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PaperclipPerfector  7d ago (text post)   31588 thread views

Culture War Roundup for the week of January 19, 2026

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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.

I'd like to think I'm more neutral than most on this issue, I don't have strong feelings about ice in general. But I would say if you gave me that prompt I might have responded similarly, but that was definitely not the initial reaction I felt when I watched the video.

In the video I see a woman approach an ice officer with her phone recording him. I'm sure this is annoying but she does not look like a physical threat. The ice officer responds by shoving the woman to the ground. A man sees this and moves between the officer and the woman with his hands up possibly making contact with the officer but not in an obviously aggressive way. He is then immediately pepper sprayed. He falls to the ground, is dog piled, disarmed, and eventually shot.

I think there's two big reasons why the public is reluctant to blame him for what happened. First is the fact that he appears to be trying to defend the women that was shoved. You can argue that what he did was dangerous, but putting yourself in danger in order to protect someone is generally seen as honorable.

Second the situation just escalates so quickly. In the Good case people were arguing it doesn't make any sense to shoot at the driver of a car that is going to run you over since it's going to run you over regardless. The response was that it was a reasonable response in a split second situation where people won't make perfect decisions. Well, this guy made a split second decision to stop a woman from being attacked (from his pov) and almost immediately triggered the chain of events that leads to his death.

To be clear I'm not trying to say which side is responsible for what. I'm just saying I don't think the argument that the man shares the blame for his own death for intervening in police activity is going to be a compelling argument to people who watch the video, and asking chatgpt isn't going to explain why that is.

All this is true, but this doesn't excuse the shooting. An analogy would be the classic one feminists hate, woman walks down the street in a bad neighborhood alone at 2AM drunk in a skimpy outfit, gets raped. She was stupid and this was a predictable outcome of her decisions, but that doesn't mean the rapist is suddenly a good person and his actions are excused and he should get off scot-free. Here, the guy was stupid and his actions predictably resulted in his death. However, the evidence certainly seems to point to the ICE agent shooting him in the back when he was already subdued by about 5 agents, his gun was taken and the agent with the gun was already well clear of the scuffle. There is just no excuse for that. Additionally the administration is obviously lying by calling him a domestic terrorist that tried to assassinate law enforcement. This situation feels very clearcut and easy to interpret.

It's a poor analogy to use for this case but if you really wish to use it, a more accurate version would probably be this: Woman is told to not walk in a skimpy outfit in the bad neighborhood by multiple sources, woman even takes a class on skimpy outfit etiquette where she's told about the bad neighborhood where she has a high chance of getting raped if she decides to go there in a skimpy outfit. The woman has grown up in a skimpy outfit culture and there's many videos on the internet of things going bad for other women that went to the neighborhood while wearing skimpy outfits. There's a big sign that states "WOMEN IN SKIMPY OUTFITS STAY AWAY" at the entrance to the bad neighborhood. She goes there in a skimpy outfit anyway and gets raped.

This situation feels very clearcut and easy to interpret.

Is it? 24+ hours later and there's still multiple narratives being thrown around from 'pigs murdered him in cold blood because they could' to 'his gun malfunctioned and cops got spooked'

Most likely the shooter saw the deceased move in a way that appeared like he was going for a gun.

“Guy reaches for gun that was removed five seconds earlier” is almost certainly not a scenario they train for. “Guy reaches for gun” almost certainly is.

When situations turn chaotic people generally fall back to the level of their training.

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.

You aren't a bootlicker.

During the Civil Rights era the protestors did maximally nonviolent and safe protests to exhibit injustice.

During the BLM era the protestors engage in violence, harassment, rioting, impair communication, and overall behave in such a way that low likelihood fuckups become impossible to avoid. They then blame the right/police for conditions they created.

It's the same basic tactics as Hamas and its abusive behavior, victim blaming.

But the ICE agents didn't shoot him as he was approaching them with gun in holster. They got him down on the ground, one agent took his gun, and the other agent shot him from behind as he was getting up (?).

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.

"There's a scuffle" and "in the confusion" seem to be doing an enormous amount of heavy lifting.

By this sort of logic, an armed citizen could confuse the ICE agents for a gang of kidnappers from a distance and open fire, killing several. Would that be a "reasonable determination" too, because "there was a scuffle" and "the shooter was confused"?

"There's a scuffle" and "in the confusion" seem to be doing an enormous amount of heavy lifting.

Yes. How is that an issue when there was, in fact, a scuffle, and a lot of confusion caused by the chaos of the protest?

By this sort of logic, an armed citizen could confuse the ICE agents for a gang of kidnappers from a distance and open fire, killing several

No, they couldn't. They're in uniform with big letters spelling out "ICE". Not to mention thr only reason thr protesters are there is because they know ICE is there as well. Also, in this case they didn't open fire at a distance.

If you were going for an analogy, you came with one that is on the dissimilar end of the spectrum, to the point where I don't see how it's useful here.

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