Earlier (June 2) : Biden Suggests Cops Shoot "Unarmed" Persons Coming At Them With A Knife In The Leg Instead Of The Heart
From Joe Biden’s Town Hall transcript on how to reform the police:
There’s a lot of things we’ve learned and it takes time, but we can do this. You can ban chokeholds, you can — but — but beyond that, you have to teach people how to de-escalate circumstances, de-escalate.
So, instead of anybody coming at you and the first thing you do is shoot to kill, you shoot them in the leg.
Why not just shoot the knife or gun out of the bad guy’s hand like on the TV Westerns that Joe avidly watched in 1955?
From TV Tropes:
Discussed in Blue Bloods after Jamie kills a man for the first time. A reporter at a press briefing asks Frank why Jamie shot to kill instead of trying to shoot the gun out of the man’s hand. Frank just sort of gives him an exasperated look before explaining that Jamie followed department policy, which is to shoot until the threat is neutralized. Then, when the reporter keeps trying to press the issue, Frank shuts him up for good:
Frank: There’s a man in front of you waving a gun in your direction. You have a second to react. What do you do?
Reporter: Well, first I’d-
Frank: [interrupts] Too late. You’re dead.
Joe has been expounding upon his “shoot them in the leg” reform for months on the campaign trail. Does it focus group well? Has nobody asked him about how it is supposed to work in the real world? And how would an announced police policy of Don’t Shoot to Kill de-escalate circumstances? Wouldn’t it incentivize crooks to try their luck charging the cops?
By the way, I could imagine a policy of shooting out tires on getaway cars might be worth considering. For example, in the Jacob Blake case in Kenosha, you have Blake’s ex-girlfriend screaming that this man is stealing her car with her children inside it. Maybe in these kinds of cases where the cops arrive and they can’t tell if it’s really a kidnapping or just a domestic dispute, shooting out a tire would buy some time to sort things out.
But, of course, shooting at a car with three children in it …
By the way, my mother was selected for the jury to try Richard Pryor in the January 1, 1978 incident in which, after a tumultuous New Year’s Eve, his wife climbed in her car to leave him for good, but Pryor, wishing to slow things down, shot the engine of her car in his driveway. (But the trial was then delayed, so the jury my mom was on was dismissed.)
