Photoman wrote:RubenZ wrote:
Are you for real?
This has happened to me a lot of times. Where your paying for something and you move liek 4 ft to put something back and right away the guy behind is already there. I'm not gonna wait for them to finish picking hundreds of lotto cards before I retrieve my item back LOL.
Seriously man, if that is what made that punk go get a gun then its a good thing it happened already.
I'm very for real.
Watch the WJLA video. At 3:00 minutes the police officer made a decision that ruined everyones day. All he had to do was wait one minute tops, let the kid finish buying gas or whatever and everyone goes on their way. It's even more evident from the behind-the-counter video. You can actually see the kid startle at 1:02 on the CNN video.
And remember, we can't hear the conversation from 3:02 to 3:25 on the WJLA video. It is evident, though, that whatever the police officer said really inflamed the kid.
When you make the decision to carry a gun, you have to be more tolerant of others rude behavior.
I'm not saying the kid had a right to go get his gun, I'm saying the police officer, with a little patience, could haved saved everyone a whole lot of grief.
My first CHL instructor made a statement that I still quote today, "If you carry a gun, you'd better learn to eat a lot of crow, or you going to have to shoot a lot of people." This is an obvious overstatement, but it does get the point across.
However, to argue that reaching around a man at a counter should put the officer on notice that he would be the victim of a murder attempt seems a bit of a stretch, in my view. I don't necessarily agree that the "kid" was startled, nor do we know if words were exchanged. However, even if that were the case, no reasonable person would believe that those factors might put their lives in danger, or lead to a gunfight. This fact pattern is different from verbally sparring with someone in such a manner that a reasonable person would believe it might escalate to violence.
Chas.
both points. I don't like rude people, COPs or not. But saying the LEO brought it on is like blaming the thug's mother for giving him birth. Before we even think of blaming someone for an event, we need to determine if the consequences of their actions were reasonably foreseeable. (Yeah, that’s a legal concept, but I think it’s also a reasonable moral concept as well.)