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Comment by Kenji | Hacker News Reader

I wonder if there was a way to resolve this standoff without her death. I.e. letting her shoot all the shotgun shells she has, or just waiting until she gets tired and slips up, gets hungry, etc. Yeah, it requires a lot of patience but hey, you can save a human life. I don't think she would have harmed her kid so waiting in cover seems like a relatively safe thing to do?

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Someone shooting at the police is a clear and present danger to everyone's life and needs to be neutralized as quickly as possible. "Letting her shoot all the shells she had" sounds like a cute scene in a movie, not reality. You don't know what the shells will be able to penetrate, whether bystanders in nearby apartments or on the street are at danger, etc. The preservation of her life stopped being a concern when she pulled a deadly weapon and most certainly when she opened fire.

You also don't know how many shells someone has when they can buy them by the crate at Wal-Mart.

You're just wrong. You don't know that, period. It doesn't matter how legal or illegal guns or ammunition are.

Agreed. Especially if you consider that she was originally being served a warrant for a relatively minor offense, which she hadn't even been convicted of.

Absolutely right. They have all day and night she needs food and sleep.

Sadly this is pretty much the one situation where, once negotiation has been exhausted, it is necessary to shoot the person holding the gun.

Even in the UK with its very low use of police gunfire (http://www.independent.co.uk/news/uk/politics/uk-police-shoo... - seven shootings out of ~12,500 incidents involving firearm officers) have done this on a few occasions involving sieges.

It's all the other incidents we should be concerned about.

if police are about to shoot, and have good cause to, then it would seem reasonable that they be allowed to use sleep gas or tranquilizer, similar to what doctors use during operation. Seems better than killing them.

Downside could be lawsuites against the police for "damages" that the sleep gas caused.

As nice as it would be to have a reliable nonlethal alternative to firearms, there simply are no nonlethal weapons capable of stopping someone who is presenting an immediate threat. Tranquilizers and anesthesia are administered by an anesthesiologist, a doctor trained to determine a dosage based on a person's body mass. Too much of a dose, or even administering it too quickly can cause serious complications, or even death. Even under the controlled environment of an operating room 1/20 patients die under full anesthesia a year.

Sadly, the most reliable method of stopping a person presenting a threat is with a firearm.

I mean nukes are reliable too. Doesn't mean they should be used. The culture of lethal force means innocent people die.

Could you clarify what you mean by 1/20 patients dying? I looked at http://patient.info/health/anaesthesia-death-or-brain-damage and it said the risk of death (England and Wales) was 1/100,000 full anesthetics.

Definitely questioning that 1/20 figure, I had full anesthesia with a surgery earlier this year and I'm pretty sure I'd be informed of that kind of risk.

For reference, what happens when you use "knock out gas" in a contained space:

https://en.m.wikipedia.org/wiki/Moscow_theater_hostage_crisi...

...everyone's reliably incapacitated, and most people survive? (potentially everyone with adequate medical care which was not provided in that situation)

That seems strictly better than shooting to kill.

130 out of 850 people died. That's a 1 in 6 casualty rate - about what you'd get playing Russian roulette.

"Sleeping gas" isn't safe. Look up the Moscow theater hostage crisis.

A dose enough to knock out an adult might easily kill a child.

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