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Comment by michaelmrose | Hacker News Reader

To be maximally fair they didn't kill the old guy a heart attack did which might have been unavoidable.

I went googling and found this: A study at Johns Hopkins University School of Medicine has demonstrated that sudden emotional stress can result in reversible heart failure[1]. It goes on "a traumatic event such as a breakup, the death of a loved one, or even the shock of a surprise party can provoke a heart attack in people who don't have heart disease and are otherwise healthy, researchers say". and

"Dr. Wittstein and his research team found that some people may respond to sudden, overwhelming emotional stress by releasing large amounts of adrenalin and other chemicals into the blood stream. These chemicals can be temporarily toxic to the heart, effectively stunning the muscle and producing symptoms similar to those of a typical heart attack: chest pain, fluid in the lungs, shortness of breath and heart failure. However, there are no further similarities between "broken heart" syndrome and cardiac arrest. Closer inspection using blood tests and magnetic resonance imaging scans failed to show the typical heart attack signs, such as irreversible muscle damage and elevated levels of certain enzymes."

If that happened, it would have been avoidable; it doesn't necessarily mean he was sickly and this was the straw that broke the camel's back.

(Aside: I wonder if anyone here would think comparable things of the organizers of a surprise party, 16 years after it's published in a medical journal that they can be fatal? What if the birthay person was known to hate surprise parties? Anyone calling for a death penalty or years in prison?)

[1] https://www.jhunewsletter.com/article/2005/03/sudden-shock-c...

I meant the cops aren't necessarily at fault as the unavoidable stress of such a confrontation might have inevitably ended in a difficult to predict or mitigate health complications.

Swatting has a predictable risk of mortality thus the criminals don't get off morally because their victim died a different way than expected.

> "because their victim died a different way than expected."

I haven't seen a claim that the perpetrators expected the man to die - didn't they want to harass and scare him until he gave up his Twitter handle? If he was dead they'd have no chance of getting access to it, therefore they likely were not planning for him to die, right?

They were ok risking him being killed in order to obtain the expected benefit. If you beat someone killing them is a predictable risk. It constitutes merely a lesser crime in the same category.

I am not agreeable to the claim that minors who called a SWAT raid internationally because of a Twitter account were really forseeing all the possible consequences and rationally deciding they were OK with them. I'm also not okay with you claiming a militarised police force SWAT raid was "unavoidable".

I don't see anywhere people are saying it was actually SWAT or any kind of "raid". It was simply a bunch of cops according to the family members in the video. They did not enter his house, they merely approached it. He appears to live in a rural area.

Swatting is used to mean calling the authorities with a fake crisis so subject people at the address targeted to risk and inconvenience it has nothing to do with the resulting police response.

If Barney Fife showed up to kindly ask you if you were ok you would have been swatted just not very effectively.

> "I don't see anywhere people are saying it was actually SWAT or any kind of "raid"."

The article uses this picture: https://static.techspot.com/images2/news/bigimage/2019/03/20...

Google reverse image search for that suggests a search term of "fbi swat team" and first result is a wikipedia link to "FBI Special Weapons and Tactics Teams". The picture is from the Wikipedia page on swatting which says it is "an FBI SWAT team during training". https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Swatting

Yes it's clearly not a photo of the actual event. Are you complaining that you were misled? or are you suggesting "techbase" uses of stock photos is more authoritative than their own primary sources which I just summarized for you?

You said "I don't see anywhere people are saying it was actually SWAT" and I'm pointing you to where the article implies actual SWAT was involved, with their use of a photo of an actual SWAT team.

Are we victim blaming now? Is that what we’re doing?

Are we being deliberately obtuse in order to inject left-wing buzzwords into situations where they're completely inapplicable? It's that what we're doing?

I meant the cops dont apear to be at fault for a change.

That's stupid.

If you shoot someone, we don't say that technically the bullet killed them not the person who fired the shot.

That's a false equivalence. If you shoot someone with a gun, it's reasonable to expect them to die. It is not a reasonable expectation that someone will die when you ask them their name and tell them to put down their weapon.

You can reasonably know that shooting a person with a bullet will cause injury or death. Telling them to drop their weapon and surrender does not usually cause injury or death.

I meant the cops might not be at fault

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