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Comment by uberman | Hacker News Reader

When responding to a break and enter and you find two people fighting over a knife. How about next time you shoot the one wearing the ski-mask rather than the one in his underwear.

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Even worse the victim's daughter provided a description of the intruder when she called 911 (a woman wearing a red hoodie). When the cop saw a woman wearing a red hoodie trying to stab a black man in his underwear he chose to shoot the black man in his underwear.

They had knives, how about using a taser instead ?

I have been saying for decades, regular cops in the US should not be allowed to carry guns. If they need help, call fully trained people with guns.

Or maybe no guns unless they have a fully unblemished record, without any kind of complaint.

Tasers fail frequently and knives are extremely deadly within a certain range. Yours is a very unconsidered opinion; not really helpful to this debate.

Guns also fail frequently, in ways that are much deadlier to innocent and unprepared bystanders, as seen in the article. Perhaps tasers per se are not the answer, but there most certainly needs to be a range of nonlethal interventions available to police officers. The current system appears to be "turn up and make a snap decision who to murder to make the problem stop", which is - dare I say - a bad system. It is not even unreasonable to argue against giving government officials the power to simply end people on a whim at all.

I don’t necessarily disagree overall, but what does that have to do with the point about knives being very dangerous in close quarters, and tasers being a very poor/risky choice to try to stop someone trying to harm you/another with a knife? That’s what I was commenting on…

Shot once then 4 more times. The policy is terrifying in the US. Many deaths could be avoidable with a policy change.

> Mr Bookman then fires five more shots at Mr Durham and says "put your hands up"

WTF?

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