Idaho police officers opened fire from behind a chain-link fence just seconds after exiting their patrol cars and critically wounded a teenage boy — described by his family as nonverbal, autistic and intellectually disabled — as he stepped toward them with a knife, video from a witness shows.
Seventeen-year-old Victor Perez, who also has cerebral palsy, remained hospitalized in critical condition Tuesday after having nine bullets removed from his body and having his leg amputated, Ana Vazquez, his aunt, told The Associated Press. Doctors were planning tests on his brain activity.
The shooting Saturday in Pocatello outraged the boy’s family and neighbors as well as viewers online who questioned why the officers opened fire within about 12 seconds of exiting their patrol cars while making no apparent effort to de-escalate the situation or use less lethal weapons. