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Comment by StavrosK | Hacker News Reader

The grandparent said that the person most at fault was the person who called it in. I disagree, the people most at fault were the police, by far.

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I get where you're coming from, but the person who called it in named themselves SWauTistic and makes a hobby of this behavior.

Yes, the guy is definitely guilty of some degree of murder, because he knew what he was doing. However, I'm contrasting it with my country, where calling in such a situation would be very unlikely to get someone killed, because the police are much more reticent to shoot people. In such a case, the caller could be guilty of wasting resources, but not of murder. The only difference is the handling of each situation by the police, hence my reasoning above.

How many gun-related homicides are there per year in your country?

1.5 per 100k (most of which are suicides), gun culture isn't big here.

That's why it seems a bit unreasonable to compare how the police in your country would react to how American police unfortunately reacted in this scenario. Because the situations those officers face on a daily basis is completely different. American cops can reasonably expect to regularly deal with armed and hostile psychos, unlike the cops in many other countries. Again, that's not to say that the shooting was in any way justified, but try to put yourself in the life of American police officers.

Yes, that's another good point, and a big factor in why the police there acts the way it does. Yet, even with all the needless deaths, gun culture remains widespread.

> However, I'm contrasting it with my country, where calling in such a situation would be very unlikely to get someone killed, because the police are much more reticent to shoot people.

Yeah, but I don't think that's reasonable to do. If you live in the U.S. you know this is a problem, choosing to still do it is more damning.

I think the disagreement here lies in that people think "given that the police is likely to kill someone, the person who called in an innocent man is a murderer", and I agree. However, I contend that the police should not be likely to kill someone, exactly because they might be killing innocent people. The police are the ones with guns and ostensible training.

> However, I contend that the police should not be likely to kill someone

I'm not arguing that they should. I'm saying that they are, and having knowledge that they are makes the one calling in the threat seriously in the wrong. I can't stress enough, the caller's twitter handle is SWauTistic. They know full well what they're doing.

We completely agree on this.

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