Annoying Terminology...

Two phrases often used in journalism get under my skin because of the ignorance in which they are rooted.

The first is when it's intoned that someone shot "an unarmed man". There's no requirement that someone be armed or not to use lethal force. You may reasonably believe they are armed. You may reasonably believe they are trying to become armed. You may know they are are unarmed and yet still have a reasonable belief that they still present an immediate, otherwise unavoidable, threat of death or grievous bodily harm to yourself or another innocent individual.

Actually, that latter part is the whole nut of whether deadly force is legal or not: Do you have a reasonable belief that they present an immediate, otherwise unavoidable, threat of death or grievous bodily harm to yourself or another innocent individual? If so, their actual status of being armed or not is immaterial.

The other annoyance is when the newsreader breathlessly intones that "the death has been ruled a homicide." Well, no duh, Sherlock. We all saw him shoot the guy right there on video, and he was delivered to the coroner full of bullet holes, so we didn't need to wait on the official ruling from the medical examiner to know this; that was just a formality.

All "homicide" means is that a dude was killed by another dude, as opposed to dying of natural causes or being hit by a mysterious piano falling out of a cloudless sky. It's not a criminal ruling. It's up to the legal system to determine if the homicide was a justified one or not.
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