Police kill middle school student

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I hope you realize that in the context of my post, this reply doesn't make any sense. It's also one thing to say that the police are innocent - given their duty, the outcome was pretty much inevitable.

My point is that I doubt if the persons directly involved in this particular situation could have done anything to help the kid anyway - I don't doubt that they tried, and I'm not trying to argue whether or not they tried hard enough. I simply find it sad that someone who could have made a difference was not around, because however you look at it the outcome is not a very good one - a kid who refused to drop a toy gun actually died.

 

Not a toy gun -- a pellet gun. They have about the same damage potential as a .22 cal short round (and about the same look as well).

 

I read in another article that the police tried to contact the kids family to see if they could talk him down.

I seem to be totally unable to find this article now though, its not appearing on google anymore.

I dont think this is really something which can be stated, unless someone can present realistic statistics of every millitary outfit in the world and their 'assassination' mission specifics in the recent years. Im pretty confident that Russian GRU units have done alot of crap that we dont know about, same can be said for many other special forces groups. The whole "our special forces are better than your's" almost sounds like 2 kids in a playground arguing "my dad's bigger than yours"

we dont know anything about the gun, lots of bb and pellet/air soft guns are made to look like the real thing, they are imitation firearms, I highly doubt that the tip of this gun was painted red like a real toy gun to tell police that it isnt real.



Could you tell that isnt real if someone pointed it at you?

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I agree, the police was just doing their work. It is a tragic outcome, and I am pretty sure the officers involved are not sleeping too well after that (Police work can be traumatising. As far as I know, here in Germany Police officers are required to regularly visit therapists to avoid an escalation. Left with a trauma too long, can also cause disasters...like a police officer running amok.).


As for the shooting at the center of mass, that is pretty much common practice. It is the most likely to actually hit. But even if they tried hitting limbs, or anywhere else, that doesn't mean a person is much more likely to survive. The legs and the arms both contain important, and rather large major arteries. Even slightly injuring them can quickly make a person bleed out. The lower body also harbors the danger of injuring the colon, which is not a pretty thing. It basically poisons the body, and also contains blood vessels.

There's no "safe" points for shooting at someone. If you shoot at a person, you should be aware that it can always be lethal. There is no "shoot to wound".

 

I've already stated my opinion, but perhaps it would be more reasonable to assess based not on the outcome of the officer's decision, but rather on the rationale used in making that decision. It seems to me that the officer's reasoning for why the chose to open fire was reasonable - they thought the kid had a real gun and thus, all the while he was so armed he was a danger to other people in the school. That it turned out to be a fake gun is tragic, but the officers had no way of knowing that at the time they made their decision. I don't think anyone here believes that the officers would still have opened fire had they known the gun was fake.

 

He refused to drop it, they had no choice.