dr_analog
top 1% of underdog fetishists
No bio...
User ID: 583
It does mention scuffle above but let's drill down on your point. I wouldn't normally do this but since this is the game I'm playing, here's my very next prompt in the conversation. This is, I think, as fair and as neutral as I can make it.
me
lets say there's a scuffle. there's 6 or 8 officers on top of me trying to subdue me. my gun is taken by one of the officers but the rest don't necessarily know that. they eventually, in the confusion, open fire on me and kill me. what's the tactical and legal determination? again, answer in one brief paragraph.
ChatGPT
Tactically, once you’re in a pile-on with multiple officers and there’s a report or glimpse of a gun, the scene collapses into pure threat heuristics: fragmented information, adrenaline, shouted “gun!” or “he’s armed!” cues, and officers default to worst-case assumptions—so even if one officer has already secured your weapon, the others may not know that and will treat any movement as a potential draw attempt, which is exactly how blue-on-blue or overkill shootings happen in chaotic arrests. Legally, the analysis is still Graham v. Connor objective reasonableness, judged from each officer’s perspective at that instant, not with hindsight; if they can articulate that they believed you were armed and reaching or resisting during a volatile arrest, courts and juries often deem the shooting justified, even if the gun was already confiscated. In other words: tactically it’s a classic fog-of-war misidentification, and legally it often resolves to “reasonable mistake,” which makes it very hard for a wrongful-death claim to succeed.
Again, I'm not pasting this as if it's some adjudicating authority, just trying to compare to a knowledgeable impartial observer. Since the entire world is telling me I'm thinking like a Chud now .
In the court of public opinion this looks like an execution. In a court of law, maybe not.
Separately, I an reminded of the concealed carry class I took. The most basic message was: having a gun on me required me to be more responsible in public, not less. I don't know if this is universal but it is confirmed by my local monkeysphere of other concealed gun license havers.
dr_analog
top 1% of underdog fetishists
14hr ago
I feel like I'm going insane watching news coverage of this event. I've been wondering if I really am a bootlicker or if I'm in an echo chamber or what. I thought I would ask ChatGPT about this. Yesterday's shooting is not in the training data, of course so, while it's still possible to get an untainted answer I thought I would ask.
me
okay so, hypothetically, I am carrying a holstered handgun. I am at a protest. we are protesting a police arrest. the protest gets a bit rowdy. a police officer pushes someone out of the way. I step forward and try to block the police officer from the person they pushed. how much danger am I in? what would a court say if I was killed? answer in one brief paragraph.
ChatGPT
Short version: you’d be in serious, asymmetric danger, both physically and legally. The moment you step into an officer’s path during an active arrest, you’ve likely crossed from “bystander” to interfering/obstructing, and if you’re visibly armed (or they discover you’re armed during the scuffle), you now look—through an officer’s threat model—like “an armed subject interfering with police action.” That combination massively raises the probability of force, up to lethal force, because officers are trained to treat armed interference as a precursor to weapon deployment, not as peaceful protest. If you were killed, a court would mostly analyze it under objective reasonableness (Graham v. Connor): would a reasonable officer believe an armed person stepping toward them in a chaotic scene posed an imminent threat? In that context, juries often side with the officer, even if you never touched the gun; legally it’s less about your intent and more about what a cop could plausibly fear in the moment. In practice: armed + physical interposition near police = you’ve accidentally made yourself look like the most dangerous person in the scene.
Maybe this is what these tools are designed to do at this point but I feel a little less alienated right now.
dr_analog
top 1% of underdog fetishists
16hr ago
I don't think I've ever read a statement from a police department that didn't come across as pure conflict theorist messaging. This is probably true of almost any government agency that is at all controversial. They don't typically say completely false things (unless there's no possible evidence either way), but they will absolutely lie with a minimum of true statements.
I think this is bad. But it's definitely not new.
dr_analog
top 1% of underdog fetishists
22hr ago
I was driving my daughter to school on Friday when I saw a man laying down on the side of the road, just by my house. He was very underdressed, looked cold, and had tears in his eyes. I'm guessing he was high and confused. Most homeless around here are white, but this one had dark skin. I didn't think he would last long at all with how cold it was and how underdressed he was.
I didn't want to stop with my daughter in the car so I texted my wife and said could you just take a quick look and call 911? Just eyeball him from the front yard and see if you agree with calling 911
She texted me back later to say he seemed fine, he was bundled up and had another homeless friend with him.
I thought that was odd but did the school drop-off and came back home, then we spoke about it. It became evident then, that she thought I was talking about a different homeless person. The two she spotted were curled up in an alley behind a restaurant on the corner while the guy I was talking about was on the sidewalk in front.
But he wasn't there anymore. I don't know what happened to him.
dr_analog
top 1% of underdog fetishists
1d ago
Also, as we covered last week, a person with one concealed handgun can have a second concealed handgun; for those moments where reloading just isn't fast enough.
The Texas State Police on site outnumbered the school police and appeared much better armed. One wonders why the ranking officer with the Texas State Police did not get frustrated with the slow progress, walk up to Arredondo, say you suck, you're out. My men are in. Have your people stand outside and try not o shoot your own dicks off when the action starts.
dr_analog
top 1% of underdog fetishists
2d ago
Honest question: how? Doesn't using, say, a shotgun on the lock risk collateral damage? Doesn't trying to use a contact tool mean whoever volunteers for that is going to get shot at?
Yikes. The cringe, it's too much.
The flip side to heroic responsibility is that once you start prevent other people from being heroes, you've picked up a lot of responsibility.
