Hacker News Reader

Comment by jakelazaroff | Hacker News Reader

> In 2023 it's estimated police killed around 1,248 people. Notice I said killed vs Murdered as words matter. Out of that only 104 were unarmed. Now without looking at each case or example here, you can still account for the mass majority of police interactions ending in a death, the civilian was armed at a minimum.

Does the Second Amendment not exist? Which other constitutional rights do you think we should use to justify these murders?

View on HN

The 2nd Amendment doesn't give you the right to brandish at cops (or anyone else, outside of limited situations like self defense)

GP merely said “armed”, not “brandishing”.

Armed during a police encounter. I agree we need more information on the stats, primarily what was the catalyst for the interaction? I would suspect though that most of these stats are based on interactions driven by criminal behavior. This isn't counter to BRUEN and current interpretations of 2a rights.

“Armed during a police encounter” — right, so what? Is there, like, an asterisk on the Second Amendment that says “unless it’s during a police encounter, then they get to summarily execute you, sorry”?

That feels like a weird category to use IMO. People who brandish are armed but not all armed people are brandishing.

More to the point, if you went to your local PDs website and watched body cam from the last 10 shootings, how many do you think would be involve law abiding gun owners with CCWs using guns in a way consistent with the 2nd Amendment vs people brandishing or using their guns in a criminal and/or dangerous way?

Again, I am not the one using that category; I am responding to its use.

How many were using their guns in a dangerous and/or criminal way? We may never know, because they were deprived of their right to the trial by jury which would have determined that.

"Armed" is a proxy for criminals being criminals, and almost always reaching for, displaying, or using the weapon in some antisocial way prior to being shot dead.

Legal gun owners not committing obvious crimes are only rarely accosted by police, and shootings are exceedingly rare, and they usually make the news and result in legal action. They also usually involve the victim doing something that's not advisable, even if they're not doing anything legally wrong. Philando Castile, for instance, or Johnny Hurley.

"Unarmed" doesn't represent what the suspect was doing that got them shot. Were they resisting arrest or being noncompliant and reaching for their waist or a center console or glove compartment?

There are cases where police shoot suspects, armed or unarmed, unjustifiably. They're not as rare as anyone wishes they were. They're still fairly rare. Behaving civilly, even while recognizing that many police are like barely constrained wild animals, goes a long way toward ensuring that an accidental furtive gesture isn't interpreted as reaching for a weapon.

No, “armed” isn’t a proxy for anything. It means they were found to be carrying a gun. It doesn’t matter whether they were committing a crime or doing something inadvisable — the point is that if merely being armed justifies your extrajudicial murder by police, then the Second Amendment doesn’t actually exist.

It is, because cops never shoot someone just for being armed. They just don't. It's a combination of being armed plus (believed) criminal status, or behavior during the encounter.

(And it's exceedingly rare that cops will believe an upstanding citizen who's legally armed and behaving civilly is a criminal. It happens, for instance in the two cases I cited, but it's rare. They're a rounding error in the police killing stats.)

Why do you believe that? We routinely see police break the law, harass people and otherwise abuse their power, but when it comes to encounters with armed civilians they become upstanding professionals with perfect judgment?

>It is, because cops never shoot someone just for being armed. They just don't.

So you don't know about https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Killing_of_Philando_Castile

They do, they mentioned him earlier:

> They also usually involve the victim doing something that's not advisable, even if they're not doing anything legally wrong. Philando Castile, for instance, or Johnny Hurley.

“Not advisable”, of course, being a goalpost on wheels that allows them to justify police misconduct.

Reply on news.ycombinator.com