Viewing a single comment thread. View all comments

Soggy_Affect6063 t1_j9ujv2z wrote

Reply to comment by Badgercakes7 in bridgeport firefighters catalyst converter stolen at fire dept by Technical_Success987

“First of all they are innocent. A) our criminal Justice system is based on the presumption of innocence until proven guilty in a court of law and b) in case you missed it in my comment, I am referring to a case where a car owner comes up and sees someone near their car and THINKS they are thieves despite the fact that they are not. If I drop my keys and they roll under your car for example. In this case they definitively ARE innocent in every sense of the word.”

I’ve explained “positive id” relative to your example of innocence twice and I’m not explaining it a third. You obviously aren’t getting it.

“I have seen plenty of videos of the use of deadly force. How about the one where a police officer shot a kid holding a pear because he thought it was a grenade? There are plenty of videos of people being killed because the person with a gun THOUGHT they were in danger but they either due to a lack of training or just the fact that humans are fallible, jittery idiots on the whole, are capable of making split second mistakes, Including “trained” individuals. And given the current “training” required to be a gun owner is a power point presentation, a multiple choice test and firing a couple rounds in a gun range, I wouldn’t exactly consider that adequate training. You can claim you want gun owners to be better trained for real world situations, fine I can agree with that, but you cannot deny that they currently ARENT and taking woefully untrained people and allowing them and even encouraging them to use firearms in real world situations will, inevitably, lead to them making incorrect assumptions and decisions and will, inevitably, lead to them causing the deaths of innocent people.”

You are seriously stretching what defines an innocent person as a generalization in these cases. Even more, the kid with a pear. Okay let’s take that case. What information was given to the officer prior to him shooting that kid with a pear vs me happening upon you with your dropped chapstick next to my car? You’re implying a very choice set of variables that have to happen in sequence that would lead to me thinking that you were stealing my cat. Which is highly unlikely because any thinking person can see that you don’t have a sawzall and will probably state that you dropped your chapstick. I’m saying NO ONE thinks like that unprovoked, armed or not. I beg to ask because there are armed people among us everyday, has that ever happened to you where someone thought you were stealing something and pointed a gun at you without question just because you were bent over?

“So I ask again, how many catalytic converters is worth an innocent persons life?”

🤦‍♂️

2

Badgercakes7 t1_j9up6ld wrote

Dude. Are you serious? Our police are trained (to some extent) to obtain”positive id” of wrong doing prior to using deadly force and guess what? They get it wrong not infrequently. And those are people who do this for a living and are trained, quite specifically, in doing this. And you want to empower some dumbass whose only training is an afternoon sitting through a PowerPoint on gun safety and firing 3 rounds in a gun range to try and do the same thing?

You are so hung up on the idea that people would only use deadly force if the are 100% sure of wrongdoing but that completely isn’t the case. Look at Ahmaud Arbery. Those guys killed him, thinking he was a threat, because he was jogging in the “wrong” neighborhood. People make mistakes, especially when they believe themselves (correctly or incorrectly) to be in a life or death situation. In the case of the kid with the pear, the cop asked the kid to put his hands in the air. He did and he happened to have a pear in his hands, the cop thought it was a grenade so he shot him. Our trained professionals get this wrong, which is the entire reason they are given qualified immunity, and you expect someone without their training to do better? This isn’t some Hollywood movie, you’re not a superhero.

1

Soggy_Affect6063 t1_j9v2mu5 wrote

I love the “this isn’t some hollywood movie” because pretty much everyone who’s shot a firearm knows hollywood is trash when it comes to anything realistic about firearms. Also tells me where you’re getting your information from. TV and not the range.

You guys are fine with throwing around “innocent until proven guilty” and want to talk to me about reality but throw around extreme circumstances or outliers that aren’t even remotely representative of the values or training of the majority of law enforcement or civilian gun ownership. In both cases people decried the actions of the officer and those looney toons that chased down Amaud.

But since you want to throw around incidents lets go there. Earlier this year an armed citizen, stopped a violent attacker, Estaban padron, who had slashed two other applebees employees. No shots were fired. This happened in upstate NY of all places. Was an “innocent” person killed? No. Did it stop the criminal activity? Yes.

Remember Shawn Sutton and his wife Melody? Dude pretended to be a customer to rob a gas station in North Georgia. Two armed customers noticed the situation, stopped the robbery, and held the two at gun point until officers arrived. No one died in that petty theft event.

Or this one. Stopped theft without a shot being fired. I could go on. That’s reality.

My invitation is always open if you guys want to hit up the range, a gun class, a self defense and firearms law course both of which are taught by law enforcement and attorneys so you can see for yourself.

1

Badgercakes7 t1_j9v6smv wrote

I possess and use firearms, I have hands on experience shooting a gun. I did not ever claim that SOME gun owners are capable of what you’re claiming, I am saying that <100% of them are. I’m sure that people with guns are, in some cases, capable of being useful but statistically speaking, having untrained armed citizens get involved in law enforcement leads to higher likelihood of innocent people (often random bystanders) being shot 12345

1