On Deadly Force

[kaninchenzero]

Here I get into some detail about firearms training and use and the effects of firearms on the human body. My use of language may seem detached and clinical in places; it is deliberate as this is a subject from which distance is a good thing for me. Trigger warnings apply.

One has to wonder how, in such a situation as officers deemed it

Comments

[noiseinmyhead]

My father was a gun dealer, before I was born. He always told me never draw a gun unless you mean to kill.

[kaninchenzero]

Yup. It is what they are for.

[kaninchenzero]

You're welcome! If it didn't annoy my wife so much I'd spend the whole show critiquing everything they're fucking up (this is fun for me and how I enjoy my mass media consumption). We've compromised; I stay quiet when the show's on unless it's something really egregious and gripe during commercial breaks.

[karjack]

This is pretty much in line with stuff I've heard as well, from cops who train cops.

And yeah, I was raised don't ever point a gun at someone you don't mean to kill.

[kaninchenzero]

Yeah it's pretty basic safety stuff -- for people who take it seriously. Media people have this idea that somehow showing how cop shit is actually done is boring and people won't watch. So they have cops do unsafe shit and write things that don't actually happen like cops shooting people weekly and criminal type people actually killing police which does not happen much because nobody wants to be around the asshole that every cop in the fucking world wants a piece of.

But dude The Wire was the best fucking thing ever. It was so frogdamn cool. They didn't fuck up the cop shit much; they showed pretty much how it's done. Which meant yeah you send the fuckup you can't get rid of to do shit like dig through microfiche for a few days and print things out. [asscone]

[karjack]

What blows my mind is that the real cop stuff is way more interesting. To me, at least. I guess that's why a lot of cop shows don't interest me. They're just another way of couching white-guy power fantasies at the expense of stories about real human experience. I haven't seen The Wire yet, but now I'm interested.

The sergeant whose talks I attended about this stuff mentioned how much many of his colleagues hate cop shows because of all the cadets who come in thinking that's exactly how it's going to be. Like training someone to be a good cop isn't hard enough without having to train that shit out of them.

[avengangle]

We just covered a class in Crim Law with a cop shooting a burglar in the back of the head, and a significant number of students said, "Hey, why couldn't he have shot him in the leg or something to incapacitate rather than kill?" The prof didn't know any of the stuff you covered here, but some of my classmates are ex-military (and/or gun owners/users) and managed to correct the rest of us after class.

I remained silent, because I know I don't know a lot about guns and am OK with that.

[kaninchenzero]

It is so okay to not know a lot about guns. Not that you need external validation for that but I know it's also nice to get sometimes. A big reason we have these elaborate societies and laws and customs is so we can live together and not have to go about armed or afraid we might be killed. We don't actually have this in the US. We have it in parts of the US but others are heartbreakingly violent. We have built a society where keeping non-white people incarcerated and systematically destroying non-white people's lives and families and communities is such a high priority we have spent hundreds of billions of dollars on this program at home and hundreds of billions exporting it with similarly destructive results. There has been not the slightest indication it works at all to achieve its stated goals of ending or reducing the consumption of certain intoxicating substances. It is an evil rivaling institutional slavery. Even the Jim Crow years weren't quite this evil