Virginia Tech School Shooting

The distinction I wanted to make was that in the line of duty of an average cop during the course of an average career, it shouldn't be the case that you're statistically more likely than not to be shot at.

It's obvious that cops sometimes get shot at; but if it is the case that there's at least one shooting per police officer without counting those employed in extra-risky branches of the force, then there's a huge social problem and I would consider it something of an emergency.

Fortunately, I find it unlikely that that would be the case in the US.

As for supporting a police state, no, I would not, but I would support employing extra force (within certain limits, obviously,) until the crisis is resolved (if there is one, which I don't think is the case.)

Oh, and sorry about topping the page with a continuation of the derail, but I hope that clarifying my position will put an end to my part in it and hopefully some other loose ends that are flapping around in the discussion.

edited 8th Dec '11 5:12:19 PM by BestOf

I would wager a guess that, in certain areas, one is more likely to be shot at once in your career as an officer than not.

I don't really think you can compare this (once in thirty years, etc) to going into a warzone.

edited 8th Dec '11 5:16:00 PM by ohsointocats

Well, then deploy special forces. (I need to clarify - I would not consider any kind of a military the force of first resort; there are units within police forces with varying degrees of authority, training and equipment, and scaling up the intensity of the police operation is what I would do first to alleviate the immediate problem before immersing myself in identifying and removing the causes of such social disturbance, which in any case is the long-term objective of the collective effort of the society of which the police force is part.)

I excluded from the definition of an average police officer any unit that is deployed in a duty that by its nature is subject to higher risk - these are the special units to which I refer. In this sense, if an ordinary police officer can expect to get fired upon, then there's a problem.

Let's take a look at the warzone bit:

So you can see that I started by immediately pointing out the most obvious type of profession in which you wouldn't complain about a high risk of coming under fire. I excluded the more intense kinds of police duties for the same reason: I wanted to look at ordinary cops doing their ordinary duty.

edited 8th Dec '11 5:22:08 PM by BestOf

The causes of such disturbance are socioeconomic inequality and the criminalization of large swathes of the population, who'd otherwise be ordinary folks.

Special forces and militarized police can hardly fix'em.

They did, Best Of.

I don't know if you saw video, but they had multiple fire teams of officers equipped with military assault rifles.

If this idiot had tried to keep going, he'd have ended up as Swiss cheese in a matter of minutes.

I don't know if you're understanding the statistics involved here. You have once in thirty years, and you have someone on combat on deployment, when they're pretty much guaranteed to be shot at, over a span of 6-18 months. That's quite a difference in probability.

There have been two shots fired on campus at my school within the past eight years. Under your logic, the entire school should be on lockdown, correct?

Talba, I'd laugh, but it's not funny. Not anymore, anyway. We've heard his "kill the pigs, row row fight the powah" shtick over and over again. It's stupid and immature. If that's all he has to say he should leave and not come back.

I edited my previous post to address the issue. You're misunderstanding what I'm saying, but I'm fairly sure that I was able to clarify my position in my previous two posts.

I'm not saying that one shooting every now and then constitutes a crisis, nor am I saying that even daily encounters would necessarily be that if they were handled by the appropriate units and were within the expected statistical margins considering the population and other factors.

I used the terms "crisis" and "emergency" to refer to an imaginary state of affairs in which normal, average cops doing normal, average duty have a higher chance than not of being shot at during their career. I'm fairly sure that there isn't a country on earth where that would really be the case; I'm just trying to paint some broad lines here to dispute the notion that getting shot at really does "come with the job." The risk of it does, but it's not supposed to be the case that you can be fairly certain that you'll be shot at if you're not employed in a line of duty in which there's a heightened risk of it happening.

All right, I'm going to grudgingly admit that the incident was regrettable, and it would have been better for it to be avoided entirely: If it had been avoided, neither of those two guys (I'm assuming they were guys) would be dead, and that'd been two grieving families less.

I'm leaving it at that and butting out of the thread. Sorry if I offended y'all with my lack of sympathy.

edited 8th Dec '11 5:48:33 PM by SavageHeathen

At least it was responded to than the first one. Its still terible two people died. I've heard one of them was the shooter though.

So did anyone other than the policeman and the gunman die?

'Cause if not, then I hope neither gets demonized in all this mess.

Just thought I'd step in as someone from a family of three generations of LAPD officers:

Most cops, even in places like Los Angeles, don't ever have to kill anybody in their entire career. Will they draw their weapon a few times on average in a 25 year span? Yeah. But I'd say it's a good 90 percent who never have to actually pull the trigger. And that's in a shitty place like LAPD, by and large the overwhelming percentage of Cops never take a life.

edited 8th Dec '11 6:56:40 PM by Barkey

This is sounding more and more like a relatively routine shooting that got blown out of proportion due to the coincidence of location.

We were talking about the chance of a policeman getting shot at, not a policeman doing the shooting. And I was trying to explain that the chances of this are much smaller than a warzone. In a warzone, you'll probably get shot at more than once, but let's pretend it's once. 1/6 months. If you're a police officer, and you get shot at once in your 25-year career, that's 1/300 months. These numbers, with the first probably being higher and the second even lower, are not comparable.

And yes, when I said "in certain areas" previously, I meant inner city St Louis and the like.

edited 8th Dec '11 7:05:38 PM by ohsointocats

That guy really manages to disgust me.

But to have this happen twice at the same school...damn. What if the shooters are people trying to "continue the legacy" of the ones who did the first shooting?

^^

Even then, cops don't get shot at all that much in their career, even in the worst areas. It's not common.

Oh, I thought this was the one with Korean. Guess I should be relieved?

That's what I was saying.

I'm sigged now? Shoot, I was just pointing out the obvious.