I’ve seen someone take 4-5 shots to the torso and still have enough fight and presence of mind to unload several rounds into a nearby U.S. serviceman.
And this guy wasn’t shot with bean bags, he was perforated with high velocity bullets and he was still able to shoot with enough accuracy to wound someone.
Although I would think a taser would only fail if the device failed. From what I understood the tazer works by disrupting the bodies bioelectrical responses and there’s no real “toughing it out” you lose complete control of your body and can’t move for some time. So I would think there’d have to be either a device failure or a failure of the device to properly hit the target or something.
What if the guy was exposed? You can try to take cover as fast as you want, a bullet moves over 1,000 feet per second, you ain’t gonna dodge it in mid air. If you’ve got a gun trained on you your best chance of survival is to kill the person holding that gun before they can get a shot off.
The SWAT officers had to be exposed to someone coming out the bathroom door to a degree or otherwise they wouldn’t have been able to properly contain the suspect; nor would they be able to properly protect the students who were still in the school and couldn’t be evacuated yet.
The situations are not necessarily analogous. I don’t claim expertise on being shot with high velocity rounds but those have the ability to basically go right through someone. While that causes more severe damage in the long-term that doesn’t necessarily mean they cause more damage in the short term. My understanding is that these bean bags are basically shot with shotgun shells. Thats a heck of a lot of momentum and energy in those bean bags.
I would be extremely impressed with anyone continuing the fight while under a hail of bean bags but I concede its possible. I am not trying to second guess the officers there becuase I wasn’t there. That being said, it seems like a failure of the police to not have used less than lethal weapons. It looks like the school provideded sufficient cover for the SWAT officers to take behind. It seems unlikely that the student could have gotten off an effective shot while being shot at with beanbags.
Well in the situation I presented the person was shot and it affected him badly enough that he later died, and before he died (and before he returned fire) he had fallen down completely. The bean bags are fired from in a “semiautomatic” fashion from what I know about them, at worst they would knock someone down. I fail to see how being knocked down with a bean bag would more severely impair someone’s ability to return fire than having holes punched through vital organs.
Also, you should be aware that the “beanbag” rounds are anything but. They’re filled with lead balls. Beanbag rounds do and have killed. Beanbag rounds are unsafe to use within about a 10 meter radius because at that close range they are more likely to kill. A beanbag round is specifically intended to be fired at the extremities which in and of themselves makes them less than perfect in a huge number of situations, they are intended to be fired at the extremities because a hit on the torso can kill (and has before.)
Also, there’s the ultimate issue of how to address lethal force. It needs to be countered in the manner most likely to stop said lethal force. Almost always that is going to involve the use of lethal force, unloading conventional bullets into someone officers a wide range of advantages in countering lethal force versus non-lethal alternatives. One is if you shoot someone dead they can’t fight back, full stop. That’s a mixed bag because you’re not guaranteed to kill anyone by shooting them.
However less than lethal or “less lethal” or even “non lethal” however it’s being described these days is primarily designed to counter non-lethal types of force. Primarily because of the inherent limitations in all of the systems.
A beanbag round stops being “less than lethal” under a certain range, and it loses effectiveness entirely at a range much shorter than that at which any normal round will kill from. In general bean bag rounds also aren’t delivered in systems which allow rapid fire, a pistol can be unloaded in a matter of seconds. Many beanbag rounds are delivered in a manner that requires reloading after every fired shot.
That’s a “what if.” How come you’re allowed “what ifs” in defense of the SWAT team but no one else is allowed a “what if” like, what if Dad informed law enforcement that his son had a black painted pellet gun? What if Dad had been allowed into the area where his son was being cornered in a bathroom? What if SWAT had taken a moment to assess the fact that this was in fact, absolutely nothing like Columbine? What if this occurred in Florida, a concealed carry state, where you’d expect lots of people to have guns anyway, and cops who know how to deal with people who are likely to have guns without reacting like it’s Columbine, Pt. II, “Revenge of Columbine.”