Especially when an armed pack of parents would almost certainly have been much more effective than the police.
EDIT: Thinking about how much better a job motivated and armed parents would have done, I wonder if trying to train Uvalde police mopes made them more incapable of acting, not less. You have to follow the procedures! You have to listen to the chain of command! Everyone struggle to remember what you were taught. With adrenaline! If a kid dies when you did the wrong thing, it'll be your fault! Wait is this a barricaded shooter situation or a hostage situation or something else? Where are the tools? The protocols man, the protocols!
Whereas parents would just be like, do some of us have guns? Good, let's go.
dr_analog
top 1% of underdog fetishists
2d ago
You seem very certain of yourself and like you have experience so I'd like to ask you, what were the police supposed to do when the door was locked and the suspect was firing through it whenever he heard them messing with it?
There are close quarters combat protocols for how to go through a doorway as team. That's dangerous but with training you can minimize the danger. But what's the protocol for trying to open a door when bullets are coming through it? Are the men, unable to live with themselves if they don't act, supposed to line up by the door and take bullets until the shooter runs out of bullets, or someone manages to break it open?
AFAICT, the reason they were able to breach it is because a Border Patrol agent came on scene and was just a lot more effective at finding the master key and opening the door. Maybe he was much smarter and more competent and took his oath more seriously, but he also could have had the benefit of coming in very late with a fresh perspective and no chain of command diffusing his own sense of responsibility.
In the meantime the police were looking for keys and stealthily trying them out and none worked. It seems they got confused about locating keys and keeping track of which they tried. Everyone thought someone else was apparently on it.
This strikes me as systemic idiocy that comes up in crises, not individual cowardice. But I say this as an armchair QB.
dr_analog
top 1% of underdog fetishists
3d ago
Replying to myself, having read the timeline, can we all just recognize that the off-duty Border Patrol agent came on scene, saw how retarded the Uvalde police were, ignored their command structure, asked a school administrator for the master key, opened the door, and then organized a breach party in like 5 minutes? Bro got shit done.
dr_analog
top 1% of underdog fetishists
3d ago
The excuse for ignoring all that was that the cops supposedly thought the shooter was barricaded in there alone, not with children, hence they were in no rush to assault the shooter and were free to assault the kids' parents instead.
Interesting.
According to this timeline of events https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Uvalde_school_shooting#Timeline_of_events
They originally thought this and began the barricaded shooter playbook. But then they were informed there were kids inside and failed to process the update and switch tactics.
dr_analog
top 1% of underdog fetishists
4d ago
Congrats!
My wife is a former recruiter, and I think I did absolutely every single thing she told me not to do. I said almost everything she told me not to say. It all worked out in the end, far better than I could have ever dreamed. I donno, maybe all that "Just be yourself" advice isn't complete bullshit after all.
ha, example? Was she like "make sure you know what your greatest weakness is! make it relatable but not terrible and spin it into a positive" and then they asked you and you were like "I have no weaknesses" with a yeschad.jpg smile?
Sorry about that. I should have mentioned NeoPixel (or DotStar) USB-level voltage strips as an option, so used to students starting a shopping list at Adafruit that didn't think to mention it.
Ha, no worries at all dawg. You've helped me so much already.
I'll probably still use what I learned about 12V for non-wearables projects. I'm looking forward to getting a new place and really ricing out my man cave.
LED drivers are more an early high-school thing, but they're just so much better at teaching for loops, modulo operators, and fundamentals of processor timing, to too many students that otherwise get bored out of their gourds dealing with Scratch.
What do you normally teach, exactly?
I've been on hiatus with TRON bike lighting since I had a bunch of everything else going on. Mostly discovering mathacademy.com and making myself do the adult courses for fun.
Though I'm still dabbling. One thing that I wish I had known about a year ago is that they make LED strips that run on 5V instead of 12V (WS2812s instead of WS2815s). Combined with an ESP32 that runs off of 5V, it means I can dispense with 12V power sources and just run everything directly off of a USB-C power source. This allows me to delete a lot of fabrication nuisance: no need for a PCB with shitty buck converters to step down from 12V to 5V and wiring it up accordingly. I understand voltage sags at 5V can discolor LEDs on longer runs, but for my bike wearables project this should not be a concern. I might even be able to get away with not having to make an enclosure at all for the helmets!
I'm annoyed to be discovering this so late. They really should teach LEDs in school. I feel like I'm mostly fumbling in the dark (ha).
We already know what this looks like. It looks like Minnesota. Minnesota law-enforcement doesn't seem to have any interest in policing the mob so long as is stays focused on the right targets.
According to my X feed the Minnesota Sheriff's department is now guarding the ICE facility.
It's heart warming.
ICE is also not only active in Minneapolis. Every blue town has an ICE watch effort but the chaos mostly seems limited to Minneapolis for now.
I think the videos alone aren't enough to close the book on the case. But if this is the only evidence we'll ever have I agree it's not excusable.
I do think an impartial investigation must happen, perhaps even a trial, and also that it won't happen and that's bad. If this is justifiable we should hear from the officers and see their body cams.
I do think the victim contributed significantly to his own death though, and I'm surprised there's so little acknowledgement of this. I don't think it's victim blaming the way the skimpy outfit at 2am is.
Crossing a highway at night wearing dark clothes is probably a closer analogy. Cars don't have a right to hit you, it is not good that they hit you, but you probably can't assign moral blame to them if they hit you.
Police are given latitude to reasonably assess risks to themselves that private civilians are not.
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