Believing police in the USA are anything near well trained or disciplined is naive at best.

Correct, which is why it’s not an opinion I expressed.

My statement was that giving untrained, undisciplined people weapons is a bad thing. The point was to address the whataboutism of “they’re out there shooting us right now,” not to defend the absolute joke that is police in the United States.

Now that I’ve discovered the rest of the article beyond the wall of ads, I agree. I had partial information, and wrongly believed it was all the information, as the blob of ads on my mobile device was a whole screen. That, combined with being on the way out the door in the morning, led me to believe I had read everything and everyone in this thread is insane. Thenn, someone made a specific reference to something I hadn’t read and I was prompted to go look, discovering there is much more article beyond our corporate sponsored break.

I legit thought they scared a dude with a rifle into fleeing, and then shot at him instead of letting him get away.

The dude with the rifle was running. That whole argument is fine when someone is draw weapons and making threats, but they shot at someone trying to flee the scene after causing no harm and killed an innocent. Everything else is imaginary justification.

EDIT: Wondering where the hell everyone else got so much more information, I reloaded the article, scrolled past the ad wall and found the rest of the text, which makes clear that the dude with the rifle pulled his gun into a firing position on the crowd. Fair enough, I was wrong and the citizen was right to have taken the shot. I blame the ad wall for convincing me that the news article was over.

Sorry, how many protesters were shot and killed by law enforcement this weekend?

Listen, I take your point, but the killing of random civilians isn’t better.

Exactly. The level of cultural brainwashing in this thread is insane. You don’t just let any random volunteer perform jobs like this.

Volunteers were told not to carry a weapon because of outcomes like this. They’re not trained professionals, and they’re definitely not action heroes. And now someone has to explain to a child, a parent, a partner, etc., that the civillian death here was just an unfortunate outcome of a wonderful American citizen protecting his country. It’s actually fucking despicible.

But what else could we have done?

What I want done is to create strong gun legislation instead of encouraging citizens to play action hero and see the civilian shot in the crossfire as an unfortunate but unpreventable casualty.

EDIT - I’m addressing everyone’s comments here rather than copy-pasting the same response to everyone. I had only read the first section of the article, having been fooled by the wall of ads on mobile into believing that the first five paragraphs was the whole article. Without the additional explination and context in the remaining article I had believed that, when approached by volunteer security, the man with the rifle had attempted to flee, and the securities’ response was to gun him down, and an innocent caught a stray. It was insane to me that people thought to defend that, but as people pointed out that the rifleman was running towards a crowd with the rifle in a firing position, I was wondering how the hell people got that from the 5 paragraphs. I reloaded the article, scrolled past a full screen of advertising, and discovered there was a lot more depth provided in the article than I had realized. With a rifle aimed at civilians, the security volunteer was right to take the shot, because the intent for harm was clear.

I stand by this being a systematic issue that needs solving at the root, but in the moment the security volunteer handled the situation correctly.

I did miss that bit in the full article, so fair enough. It certainly could be more clear though: they’re burying the lede pretty badly by opening with the wording that insinuates we don’t know.

“A person believed to be part of a peace keeping team” and “people running security” are not the same thing. At a glance this looks like the “good guy with a gun” mythos that pro-gun advocates keep spreading cost an innocent person their life.

If this is professional security who fucked up, sure, there’s a discussion to be had. If this is a volunteer peacekeeper who showed up strapped, he is part of the problem, not the solution.

No, I am responding based on the whole article.

What the fuck does “believed to be” mean in this sentence? Why do we not know? Were they hired protection? Are they a trained professional? Or are they an idiot with a gun who thinks they’re an action hero?

The article is very unclear on this front.

EDIT: Ha, no I wasn’t. Ad space is pervasive, and I had believed I had read the whole article when I had only read like a fifth of it.

Wait, so, trying to follow this: someone pulled a rifle on protestors, so a “concerned citizen” pulled a gun on that person, shot, missed, killed a bystander, and then shot again? Am I following this right? And the person being held accountable for the death is the guy who initially pulled the rifle, not the random citizen firing a weapon into a crowd?

Is this that “American exceptionalism” I keep hearing about?

EDIT - Nevermind, there’s a lot more detail after the wall of ads that convinced me the article was done.

I still have the CD in a box somewhere. It was loaned to me by a friend and I never gave it back. Hilariously, I still see that friend, so that might make for a fun conversation.

38% is in fact shockingly high.

I might have misread a b as an m.

Well, I can be wrong, and they can still be fuckwits.

So DOGE’s cuts saved just over $150 million (apparently I can’t read), and we’ve already burned through most of those saving mobilizing the national guard to tear gas people foolish enough to claim Trump isn’t king? Fantastic. I am so tired of all this “winning.”

Edit: I misread some stuff but the essence of the absurdity I am directing my anger at remains the same. Fuck fascism.

Don’t get me wrong, the gap is huge, but this graph is designed to misrepresent the information.

The scale starts at 45% and tops out at 60%. Even the bottom of the scale is only JUST below half, and the top is only 10% above it. The midway point is not the 50% mark, which one would expect to be the case for a graph showing percentages. So that low point is not the low point the graph insinuates, and the gap is only 15%, not the like 95% differential the graph insinuated until you start looking more closely.

The message is ultimately factual, but misrepresenting data to misrepresent vibes is still misinformation.

I’d challenge the word “illegal” in the Republican strategy, but I’m with the spirit of your post.

They’re not sending their best.

Doing the lords work, my man.

I’m so sick of watching these fascist fucks do their best to replace the empire they don’t like with an empire they do like, all the while cosplaying as a modern leftist. These guys are left wing like Stalin was left wing.

The term “eighty-six” is a verb, which the Merriam-Webster online dictionary defines as informally meaning “to refuse to serve” or “to eject or ban” a customer, and “to reject, discontinue, or get rid of” something.

Trump: “He called to have me killed!”

Calm down, snowflake in chief, he said you deserve to be let go. An opinion most of your country agrees with.

Uh, excuse me? They’re not American. Their skin is 1-2 shades too brown. They were here for the land and jobs that belongs to honest, god-fearing Americans.

/s because holy fuck, that could be a real response today.