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Comment by jonlucc | Hacker News Reader

Shooting into a moving car is insanely dangerous. The expected outcome is an uncontrolled moving car.

Sometimes that's a preferable outcome to the alternative. The North Hollywood shootout is an extreme example, but it illustrates the point; if bank robbers in a car are shooting at everybody they see, the cops shooting back at them is the only reasonable response.

This doesn't mean cops should be making a habit of having high speed shootouts on freeway; nobody wants that. It means the rules need to allow reasonable leeway for people to do what they think is appropriate in the unique situations they encounter. Blanket bans enacted by people reasoning about generalized scenarios are not a good idea. Those sort of absolute rules are too simplistic to be good for anything other than pandering to crowds.

There are some limited situations where an uncontrolled moving car is less dangerous then a controlled car being actively used as a weapon. For example, in the 2016 Nice truck attack if a police officer had a clear shot at the driver should they have avoided taking the shot?

Using a one time unique event as the reason for dismissing a provably valuable policy change isn’t very rational.

It would be like using a single child’s death caused by a vaccine as the reason to ban all vaccines.

Simply put, such a policy to save far more lives that it would cost, which must count for something. Or perhaps we should also stop using seatbelts and airbags.

There are certainly more examples beyond that one event. I support additional reasonable restrictions on police use of force but they have to allow for human judgment in unusual situations rather than flat bans.

Those proposing these restrictions see everything in shades of grey, to most of them it is self evident that officers would be able to exercise judgementand defend themselves after the fact by pointing at an exception. Those opposed tothe restrictions see everything as black and white, you do what the law says or you go to jail. I think... Generalizations are always always wrong.

Better than a controlled moving car aiming for pedestrians.

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