Comment by hajile | Hacker News Reader

Comment by hajile | Hacker News Reader

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It's obvious that you've never even shot a gun before. Pistols aren't particularly accurate in a shooting range even if you take lots of time to aim. With a moving target, adrenaline, and all the other factors in an actual situation, you're going to be lucky if all your shots even make contact with the target.

Where do you aim if you want to "shoot to incapacitate"?

No such place exists on the body. Even using small, low-powered rounds like a .22 rimfire short carry extreme risk of death no matter where you aim.

The answer is more simple. Don't pull out that gun unless what the person is doing warrants death. I don't know that attempting to apprehend a DUI is worth killing someone over. If you're responding to a domestic violence situation where someone's running around with a knife though, it's likely that a gun isn't a terrible consideration.

I think the real issue is getting in the competitive zone. "I'm not going to let this pero beat me" instead of considering if the cure is worse than the disease.

I assume you're referring to the death of Rayshard Brooks with your DUI comment. In that specific case, the police officer only shot once Brooks shot at him with the stolen taser. At that point, I suspect the argument he'd make is that he believed (rightly or wrongly) that his life was in imminent danger and he was ending that threat. I doubt he shot to apprehend the fleeing suspect, which would go against his training and is in fact illegal under such circumstances.

There's a larger issue, though. All laws ultimately are enforced by people with guns who will do violence up to and including death if people don't comply. Some laws are less likely than others to result in death (e.g. drug laws vs. securities fraud), but "is this law worth killing for?" is a question we all should ask when considering what the law should be.

You cannot incapacitate multiple people with a taser (once the rounds are in the first person it's unavailable to be fired again) and there were multiple cops there.

If the threat of a taser is a threat that warrants lethal force in self defense, the police are reaching for them far too quickly when they deal with people who are non-compliant. It takes very little provocation for most police officers to deploy their taser. I believe they are almost always used against unarmed people (armed people get shot, not tased).

Americans certainly know more than western/northern Europe about shooting people, but police here is trained to shoot to incapacitate, and it generally seems to work, as the fatality rate of police shootings is only about half as high as in the US.

Police in Europe is more trained in general. Something like 9 months of training to become a police officer in the US vs two or three years in western/northern Europe.

"...but police here is trained to shoot to incapacitate, and it generally seems to work."

I've never heard of this practice, and the opposite is regularly taught to various armed forces around the world. I'm curious to read about it, do you have any info or sources to share?

Half seems insignificant since in America the shootings are more commonly two sided, which warrants more deadly use of force. You wouldn't stop with the first bullet if your target had a gun in their hand(as opposed to a knife).

If the target has a gun in their hand no doubt they represent a threat. Use the body cam to prove that and you're good in the eyes of the law. But, I've seen plenty of people fleeing being shot and that is just so wrong, the said cop being the justice and the executioner, with a decision which they have taken in blink. And I've seen cases where the cop got away with it and that is what hot buttoned the protesters.

You really need a citation for the notion that police in any part of the world are trained to shoot to incapacitate rather than kill. Firearms are deadly weapons. Shots aimed at any part of the body can easily be fatal because there are arteries everywhere.

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