Comments on: On the Shooting of Laquan McDonald

By: Cornelius

Cornelius — Thu, 26 Nov 2015 15:20:26 +0000

Fifty-eight minutes of the security footage from a nearby Burger King have been erased. Cops took the tape, returned, and the footage is now missing.

By: Johann Theron

Johann Theron — Thu, 26 Nov 2015 07:10:06 +0000

I am no expert in this, but my experience tells me that the cop kept on firing because he was under severe stress and was in fact releasing his emotional bucket, so to speak. Other people do that differently. You have no idea what it takes to confront a berserk (not crazy) person until you have done it and no idea how you will react regardless of a “good shoot” training. My view on this is that the cop was absolutely forced to lower his standards to become berserk himself, and he kept on shooting to make himself sane, i.e. to come back up from that terrible situation, which will undoubtedly happen again and again in America in future. So, other Officers should take serious note of this.

By: Slovenian Guest

Slovenian Guest — Thu, 26 Nov 2015 03:21:20 +0000

Essentially MythBusters did the so called Tueller Drill:

A self-defense training exercise to prepare against a short-range knife attack when armed only with a holstered handgun. Sergeant Dennis Tueller, of the Salt Lake City, Utah Police Department wondered how quickly an attacker with a knife could cover 21 feet (6.4 m), so he timed volunteers as they raced to stab the target. He determined that it could be done in 1.5 seconds. These results were first published as an article in SWAT magazine in 1983 and in a police training video by the same title, "How Close is Too Close?" A defender with a gun has a dilemma. If he shoots too early, he risks being charged with murder. If he waits until the attacker is definitely within striking range so there is no question about motives, he risks injury and even death. The Tueller experiments quantified a "danger zone" where an attacker presented a clear threat.

Dennis Tueller Interview (YouTube)

By: Slovenian Guest

Slovenian Guest — Thu, 26 Nov 2015 02:53:20 +0000

People really think of shootings as some sort of Olympic discipline and how anything not resembling a duel between respectable gentlemen is somehow unfair. It’s almost seen as an offense against sportsmanship when the police puts someone “only” holding a knife down, the troopers didn’t even count to ten, sacrebleu!

Which reminds me of Mythbusters: Never Bring a Knife to a Gun Fight.

The myth is that it is foolish to bring a knife to a gunfight, but, if you were standing in front of me with a knife in your hand, and I’ve got a gun in my holster, I think I’m in danger! What do we want to know? What is the minimum distance at which a knife is in fact dangerous to a person with a gun.

Adam Savage concludes: “When you hear the phrase, don’t bring a knife to a gun fight, it implies, that if you’re the one holding the gun, you should feel completely relaxed in your superior firepower against your opponents stone-age tool, and I think we totally busted that myth.”

Even liberal Adam Savage would have pulled the trigger in this situation.

By: Space Nookie

Space Nookie — Wed, 25 Nov 2015 20:58:57 +0000

The officer may have (mistakenly) thought he had a pistol and thus when he fell on his right side with right hand outstretched towards the officer it looked like he was still trying to shoot.

By: Bomag

Bomag — Wed, 25 Nov 2015 20:06:17 +0000

Good grief. We have gone so far down the road that we have to count bullets to see if it was a “good shoot”.

The Laquan McDonalds of the world are troubling. We’ve invested a fair amount on his behalf: school, I presume, and the various social programs we all use, and programs for the less fortunate. But what we received was a knife wielding, PCP fueled criminally aggressive young man who is cheaper to us dead than alive.

That is almost too cruel to consider, and economics isn’t everything, but yet here we are. The Buckley adage seems apt, “feed them, but not too well.”