Wednesday, October 19, 2016

How it's framed...

The headline at CNN looked pretty grim:
Yikes. Well, NYPD pistol training is hurting pretty badly these days, and we all know what happens when you give an undertrained person a gun and a healthy dose of paranoia via hours of scary dashcam videos.

Then I read the body of the piece:
The woman grabbed a baseball bat and attempted to strike the sergeant, Nikunen said. The officer fired two shots, striking the woman in the torso, he said.
Wait, what? What's the problem here?

Look, y'all, if you see someone swinging a baseball bat at me and I'm not already shooting them, I'd be much obliged if you'd get to shooting them for me. I don't care if they're 16 or 66 or what bathroom they use or if they're white or black or a sort of tie-dyed color.

A baseball bat to the cranium is lethal force and don't kid yourself otherwise. You start lethal forcing at me and I'm gonna lethal force right back at you to make you stop.

EDITED TO ADD (because it came up in the BookFace discussion):

Ignore the "Why didn't he draw his taser?" thing. That's a red herring. The use of force spectrum is not like baseball. You do not have to touch every base. If you need to run straight home from second, that's perfectly legal. 
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