A Massachusetts State Trooper shot and killed a man who was threatening suicide. Of course, I wasn't there, and it does seem too easy to take pot-shots at the cop after the fact, so until today I didn't. But today I read of a riot in which police officers suffered terribly—huge lacerations, concussions, and broken limbs—yet none of the rioters was killed.
No jokes about showing up to a gunfight with a knife. No jokes at all; this isn't funny though it is grotesquely absurd. Did Trooper Wildgrube sustain any injuries? Did he tear or soil his uniform in this conflict that left a man dead? I could see the use of a semi-automatic .357 with hollow-point bullets if they were in hand-to-hand combat, and the trooper was within range of the knife's lethal potential. I could even almost understand a cop in body armor firing a gun at a crazed man charging homicidally at him with a knife. But Mr Twedt was, by all accounts, a remarkably harmless fellow who was distraught, depressed, most likely angry, and at the moment he was shot, he was coated like a ghost in white fire-extinguisher powder. I wonder, did those two hollow-points raise a puff of dust when they hit the pathetically powdered suicidal man?
Forgive my brutality, but the use of lethal force opens you up to that. And that is as it should be when police officers start using overwhelmingly lethal force as if it were a television remote control, when they do not like what they see and can't deal with it in any way other than to just shut it off.