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My God man how could you live with yourself shooting a pregnant woman or kid?
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How could you live with yourself if you had the means to stop the murders of a dozen people, and you
didn't?
A law enforcement officer might be called to the scene of a school shooting -- one where the murderer is himself just a child. That LEO should have thought their own ethics through ahead of time. The other option is for the LEOs to stand there watching children get murdered while they sort through their own inner demons about using a weapon against a child murderer.
Remember the awful Andrea Yates case, a woman who murdered all five of her own children. If a woman like that was pregnant, and threatening the lives of her children -- would the life of the baby in her womb somehow be worth more than the lives of the toddlers she would murder if the responding officer did not stop her immediately? Sometimes, the best course of action, the one with the least-horrible outcome on some coldhearted scale of injustice, is still a horrible situation that leads to pain for everyone involved.
Saving lives does not always come without cost.
If you carry a concealed weapon and have ever pictured yourself being the hero and saving the day, try putting yourself in one of
those situations. Think it through.
- If you took a job where you would have a duty to act, and might get called to such a scene, would you just stand there with your ethics spinning wildly while people are getting killed?
- Would you deal with such questions ahead of time as much as you could, so that you would have the capacity to save lives in a nightmare situation?
- Would you ignore such questions, figuring that you'd somehow steel yourself to do the necessary thing even though you literally could not even bring yourself to even think about shooting a paper representation of that thing?
We send law enforcement into situations like that. We expect them to deal with
whatever they encounter, whether it's a domestic crisis, someone gone insane, a school shooting, a schizophrenic killer who happens to be barely into puberty... Every single person who has been through law enforcement training should
know where their limits are on questions like that. Their training should have forced them to confront their own nightmare scenarios, so that they do not freeze, unable to act, when innocent lives are at stake.
We aren't talking about training officers to "just automatically shooting a target because it has a gun." We are talking about giving them the
ability to make that choice in time for the choice to do any good. That's why those targets are so upsetting on such a visceral level. Nobody wants to make that choice. Nobody wants to picture making that choice. Everyone wants to live in a world where such choices are never needed.
How old will the next school shooter be?
pax