Hacker News Reader

Comment by jakelazaroff | Hacker News Reader

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.

View on HN

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