Is “kill or be killed” replacing t”o protect and to serve”
by digby
Here’s another person making the case that you should be able to shoot unarmed people if they scare you. He is one of the editors of Red State, via TPM:
Remember, Mike Brown did not have a gun with which to kill Darren Wilson. He didn’t have any weapons at all. In a later tweet, after being criticized, Howe says, “if you have shot him multiple times and he’s still coming what do you do? You take him down if you can.” Let’s just say it’s a little hard to to believe that he meant that he would have shot Brown “right in the face” while he was allegedly charging at him. His original tweet pretty clearly meant he would have shot Brown in the face while sitting in the police cruiser.
I wrote earlier about the fact that a whole lot of Americans have adopted the belief that they have a right to shoot any unarmed person “right in the face” if they feel afraid. Even if they are in sitting in a car in which they could just roll up the window and drive away, they are justified in pulling out a gun and shooting someone if they scare them. This is basically what “stand your ground” is all about.
Now it’s obviously different for a police officer who is paid to confront scary people and protect society from them. But they too used to have an obligation not to shoot unarmed people in the face. After all, cops confront people all day long and it’s an inherently stressful situation. If they just start shooting agitated people who look scary, even if the person is unarmed, we are going to see a whole lot more deaths at the hands of police than we already have.
What you’re talking about are the rules of combat where a soldier in a war zone is charged with killing the enemy and the enemy is charged with killing him. It’s kill or be killed. Policing in the streets of America is supposed to be different. Or it used to be anyway, with the police having a very strong obligation to de-escalate situations with unarmed citizens, not shoot them down in the street. “Kill or be killed” is a very dangerous credo for the authorities to have in a so-called free society.
As for that Red State editor, it turns out that he’s a puerile fellow with delusions of grandeur:
He obviously got a little bit flustered there. It’s far more likely the guy who beat up high school kids is the one suffering from the bad karma, no? And yeah, Karma is a bitch. If you believe in that sort of thing, petty bullies who beat up kids in high school are likely to come back as in their next life as horseflies. Just saying.
