Guns and Police

 Not every confrontation with a police officer is the same...even the ones where the officer is forced to fire a weapon. The examples of Daunte Wright in Minnesota, the 13-year-old in Illinois, and the 16-year-old in Ohio are not identical and should not be judged from the same position. 

Now, I'm not a lawyer, nor a policeman, but as a rational, reasonable observer, I can see the differences: Daunte Wright was completely unarmed and represented no threat to the officer or anyone else--and clearly the officer was in a heightened mental state, resulting in her confusion about which weapon she had even drawn; the 13-year-old did have a weapon when first encountered and refused to follow the officer's commands to stop running and to drop the gun, until the very last moment when it was clear he could not escape--and by then, the officer had, apparently, already made a decision about firing, a split second (literally) before the kid tossed the gun away; the girl in Ohio clearly had a knife and was definitely threatening serious harm (if not death) to another person, a situation in which we should expect and do expect a police officer to act decisively.

I wish we had a society like that in the United Kingdom, where cops do not regularly carry guns and those who do receive very special training about how to respond in the situations to which they are called to respond. Crimes committed with firearms are relatively rare in the UK, in part because ownership of such weapons has never been considered a "right" there. Even in rural areas, a license is required for any sort of firearm--from a pistol to a shotgun to a high-powered rifle--and those weapons must be kept under lock-and-key when not in legal use, as for hunting or target practice. A police officer can demand to see such licensed weapons at any time and failure to report them missing or stolen is a serious offense.