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Comment by Izkata | Hacker News Reader

> 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.

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> 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".

> 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".

It.. is not. I suspect that you have some fundamental misunderstandings of firearm safety and I would not feel safe at a range with someone who thinks this way.

I believe it's a legal term that's leaked out into general use:

Wikipedia: https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Deadly_force

> Deadly force, also known as lethal force, is the use of force that is likely to cause serious bodily injury or death to another person.

Cornell Law School: https://www.law.cornell.edu/cfr/text/10/1047.7

> (a) Deadly force means that force which a reasonable person would consider likely to cause death or serious bodily harm.

(that wasn't what I was responding to.....)

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