They shot a crazy man who was armed only with a Metro card. And so, in a crowded area, the cops opened fire, hitting only bystanders.
Apparently he pointed his finger at the cops. And since the cops couldn't tell a finger from a Glock, they went into bangity mode.
There are a few things at play. First off, as BadTux has noted before,* there is a cult of "officer safety" that holds that cops are to do anything and everything to avoid putting their bodies at risk.** Second, the NYPD requires very heavy trigger pulls on their sidearms. It's damn near self-evident that very heavy triggers will yield crappy shooting guns.
Not that things are going to change anytime soon. It'd take NYPD brass who actually understood something about firearms and who were willing to shout down the City's lawyers to fix this.***
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* You'll have to find it on your own. I'm feeling lazy and I'm not getting paid for this.
** They leave being heroes to the firefighters.
*** So the white-shirts will stick to pepper-spraying corralled women.
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5 comments:
The cure for stopping cops from trying to kill people who point a finger at them is to take away their guns — and instruct the cops to point their fingers at armed perps and say "bang bang!" when they want to defend themselves.
I suspect — I'm not 100 percent confident, but I suspect — that after a while the cops would learn how to tell the difference between a finger and a pistol.
Yours Crankily,
The New York Crank
"You just can't tell what a suspect will do under those conditions! You just can't know that he doesn't have a squadron of B-52s in his pocket! I had to empty nine magazines into him, to protect my precious, precious safety!"
Perhaps if New York cops had to pay $1,000 for each bullet they fire in anger, more black people will get to live.
And, if that were to happen, and they were to voice protests about their own safety, we'd stop laughing after a decade or two.
Nag,
>>>Perhaps if New York cops had to pay $1,000 for each bullet they fire in anger, more black people will get to live.<<<
Since their aim is so good you really should change that to....
>Perhaps if New York cops had to pay $1,000 for each bullet they fire in anger, more innocent people will get to live.
Just sayin.
Eck!
I'm beginning to think that the solution is AI guns with serious 3D mapping and analytics.
They'd be a bit large and hard to handle at first, but once Moore's Law cuts in, the CPU could be the size of the current handle.
As an aside, California is looking at banning lead in bullets.
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