Doesn't matter whether he was charging the officer. All that matters is that Brown was not armed. Until Brown reached the officer, overpowered him and actually took his gun, the officer had no right to defend himself violently against an aggressor. At the point Brown took the gun from him and his life was in danger the officer should have simply defended himself by shooting Brown with his finger. Bang! Bang! I got you!
Where are the statistics regarding officers being shot at with automatic weapons? It's very rare you hear about a crime with an automatic weapon.
http://www.wthr.com/story/19135945/pendleton-shooting-gun-altered-to-automatic-weapon http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/North_Hollywood_shootout http://csgv.org/resources/2013/what-law-enforcement-says-about-assault-weapons/ http://www.vpc.org/studies/awavio.htm http://www.spokesman.com/stories/2014/aug/01/highwayshootercharged/ http://www.spokesman.com/stories/2014/aug/01/highwayshootercharged/ http://articles.sun-sentinel.com/20..._1_police-officer-assault-weapons-frank-sousa I could keep posting more links but they're all about the same thing: outgunned police officers who wound up confronting a suspect, frequently a convicted felon, who was armed with automatic weapons. Somebody almost always dies in those situation and the police officers are as likely to be the victims as the suspect. You can't have a society in which high-powered weaponry is readily available to the criminal class and expect law enforcement to go in with handguns as their only recourse. Many of the shootings were highway shootings where there is no backup available for miles. The officer(s) often are not aware the suspect is armed when they pull them over. Then you have the problem of high-powered weaponry in the hands of formal militias who view the government and local law enforcement as the enemy. That's a separate issue but it also undoubtedly informs the decisions that some police chiefs make in terms of purchasing weapons and equipment.
Couldnt hear any sound on that video at work, but I have to say that cop should have at least kneecapped that guy as soon as he started dancing around.
I see 2 stories related to automatic weapons. You know there's a difference between automatic and semi-automatic?
Like I said, I could post a lot more links than the ones I put up. In each case the story was about an automatic weapon or an automatic weapon that had been modified to be semi-automatic (the AK-47). The point is that if we're going to have a society that is a perpetual armed camp I want the authorities to be at least even in the race. In 1929 the Bundestag legalized private ownership of guns in Germany. Within two years the Brownshirts were effectively the law in Germany. Why? Because they were both more numerous and better armed than the constabulary.
Cops have semiautomatic weapons. Automatic weapons are very rare. If the nazis try and take over we can call in the army.
they should take all that military equipment our police forces have and send it to the national guard on our southern border.
Well the reports I was referring to at the time was the eye witness accounts and the number of shots shot. The numbers of shots (6-10) and the eyewitness accounts saying Brown had his arms up pointed this to not be defensive. But there were conflicting reports at the time so I wasn't ready to absolutely call it a straight cop shooting an unarmed person with their hands up, just that from what I had read it didn't look good for the cop. The reports I read also stated the cop was not pulling them over for a robbery. He was pulling them over for jaywalking, not a thuggish behavior even though you listed it as fact. A lot of reports when that I posted read like this: http://www.cnn.com/2014/08/15/us/missouri-teen-shooting/index.html
Good post. I never thought of why the police department is not part of the community, but this makes more sense.
Here in SC we had a cop shoot an elderly man at a traffic stop,mistaking his cane for a gun. The old man died. The riots and looting have been postponed due to being civilized
If we get to the point where we have to call in the army we're totally screwed anyway. The problem in Germany in 1931 was that there were 3 million brownshirts and 100,000 in the army. All 100,000 were at home though, not entangled in foreign operations at that time. In 1934 Hitler disbanded the brownshirts and shot everybody at a high level in the organization. This is known as The Night of the Long Knives. The reason he did this was that the leader of the Brownshirts, Ernst Rohm, was conspiring to fold the vastly outnumbered Reichswer (army) into his command structure. Hitler already was co-opting the top military leaders at the time and they told him that Rohm was trying to get their allegiance. He wanted to save Rohm from the purge in gratitude for all the face-busting he had organized to bring the Nazi's to power but the Generals were adamant, Rohm had to die and he was killed by two officers from the newly formed SS.
So you want to live in a nanny police state so the nazi's don't take us over? Didn't we already kick their asses?
Much prefer a nanny state to Nazi's. It's the whole camps, ovens, mass machine gunnings, etc. That stuff is great in a WWII movie but I don't think any of us would like to live through it in real life. You never know who will control the wheels of power if constitutional government goes off the tracks. It could easily be eugenically oriented people, like the Nazi's, who decide that over-population is the biggest problem that America faces and start carpet-bombing cities to fix the problem.
