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Notes -
Define it.
Define "competently"
I need your full rubric, please.
Otherwise, this is just a weasel way of saying "ICE agents should only every make perfection decisions in all circumstances"
If I give you a rubric what's to stop you from rule-lawyering it as a bad faith actor? Written laws cannot fight back as they have no agency. I can definitely say that any LE shooting someone who is restrained and is not pointing a gun at someone is outside of it is outside of it. This is not restricted to ICE. FBI, ATF, Fed, DEA, DoE, anyone with the power of violence. Do you think the ATF were competent at waco/ruby ridge? Do you think the LEs were competent here: Daniel Shaver?
I'm willing to give you an effort post in what does a competent government agent look like, if you'll return the favor/effort and give me examples of government LE agents behaving incompetently in the past decade? People on the right here love to complain about the lefties acting incompetent in the gov Bureaucracy, shouldn't be hard.
By that rubric, if I yell "I'm going to shoot you!" and point something that is an exact facsimile of a gun at a police officer but isn't, and they shoot me, that is incompetent on their part, even though it would require psychic powers on their behalf to know the difference.
I think the problem here is that you seem to very much want to remove any subjectivity from the rubric, but this is just logically impossible without leading to absurd outcomes like the above. Subjectivity requires us to examine things like, even if there was no gun, did they believe there was? If so, why? Was that belief reasonable even if incorrect? If not, just how unreasonable was it? In this case, it hinges on factors like what the person may have said, how they may have acted, whether or not an accidental discharge took place, etc. These factors would determine whether criminal charges are appropriate, if so which ones, and whether and which workplace disciplinary actions would be appropriate.
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What about law enforcement shooting someone who is not pointing a gun and who they are not even attempting to restrain?
I believe you are the big advocate for rules having no agency around here. Are you going to apply that same argument to your own arguments?
Mu.
Human rules cannot constrain human will. This does not mean that rules are useless. It does mean that they are not a general solution to the problem of human evil. You appear to be doing an absolutely fantastic job of demonstrating this reality with your arguments, so my congratulations on that. I will certainly be quoting your arguments in the future.
Logic is not a human rule. If you are appealing to it, you must be bound by it. I believe I am doing a fairly good job of being bound by logic.
If the above is not a satisfactory answer, I invite you to elaborate.
I genuinely can't tell if this is praise or a "You have a shit argument I can't wait to use them in the future to throw tomatoes at"
Rules are just the manifestation of human will, they have no sanctity on their own. Rather they must be continually believed in, and enforced. Resting on the laurels of some previously set up rules is much like resting on any laurels, it lasts for a bit but always fails later. We as a country have become complacent believing the rules of yesteryear were sacred, untouchable, enforced themselves. But that is a mistake, it takes active effort to defend the liberties our founders enshrined.
The problem with litigating rules, is that it leaves them open to abuse of the rules-as-written instead of the rules-as-intended. But rules-as-intended requires active effort to get people to agree with the understanding and to police bad actors who desire to abused the rules-as-written for personal or tribal gain.
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