siryouarebeingmocked:

fandomsandfeminism:

>You know, you could have just responded to my post, honestly.

Yes, I could’ve. But I didn’t feel like it.

>And like, if cops REALLY and truly only shot people who were an immediate deadly threat, we wouldn’t be having this conversation.

I never asserted otherwise. The question should be “how many unjustified shootings are worth the justified ones? How many of those unjustified ones were reasonable mistakes based on the information cops had available? What about the many times cops use guns to compel suspects to surrender without fighting?”

I think you’ve fallen victim to the perfect solution fallacy. It feels like you’re saying “if the cops kill a single person by mistake, ever, they shouldn’t have guns”. But you completely overlook the people saved by armed patrol cops.

>But they kill children with toys in parks,

Tamir Rice was a teenager, “child” is a deliberately emotive term, and he didn’t have a toy gun, he had a realistic replica firearm in his waistband. Even if it had the legally mandated orange tip toy guns have specifically against this sort of misunderstanding, the cops would not have been able to see it.

They literally had no practical way to tell he didn’t have a real gun.



>and dads with toys in Walmarts,

Second verse, same as the first. A BB gun is not exactly a “toy gun”. The latter term evokes something made of brightly colored plastic. Not something like this;

The linked article itself never uses the term ‘toy gun’. It prefers something like ‘pellet rifle’.



His fatherhood is irrelevant, and used only to garner sympathy. Maybe the cops did - no pun intended - jump the gun. But keep in mind that this was less than two months after a police shootout with cop-killers in, you guessed it, a Walmart, and may have had the cops a little jumpy.

https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/2014_Las_Vegas_shootings



>and legal gun owners at traffic stops,

Castile said “I have a gun” and reached for something while the cop told him to stop three times, with a hand on his own gun. A sensible person would’ve thought “oh, he thinks I’m going for a gun, I’d better stop”. Under those circumstances, how was Officer Yanez supposed to tell Castile wasn’t reaching for a firearm? I keep asking this question, and I get no response.

He did not die because he was a gun owner. He did not die because Yanex was trigger-happy. He died because he was an idiot, and possibly high on weed.

>and men holding a shower head, and deaf folks,

A man holding a shower head so only the narrow side showed, which he was pointing at people like it was a gun. I’ve seen the pictures. The public also thought it was real. Incidentally, here’s a Ruger 22 and the supposed showerhead, as well as the dead man.

The barrel of the gun looks an awful lot like the narrow end of a shower head, right? I think the guy was deliberately trying to be mistaken for a threat. It’s called “suicide by cop”. There was one video where a guy in Cali managed it just by pretending he had a weapon behind his back, in his waistband.



>In fact, they killed nearly 1000 people last year in the US.

I’m sorry, I thought you were discussing cops killing people without guns. This statistic has no relevance to that line of argument. It does nothing but attempt to make cops look bad.

As counterpoint, let me offer the story of CPD officer Veronica Murillo. A suspect on drugs assaulted her and smashed her head into the pavement, despite the presence of other officers nearby.

http://www.fox2detroit.com/news/chicago-cop-was-afraid-to-use-gun-while-being-brutally-beaten-by-man-on-drugs



She sustained brain damage, and could easily have died.



>And whats your argument? That anyone with a knife should be shot to death? That they don’t get a trial or anything?



No. What made you think that?

I think someone with a lethal weapon who is trying to use deadly force on someone else can be justifiably killed in self-defense or the defense of others, whether by police officers or the general public. Unless the person themselves is defending others, of course. There’s probably other qualifiers I can’t think of right now.

I respect the bravery of the officers involved, but the situation could’ve easily gone wrong and resulted in the deaths of officers, members of the public, and maybe even the suspect. Again, just the presence of armed police can be make people surrender. It may or may not have helped in this particular case.

>You cant simultaneously argue that we have a right as citizens to own weapons AND that owning a weapon means that any police who interact with you are justified in killing you. (I mean, you can, but you shouldn’t)

That is not remotely my position. I’m not sure how you arrived at that conclusion. In fact, I’d really like it if you answered my opening question about self-defense.

>Cops aren’t executioners. We shouldn’t expect them to be, and we shouldn’t be ok with any of them who act like it.

Killing someone is not the same as execution. You use that word for its emotional associations, even though it’s incorrect.

You claimed the SWAT teams would be armed. Thing is, that still results in cops shooting people, including mistaken shootings (EG the Tyler Barriss Incident), but with a longer response time and more taxpayer money spent per incident. And it puts the public in greater danger.

Incidentally, Eric Garner died. He died because the cops tried to arrest him and he refused to go quietly, he was injured in the neck* and chest, and because of his own chronic health problems. Nobody drew a gun, but he still died, because of something the cops could not possibly have known about.

This is very simple math; how many people will banning armed patrol cops save, and how many will die?

And how sure are you that the former is larger than the latter?

* Not, as popularly believed, from a choke hold. He was never actually put in a chokehold. A cop just put an arm around Garner’s neck, but he wasn’t trying to choke Garner out, and the injury to his neck could’ve been sustained at various points during the struggle.