fire a warning shot if you’re not in immediate danger doesn’t mean that what you’re supposed to do is draw under the same circumstances and fucking shoot to kill. It means you weren’t allowed to draw your gun in the first place. elucidator et al are arguing that the officer wasn’t in immediate danger that required all six shots, in that he might have already stopped the threat. Whatever you think of that argument and its realistic application, it’s certainly not responsive to it to say that the law prevents somebody from firing a warning shot under the circumstances, because you’ve already argued that shooting to kill was justified.
There’s no law that says that when you have justification to use lethal force you must use it. It’s not against the law to try not to kill somebody when you would be justified in killing them. Jesus.
