You sound confused. This is not a precedent. Cops have long had the law behind them to use whatever force they deem necessary to stop a threat to people, whether the assailant is armed or not. In fact, every state has a law on the books that even private citizens can resort to lethal force if they reasonably believe they are facing imminent threat to grave bodily harm or death. And not one of those statutes limits the amount of force necessary based up whether or not the assailant is armed.
We are.
Ha ha. Preparing by agitating for 'gun laws'. Right. I think your slogan during Trump's presidency was "Trump is a fascist and we want him to take away all our guns!"
Before the 6 January riot, all we heard from the Left was "Defund the Police!" ... If you listened to the Left, innocent unarmed Black youth, on their way to do charitable good works or study for their degrees in aeronatical engineering, were being mercilessly gunned down by racist white policemen almost daily. But suddenly .... it's "Back the Blue"!
Now, I'll tell you a secret: the poor deluded people who thought they were going, for once, to use the tactics of the Left to right an electoral wrong ... are paying the penalty for not being as smart as they should be.
They handed the Left an enormous victory, a gift that will go on giving for years, wiping out the memory of the events of the summer when it was the Left burning buildings, torching police cars, leaving bodies of innocents behind.
We lack competent leadership, and our people are the prey of demagogues and grifters. This is just a cold hard fact that serious patriots must face.
I haven't followed these events with respect to Mr Trump's role, or with respect to the role of infiltrators like Ray Epps who egged them on, or with respect to whether advance knowledge of what was going to happen was deliberately ignored so that the Capitol was not protected.
Police infiltration of groups and provocation is not at all unknown, although it's usually used against the Left. But I don't know if it happened here, on a planned scale (certainly individual infiltrators like Ray Epps were active).
All the spokesmen for all sides are untrustworthy here, obviously driven by partisan animus.
And ... as a rightwinger, on the one hand, my reflex is to 'back the Blue' in these situations, regardless of the politics. So although I think Mr Byrd was over-hasty, and that killing this poor woman was not justified, I don't think he deserves any penalty for it. And as I said, he's set a precedent that the people laughing about Babbit's death may come to regret.
On the other hand, I know that the police have some bad apples among them.
A personal acquaintance of mine, Ron Burkholder, a gentle, eccentric science worker -- who however liked to indulge in mind-altering drugs -- was shot to death by a Los Angeles policeman, in what appeared to me to be totally unwarranted circumstances. And of course the policeman walked. [
LOS ANGELES POLICE SCORED ON SHOOTING (Published 1977) ] So I may be a bit prejudiced here with respect to police killing unarmed people.
Ron's killer walked, as did the policeman who shot Daniel Shaver to death as he lay on the ground walked, and as the policemen who shot Duncan Lemp did as well. As did the men who killed the family of that eccentric at Ruby Ridge, and as did the men who carried out the Waco Massacre.
(By the way, a good book on that terrible event was written by a very leftwing friend of mine, and is worth reading. I appreciate his ability to transcend his political hostility towards the victims and give an honest account of their fate: You can't link to Amazon on here, but go there and look up
THE ASHES OF WACO by Dick Reavis.)
So Leftists who cheer the killing of Ashli Babbit by a policeman -- and those who, like the person who originated this thread, warmly hope to see a lynching, really ought to think twice. It's usually people on my side who have this reaction.