If you’re old enough to pull the trigger, and dumb enough to point it at people, you may have to suffer the consequences. Some frighteningly young people have been quite willing to kill, and kill brutally, and will do so again in the future.
Fortunately, we have more leeway for action with the very young, since they are prone to listen to their elders. But the police have shot and killed young children before, and been perfectly correct in doing so.
I do some part-time deputy sheriff work. I’d have shot that kid where he stood, no question about it. Likewise, the men and women with whom I work. We are, in fact, trained to respond in just that way when we are confronted with lethal force. In the real world, brandishing a realistic paintball gun is lethal force. This troubled yoot reaped what he had sown.
“Dumb enough”? Kid was suicidal. He was attempting to get himself killed, due to what most folks would consider a severe mental illness. He succeeded in his goal. In what sense was he dumb? Or do you get delight out of showing your contempt for the suicidal?
Daniel
A few years ago I was waiting at the pharmacy to pick up medication for my grandmother, and got into a conversation with a young police officer who was also waiting. Turned out he’d been shot at close range in the shoulder. He was wearing a vest so the round didn’t penetrate, but it nearly went through his vest and his shoulder was bruised so badly he was off work for several weeks. He showed me his shoulder; he was four weeks post-shooting and it was still literally black from the impact. He was also kicking himself for allowing himself to be put in the situation where he could get shot, too. All it took was literally one second’s hesitation. He considered himself lucky that it only hit his shoulder, too.
One second to make a life or death decision? That’s when training kicks in, and that’s what happened here, as far as I can tell. Even though I’m sorry a 15-year-old kid got killed, there’s literally nothing I can see in what the police officer did to criticize. You guys have a tough enough job as it is. Metacom is an ass to suggest he should have done otherwise.
Why has nobody taken Metacom up on his offer to debate in GD the merits of police force? Is it so much more fun to tell him what an ass he is, than to try to ocnvince him that his position is incorrect?
Daniel
This probably sounds heartless, but I can’t even bring myself to muster up much pity for the kid. Yeah, if this had been TV, Jack Bauer woulda shot him in the arm and disarmed him, but in real life you don’t have those choices. The kid made a decision to wave around what looked like a gun; he had the opportunity to back down, and he didn’t. My heart goes out to his family, but I don’t see how anyone could argue that the cops could have done anything different.
True, but then Jack would have stomped on the wound repeatedly while saying, “You’re going to tell me what I want to know. The only question is how much it is going to hurt.” Then he would have killed him. Bad example.
Has he started a thread there?
Put the gun down! OR MILLIONS OF PEOPLE WILL DIE!
Nope. For all anyone knew, the fake gun could have been back at home, replaced by the real thing.
The police had no rational choice but to assume that what looked like a gun was, in fact, a gun.
So he take his toys out of the sandbox and go home for a third time?
I thought about it. For me, this isn’t about police force as a whole. I have a feeling we would likely agree on the overall principal about the force police use. It’s about this one issue. I think his position in the threads about this issue is wrong. I really think his bailing on the two threads about this issue is wrong.
I’d rather he come back to this thread or the other and take another look at the reports of what happened. I think he has the wrong idea about what took place.
My contempt is for a man who went out to get someone else to kill him. He’s a coward and he got no more than he deserved. The police officer who shot the fool got worse than he [the officer] deserved.
A severe mental illness? Bull. Maybe he was, maybe he wasn’t, but that still doesn’t excuse his actions. He knew what he was doing was wrong; depression doesn’t turn off your morality. He just didn’t care. I can click my tongue and note it was a waste, but I can give no further help.
Since when are thirteen-year-olds men? Can he vote? Can he drink? Can he drive? Can he choose whether to go to school? Can he shave? Can he choose whether to have sex?
Can he be held in contempt by an Internet Tough Guy?
Daniel
Fine, the kid gets off one shot. It goes through the wall of the bathroom and kills a student in the classroom next door. Happy now? You know it’s real.
Where do you keep getting that he was 13? He was 15. It’s not a whole lot of difference, true, but there is a difference. But even 13 year olds are not children. They have known about consequences for a very long time.
To answer your questions, beginning with “can he vote?”
No, he can’t vote, except in class elections; yes, 15 year olds (even 13 year olds) have been known to drink; yes, a 15 year old (and probably some 13 year olds) can operate a vehicle; yes, some 15 year olds (and even 13 year olds) have been known to play hookey; yes, some 15 year olds (maybe even some 13 year olds) have begun shaving (not every morning, but they shave); yes, some 15 year olds (even some 13 year olds) are sexually active.
What is your point? Are you going to argue that it’s illegal for a 15 (13) year old to drink a beer, or drive a car, or skip school, or have sex in some cases? I’ll grant you that. But where is it legal for him to point what is represented to be a real weapon at a police officer (or anyone else for that matter), whether it was fake or not? The fact that it turned out tosimply a pellet gun is irrelevant. He represented it to be real and made threats to himself and others based on this misrepresentation, and that’s why he was shot.
My fault on the age; I’m not sure where I got that from.
As for my point: my point is that our society treats minors in many, many different ways as not being capable of taking responsibility for their actions, as not being as competent as adults are. For an adult to show such contempt for a minor as Bandit is doing is itself contemptible, unless he’s arguing for full responsibility and competence for minors in other areas as well.
Daniel
Or, it kills a Terrorist. It’s all good now, right?
Perhaps it’s a factor of where I teach, but I have small sympathy for the idea that a teenager/minor with a gun should be held to some different and lesser standard. Hereabouts, they shoot each other and bystanders with depressing regularity. Then, too, there was that ugly incident where one teen hired two others to shoot and kill his parents. Sorry, but 15 or 50, you go about brandishing a gun, you get no sympathy from me when a cop or armed citizen puts you down.
First off, so what? They could have been told the kid was distraught over his pet hamster’s death, or that he got laughed at for his shop project, or he didn’t get a badge in Boy Scouts. That’s not a factor to consider in a situation with a gun. And second, we know NOW it was suicide by cop. In that situation, with a school full of children in lockdown and a kid waving a gun in your face, it would have been a dereliction of duty if the cop hadn’t shot the kid.