380
Pardoned January 6 rioter said ‘I’m shooting myself’ before Indiana deputy fatally shot him
(www.theguardian.com)
this post was submitted on 01 Mar 2025
380 points (98.7% liked)
News
25503 readers
3851 users here now
Welcome to the News community!
Rules:
1. Be civil
Attack the argument, not the person. No racism/sexism/bigotry. Good faith argumentation only. This includes accusing another user of being a bot or paid actor. Trolling is uncivil and is grounds for removal and/or a community ban. Do not respond to rule-breaking content; report it and move on.
2. All posts should contain a source (url) that is as reliable and unbiased as possible and must only contain one link.
Obvious right or left wing sources will be removed at the mods discretion. Supporting links can be added in comments or posted seperately but not to the post body.
3. No bots, spam or self-promotion.
Only approved bots, which follow the guidelines for bots set by the instance, are allowed.
4. Post titles should be the same as the article used as source.
Posts which titles don’t match the source won’t be removed, but the autoMod will notify you, and if your title misrepresents the original article, the post will be deleted. If the site changed their headline, the bot might still contact you, just ignore it, we won’t delete your post.
5. Only recent news is allowed.
Posts must be news from the most recent 30 days.
6. All posts must be news articles.
No opinion pieces, Listicles, editorials or celebrity gossip is allowed. All posts will be judged on a case-by-case basis.
7. No duplicate posts.
If a source you used was already posted by someone else, the autoMod will leave a message. Please remove your post if the autoMod is correct. If the post that matches your post is very old, we refer you to rule 5.
8. Misinformation is prohibited.
Misinformation / propaganda is strictly prohibited. Any comment or post containing or linking to misinformation will be removed. If you feel that your post has been removed in error, credible sources must be provided.
9. No link shorteners.
The auto mod will contact you if a link shortener is detected, please delete your post if they are right.
10. Don't copy entire article in your post body
For copyright reasons, you are not allowed to copy an entire article into your post body. This is an instance wide rule, that is strictly enforced in this community.
founded 2 years ago
MODERATORS
you are viewing a single comment's thread
view the rest of the comments
view the rest of the comments
It is astonishing to see the amount of cheering on of a cop shooting someone who just announced they were going to kill themselves.
In any other circumstance, you'd all be up in arms over this. I am ashamed to be a part of this community sometimes. There are zero circumstances where a police officer should shoot someone dead unless their life is literally at risk.
Uh the officer's life was at risk.
Are you implying the cop should have let the guy grab his gun?
Guy was a J6 rioter. By definition, stupid and crazy. Prone to making bad decisions, including a vocal declaration of suicidal intent to a police officer. What stops the guy from putting the gun to his head, then thinking "hey wait, I'm on Team Trump! Surely he'll pardon me for this too!" And then shooting the cop instead?
Should the cop have run away? Now you've got a J6 rioter with a gun in a stolen police cruiser.
Please run us through the scenario in which it's a good idea to let the mentally unstable rioter grab his gun.
And I'm not cheering the cop, either. I'm betting the cop is a fellow Republican, because...cop... but also because he foolishly trusted the J6 rioter to act reasonably and rationally. When the information presented by his computer stated this individual has a rap sheet and this situation was going to become an arrest, cop could have properly and immediately performed the arrest by standing between guy and car door then cuffing guy, thus not allowing guy the opportunity to make another stupid decision.
Cop treated this 70 in a 55 like it was a normal boring 70 in a 55 by a normal boring citizen, and this is what happened.
You're making up a wild scenario that never happened. When people are suicidal, you try to help them, not shoot them to make sure they get what they're looking or.
The "othering" of opponents is how human deal with conflict and prepare themselves for violence since time immemorial.
Dehumanization is a really slippery second step. Fascists aren't the only people that find themselves doing it.
This isn't meant as an excuse, just an explanation. IMO, this fatal shooting is not an act to be celebrated.
I am so glad to see this comment. I certainly won’t mourn personally over them, but I’m not going to toast their death either. It’s gross.
Yeah, I really dislike how easy it is to dehumanized people. Regardless of this guys shitty politics, or what he did in the past, he didn't deserve to be shot dead during a traffic stop.
Also if a bystanders life is at risk. That would be the ideal implementation in a similar system IMO anyways, I don't think this is the way we should be dealing with problems as a whole though, e.g. every cop having a gun is unnecessary and harmful.
This is actually in part an issue of a misunderstanding of the dynamics of one of the situation law enforcement and people forced into dangerous circumstances face. Ever played that game where you have your hands out and a person puts their hands under yours and you have to withdraw your hands before you get slapped? It's the same principle. Reaction is slower than action. When someone states they have a weapon and they reach for it you could be dead in about a second, maybe two if they pull it and instead fire at you. This means your "safe" reaction space is about a second to a half second long.
If you duck out of the way you get a person with a weapon who can choose to turn it on bystanders or retaliate by getting you into another situation where you have even less reaction space. While it is realized that cops, particularly US ones tend to escalate situations more quickly in part that is because in the US there's a higher chance someone is packing heat and in part because of a culture of standing one's ground. When we are talking about ACAB events a lot of the time those deaths occur in circumstances where the cops either should not have been there at all, escalated far too quickly or the death happened when the person was restrained and no longer an active threat. In Canada for instance improper use of force applies to everyone. If you had to be violent as a citizen, including as a cop then you are vulnerable to legal reprocussions unless your use of force was judged appropriate to mitigate damage to life. Not property, only life. If you exhaust every other de-escalating option only then you are cleared to use violence but the initiation of this reaction window is the point of no return. People who experience this window basically operate strictly on instinct and often are traumatized to some degree after the fact.
In this instance the officer's life was at risk the moment the gun was indicated to be in the vehicle and the person in question stated they would use it. Could the entire traffic stop have been a series of inappropriate escalations on behalf of the officer, yes. Is there zero justification for an officer shooting this guy? No. We don't know the first part, you would have to pick apart the senario starting from when he stopped the car. But if you end up in a situation where you have a gun trained on you and you escalate the situation further by saying you are reaching for a gun then basically this is effectively how you suicide.
Hypocrites showing their true colors. It's never been about wether the shooting was justified or not but rather how they feel about the victim.
I'll cheer anytime a traitor to the people dies, liberal.
These are people who have been fed lies and propaganda their whole life, your neighbors, and family. Way to prove my point.