Send Police After Armed Criminals, People Get Killed

Walterodim79 - [original thread]

Be warned: If you haven't yet seen the video, it's very graphic. It's a 13 year kid being shot to death. It's another sad and frustrating tragedy...in what seems like a steady stream of tragedies.

So, I guess to respond to the body of your post, this is one of the things that makes me a bit angry. I'm sick of criminals doing criminal shit, predictably meeting bad ends, and then everyone (even people that think the shooting is justified!) referring to it as sad and frustrating. When shots are fired, police rush to the scene, and someone runs away while holding a firearm, attempts to use sleight of hand to dispose of it, then turn towards the police, I'm going to be unsurprised when the officer sometimes fails to notice that this rapid movement is an attempt to surrender rather than an attempt to shoot. That the kid was 13 years of age doesn't even begin to play a role in what the officer should do - a juvenile can shoot you dead just as efficiently as an adult.

To the extent that there's anything sad about it, it's whatever the previous decade of the child's life was that led to him being "Lil Homicide" and running with a bunch of scumbags that would eventually get him gunned down by someone.

Also, as I said the other day in response to the Thompson shooting:

Something that a few people have brought up that I see being used as a bit of a gotcha really does seem to me to be something that needs more consideration and justification from Democrats sympathetic to the BLM movement - the intersection between firearms laws and policing. Daunte Wright seems to be a prototypical example of a Bad Guy With A Gun, given his previous violent robbery. The broad American left generally favors stricter gun laws and tighter enforcement of those laws - how do they envision such incidents playing out? To me, this seems like a central example of what to expect more of if you go after criminals with guns in that some non-trivial number of them will do knuckleheaded, dangerous things like resisting arrest and trying to drive off. The more such incidents you have, the more such incidents are going to end with police mistakes in high pressure circumstances that end with the accused shot dead.

Rationally, I don't know how someone can square that circle of wanting police to be less forceful while also wanting to enforce gun laws. All I can come up with is that there's a fantasy where the primary group of people that don't comply with gun laws are weirdo gun nut white males, who will be swept up when they try doing some of their weirdo, should-be-illegal gun shows. This is completely out of step with the observed reality of who tends to break gun laws and who tries to comply with the Byzantine system that's in place; when the ATF says pistol braces are fine, people that want to own short-barreled AR-15s duly comply with that rule and go with pistol braces rather than breaking the rules by having a fixed stock without doing the SBR paperwork. There might be a few edge cases, but short of just criminalizing everyone that owns guns, the weirdos (like me) will mostly try to follow the rules as much as reasonably possible. Inevitably, firearms enforcement will tend to look a lot like the failed Dante Wright arrest unless the plan is to just do Ruby Ridge repeatedly.

In the real world, this is what enforcing gun laws looks like. When you send police after armed criminals, people get killed some of the time. Whether that's sad or not, it's an entirely foreseeable, expected consequence.