A kinda local story as the departed is from Mass.
An officer had “observed a large group of unruly patrons” in front of Finnegan’s Grill in Thornwood, New York, and called for support.
Officers were breaking up fights, police said, when “a vehicle parked in the fire lane” accelerated. A police officer tried to stop the vehicle, which Henry was driving, but its mirror struck the officer, police said.
The officer “ended up on the hood,” police said.
Another police officer tried to pull the first one down from the hood, when the car struck him as well, according to police.
The officer on the hood opened fire at the driver, but the vehicle “continued in the fire lane heading directly towards another Mount Pleasant Officer, who also fired at the vehicle,” according to a police press release.
Henry was later pronounced dead at Westchester Medical Center. A passenger in the same car suffered a minor gunshot wound.
Late night bar brawl, and this jerk decides to run down a couple of cops with his car, and gets shot for his decision. Sounds like a VERY clean shoot, and I have no issues, with what the police did. I’m also happy to hear that all but the driver should recover.
Now to tie it together Lingoe and Bob both have posts up about the stupidity of focusing on the tool used in violent crime.
I’ll take it a step further. In this case a car was used as a deadly weapon, and I suspect it would have resulted in deaths of Police officers who were there simply to uphold law and order. The deadly assault was STOPPED by guns, and the Police officer’s sidearms likely saved their lives.
So while focusing on guns as somehow causative of death and violent crime, you are removing a life-saving tool from the hands of good people…meanwhile ignoring the problem of violent people who will turn a car, or a shovel, or a knife, or a set of bare hands into a deadly weapon. Not to mention these people seem to get drugs and guns pretty easily dispute laws that attempt to prevent this.
This is why we should oppose them!
In the same vein, we had an officer shoot and kill a suspect during a felony warrant arrest earlier this year. Subject struck one officer with his car, was accelerating again, taser didn’t work, several rounds of .40 did.
Bad news: white cop, black victim. Cue the screams of, “Racist pigs!”.
All info went to grand jury while city and police department admin sandbagged … “time of healing” … “sad about…” etc.
Grand jury determined shooting was justified.
Ten days later the officer’s house was burned down with him inside; he made it out with some minor injuries.
I have a feeling the last of this has not been seen.
Wow that’s a hell of a story. Also from your details sounds like a VERY clean shoot as like this story we have auto-to-person-on-foot contact, and also use of a TASER.
Sucks about the officer’s house and playing of that lame-ass race-card.
Ok, let me get this straight. Cop shoots deranged motorist. Driver dies. WISQARS for this year will now show ANOTHER gun death that will be used to beat us gun owners up with. Joan Peterson will complain of another “Gun Death(tm).”
I guess the only solution is to take the guns away from police officers. We must tell them that, for the good of society, they must die when people try to run them over with cars. It’s For the Children(tm).
/sarcasm
Nope, just another reason why “Gun Death” is a worthless metric, and why people who use it either aren’t thinking, or have an agenda.
Instead we should look at this as a vehicular assault or simply “assault with a deadly weapon” and a justified self-defense shooting.
Also is it relevant that the defenders in this case are police? I don’t think so.
As bored highschool kids in AP Chemistry classes are wont to do, my friends and I did the calculations of just how much destructive capacity a full tank of gasoline could have… Granted, Mythbusters adequately demonstrated that inside the tank, the gasoline is not prone to doing a bloody thing, but in both malls in my area, driving through one of the entrances, using an initial charge to aerosolize the fuel, and a secondary charge to ignite it would not be difficult… and would result in a lot of deaths and injuries.
But, as Sean says, if someone were to pop the driver of such a vehicle after he ran throught he doors, but before he could close the first circuit, that would just be another statistic for the anti-rights nuts to wield against us. How the hell does that make sense?
On the flip side, if this car-driving maniac had been successful, the deaths he would have caused would have been rolled into the general “automobile-related” deaths category that anti-rights nuts generally do not care about, and claim cannot be compared to the deaths related to any other tools. Apparently, to Joan, some animals are more equal than others…
Damned near any object can be a weapon if I decide it is going to be – the key element in that equation, though, is me. The person, the user, is the deciding factor as to whether or not any given object is dangerous (through negligence or design) or not, and until anti-rights nuts like Joan and Sparky can understand that and comprehend that, we really are on different worlds.
http://www.youtube.com/watch?v=aod8QqBt3k8
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