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Comment by cvwright | Hacker News Reader

I'm ok with arresting someone who brings a gun or fentanyl, if that means we get them before they can kill someone.

You think fentanyl is magic killing dust? What are you, one of those moronic cops who thinks they'll die from seeing fentanyl?

They only way you're injuring someone with fentanyl is getting them to ingest an unsafe amount of it one way or another. That's not really different from a lot of prescription drugs. Or some OTC ones, like Tylenol. Or lye and many other cleaning agents.

The dose makes the poison. The LD50 for lye is 4,090 (rats) - 6,600 mg/kg (mice). The LD50 for fentanyl is 3.1 mg/kg in rats and 0.03 mg/kg in monkeys. So, very different.

And?

The only way someone is ingesting that accidentally is if a classmate is attempting to poison them. There are a lot of other poisons that can be ingested in small doses if someone is trying to injure you. Fentanyl is not going to leap out of someone's pocket and fly down your throat. It's not magic killing dust.

Accidental drug dosing happens all the time, with things with much larger effective doses. People mix up drugs. Drugs absolutely fall out of people's pockets on a near constant basis.

OP is suffering from the moral panic about fentanyl. It's gotten so ridiculous that cops suffer from a collective begin near it is enough to knock them out: https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=S0Vzz_P9JBk

If people wonder how possession worked in the middle ages, look no further than this.

to be fair, i think carfentanil somehow got conflated with fetanyl early in the drug-scare-hype cycle, and carfentanil is pretty deadly.

i do agree with your point though.

What about shooting a kid for having a water gun?

Edit: fuck me, I was half joking and thought I'd check anyway. What a shit show. Latest case was 5 days ago. https://www.google.com/search?q=American+police+shoot+kid+wi...

Look at the water gun in question though: https://abcnews.go.com/US/traumatizing-family-calls-justice-...

Still sucks that the kid got shot for it, but I can see the confusion, compared to the usual colorful water guns.

That's the thing though, in the civilised world, if you see something like this in the hands of a child, you'd assume it's a toy.

Maybe this is more a reflection of the US being civilized or not, but there are teenage “children” the same size as the kid in this story, using actual guns to commit violent robberies in parts of my city. So it’s not trivial to determine whether an adult-sized human holding a black gun is a threat or not.

This is America; Owning a real gun should not be an acceptable reason to be shot by the police. What the fuck is the point of all the aggressive defense around the second amendment if the second a cop sees a gun they are free to murder people?

Cops are not judge, jury, and executioners, and in fact have zero authority to hand down punishment. Being shot for holding a gun is absurd.

Is it that unreasonable? An adult-sized person was waving a realistic looking gun around and (allegedly) pointing it at houses. Some attempt at deescalation needs to be made, but if that fails, I wouldn’t want the cop to just shrug and leave. I’d expect him to do whatever it takes to remove the gun from this individual.

There’s a huge difference between simply owning a gun vs wandering around in public pointing it at people.

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