Comment by chaps
10 days ago
Please understand where I'm coming from:
My mom's dad was shot and killed by police. Absolutely nobody in my family knows anything about it, but the default is "he was a bad person and deserved it" or, "he probably did something wrong." The coroner's report shows his death as a suicide, despite police shooting and killing him. This was a time before cameraphones and before I was even born, so it's impossible for me, let alone anyone else to know what happened.
A lot of how you approach this discussion reminds me of the side of my family that defaults to thinking that the police did nothing wrong, or that their actions were justified or within policy, even without knowing the full facts (or, any; it's willful ignorance out the wazoo), plus a handful of assumptions. And, just -- a person died and that's all you can muster? Callousness and an air of benevolence?
You can do better, friend.
> You can do better, friend.
So can you. Your past experience was terrible, but that's no reason to ignore or misrepresent what others are saying.
What GP and I are both seeing in the Renee video is assault with a deadly weapon on a law enforcement officer. Lethal force is a valid response. That doesn't mean she deserves it, but that she was doing something stupid without realizing just how stupid it was. Most of these protestors are the same, they're new to this and being tricked by anti-ICE activists into thinking it's completely safe without getting all the information.
> That doesn't mean she deserves it, but that she was doing something stupid without realizing just how stupid it was
Am I right to say that your argument can be summarized as, "She didn't deserve it, but her actions were deserving of it"? Or maybe "merited"?
I'm genuinely confused by what you mean by "deserves".
(just to be explicit, the disagreement we have here is very much about what the word "deserves" means rather than anything productive)
"Deserved" is a stronger word than "earned" or "merited", there's a sense of satisfaction or entitlement (though negative) behind that word. Something like, to say that she deserved death means saying she should have died for what she did, that it was the right outcome. That's not what we're saying. It's more like, the actions the officer took weren't in the wrong despite the bad outcome. She made really bad choices, and she was the one at fault, but there were better possible outcomes given the exact same series of events and she didn't deserve to die. But it's not a surprising outcome either.
Another quick aside since I suspect this is a second point of confusion, "lethal force" does not mean "with the intent to kill", it means "force that is likely to cause severe injury or death".
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