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PaperclipPerfector  6d ago (text post)   31165 thread views

Culture War Roundup for the week of January 19, 2026

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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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