Under no circumstance should cops KILL

[Rev. Rye]

The thing is, cops are trained to be prepared for the worst, which frequently involves a criminal who's got a gun and is willing to use it. In the previous year alone, we've had 11 incidents of mass shootings where at least three people died. Trying to take them out without a gun is going to be a lot harder. When it comes to self-defense, it's clear that killing is likely the only good option in many cases. That said, even in the best of cases, the line between legitimate self-defense and killing an innocent person can be shockingly thin. I can remember watching the movie "Over the Edge." It features a scene where Matt Dillon points a gun at Doberman, a cop and the main villain. Dillon is shot and killed and it turns out the gun was unloaded. As much of an uproar as this rightly caused among the townsfolk, he makes a damn good point: there is no way you can tell for sure whether a gun that's pointed at you is loaded or not without inspecting it yourself. There's a lot of factors that have to be taken into account, and, in situations like this, you have to try and take them all into account within seconds. Blink features a dissection of the shooting of Amadou Diallo, how a young Guinean immigrant was shot in the middle of the night for matching a general description and pulling out a wallet that the police assumed was a gun. If it was a gun, they could very well have been killed. But it wasn't, and so, he was shot at 41 times (hitting 19.)

Let's face it, as a cop, you have to deal with the worst parts of humanity, and a lot of the time, that includes a disproportionate number of minorities, which will likely colour your views of said minorities. And then, when all those aspects and others combine, we get a situation where 987 people got killed by police last year, some for legitimate reasons, and an inexcusable number for absurdly minor reasons. It would be so nice if police didn't have to be armed, but clearly we don't live in an America where that's a viable option. And I strongly suspect we won't be able to change that anytime soon.