Line #17 Headscratchers/RedState


1	* The whole scene with the ATF agent and Cheyenne behind the house bugs me. First, there didn't seem to be a wall on that side of the house, so why not send agents to breach from that direction? Second, what was he trying to do by giving Cheyenne his backup handgun? If he wanted to make it look like a justified shooting, all he needed to do was plant it on her ''after'' killing her. If he couldn't bring himself to kill her and wanted the other agents to do it, he could have just sent her back into the house and returned to his post.
2	** It appeared that he was trying to send her back in, she just wouldn't because she knew damn well what was going to happen if she did.
3	*** I guess my real question is about the gun. He was struggling to force it into her hand (after firing off the shots), but there was no need to do that while she was alive. Shoot her and throw the gun next to her body, that's how real Dirty Cops have done it. Wrestling with her to force the gun into her hand is what allowed the mother to sneak up on him.
4	*** That's not what I got from that scene at all. I assumed that he wanted her to ''live'', and that he gave her the gun for self-defense.
5	*** Again, He fired off all the rounds first. Giving her an unloaded handgun does nothing for her or him.
6	** Maybe he just was one of those kinds of guys that just couldn't shoot an unarmed person? Some people are just too good hearted for their own good and he may have been one of them. Who knows.
7	*** That's entirely possible, but then he had no reason to pretend she was armed by giving her an empty gun.
8	** He easily could have been trying to make it seem like he killed her, which is why the fired the gun, and gave her to gun, for some random reason. He is seen questioning the order to kill her, and I doubt he would have been willing to shoot her, even with the orders.
9	** If someone has fired a gun recently, there will be gunshot residue on him. The way that the ATF agent held the pistol near her hand and fired it away from her, it looked to this troper like he was trying to make it look like she'd been firing it, planting traces for Forensics to find. Also, if he had gotten her to hold the gun, her fingerprints would be on it.
10	*** GSR would be all over her shirt, hand, face and firing arm, from firing a weapon while standing -- plus the bullets would be recoverable by forensics from far down-field. He was forcing her to grab his untraced plant-piece because these guys are all crooked and he was merely following orders.
11	*** GSR doesn't work like that. The original poster has every reason to be bugged. Every part of that exchange was just dumb and illogical. If the agent knew how forensic evidence worked at all, he wouldn't have gone to the trouble of trying to '''badly''' fabricate some. He would have done what the rest of the team was doing and simply gone into follow orders mode and killed everybody. If he was trying to protect her, nothing about what he did makes any sense: arming her with a disarmed weapon, sending her back into the line of fire; it just doesn't add up. And if he were trying to make it look like be had to kill her to protect himself, and was trying to fabricate forensics to support returning fire, he would know that shooting her in the back while she ran inside wouldn't look good either. No, that whole scene is flipping off the MST3KMantra.
12	** My two cents on it: the agent was struggling between choosing to gun her down as the orders said to and letting her go back and try to rescue the kids. He settles on the second option, but decides to empty his revolver and give it to her unloaded so she has a way to appear armed to her family without the possibility of actually shooting him.

Context Headscratchers / RedState