Why, exactly, should they have reacted like they were preventing the next Columbine?
Why, exactly, did they not lob tear-gas into the bathroom?
Why, exactly, did they wait just outside the bathroom door waiting for the kid to come out shooting, when they could have situated themselves further back, out of harm’s way?*
*Assuming that was practical. I still don’t know exactly how it all went down, and I’m more than willing to give the SWAT team a pass, pending more info. I just like asking questions of my law enforcement.
Why should they have believed Dad? I dunno, because Dad might have some good info that would have prevented this kid getting shot?
Ask any of those SWAT team members. I’d be willing to bet, had any of them been told that the kid’s dad was on the phone and the kid had a black painted pellet gun and he was despondent about a breakup with a girl, they wouldn’t have shot the kid, and they’d be sleeping a lot better tonight.
That’s about all the proof needed. Since the kid took steps to ensure that his pellet gun would be mistaken for a real gun, he himself expected the police to react as if it were. How the hell can we blame them for not taking the added precaution of getting shot first to verify its lethality?
Simply becuase you are talking about different things. Its the difference between getting hit by a baseball bat and being stabbed. If I hit you with a baseball bat you are most likely going to go down the ground, lose your breathe and be stunned for a bit. Stabbing? I am not as sure. You might end up bleeding to death from the stab wounds and survive the baseball bat but thats not relevent. If I had to choose which method to momentarily put someone out of a fight I am taking a baseball bat across the ribs.
I know this.
No it doesn’t necessarily require the most effective force to be used. There are many factors that go into what force to respond with including things like probability of the person actually using the force, danger to the officer and the effectiveness of the round among other things.
However less than lethal or “less lethal” or even “non lethal” however it’s being described these days is primarily designed to counter non-lethal types of force. Primarily because of the inherent limitations in all of the systems.
No one is denying you those what ifs, we’re just saying right now there’s little evidence those what ifs are really applicable to this situation. Most reports I’m reading are saying the dad didn’t even speak to the police until after his son was shot, and that he’s mistaken about the time frame of events. I’m not sure who to believe, both parties have something to gain by lying, not enough info is out there to even begin to say the dad was in contact with the police while all of this was going down.
Until we even know that, all your what ifs rely on us assuming what we don’t know is actually fact.
Also, concealed carry or not that doesn’t change the fact that when a gun is pointed at you that it’s time to start shooting.
You seem to be wanting a lot of things. They should charged in and use tear gas, they should have stayed farther back, they should have known more, they shouldn’t have gone about this like it was Columbine (is there any evidence you have that suggests the SWAT team thought this was Columbine part 2? Considering they had the kid cornered in a bathroom and he hadn’t killed anyone yet I’m doubting they thought it was all that bad.)
You can’t have all of those at once.
Bounded rationality comes into play eventually, especially in a situation that developed so quickly. You don’t have time to try a thousand different things or process a million different pieces of information in such a shortened time frame.
We don’t know the layout of the school, but we can use some common sense. To properly contain the student, to insure he didn’t escape the bathroom to possibly wreck havoc on other students, the officers had to be in a position to fire on him if he came out guns blazing. To be in a position to fire at someone, inside of a building like this, then you pretty much HAVE to be in a position where they too could fire on you if they chose to do so.
Yes. Most of them are intended for use as riot-control weapons, etc. At most, when the suspect is wielding a knife or bat or something from a non-lethal distance.
The SWAT team spent 45 minutes pleading with Penley to put the gun down and come out. Cell phones records have confirmed the police were not able to reach the father until mere seconds before the shooting, so there was no way they could ascertain the gun was fake.
This kid was not going to leave the bathroom alive. He put the cops in an impossible situation.
Why are you even asking? He’s said he wasn’t coming back to this thread, but that he’d participate in a thread in GD on the subject. So why are you asking this question here? I’m honestly curious as to your motive.