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PaperclipPerfector  4d ago (text post)   16239 thread views

Culture War Roundup for the week of February 2, 2026

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If it was a bad shoot only if the shooter had precognition,

It was a legal shoot for the reasons discussed to death on this forum, but as a matter of policing technique it was a bad shoot because

  • if the car had been driving at him, it would almost certainly not have stopped it. (Cars don't have dead man's switches, and the shooting did not, in fact, stop the car)
  • if the car had not been driving at him, it would have been an unnecessary-in-hindsight shooting of someone the officer would rather not kill. (This happened)
  • the shot was fired in an urban setting without time to verify what was behind the target, so the risk of hitting an innocent bystander was high.

There is a reason why real police are trained not to shoot at moving vehicles as a first-line response to dangerous driving.

if the car had been driving at him, it would almost certainly not have stopped it. (Cars don't have dead man's switches, and the shooting did not, in fact, stop the car)

Actually cars do have deadman's switches, though not very good ones. The accelerator is spring-loaded and if you let off, acceleration stops. It's true that this won't actually stop the car in many cases, and also that humans who have been shot don't always relax, but that's less than "almost certainly". If (as Ross did not know, and no one will ever know) she was actually trying to run him over, being shot prevented her from squaring up on him.

if the car had not been driving at him, it would have been an unnecessary-in-hindsight shooting of someone the officer would rather not kill. (This happened)

This did not happen. The car was driving at him. It actually struck him.

the shot was fired in an urban setting without time to verify what was behind the target, so the risk of hitting an innocent bystander was high.

Neither police nor civilians are expected to verify that the backstop is safe before shooting in a self-defense situation.

There is a reason why real police are trained not to shoot at moving vehicles as a first-line response to dangerous driving.

Every quote I've seen from police manuals or policy statements about not shooting at moving vehicles explicitly excepts cases where the moving vehicle is an immediate threat.

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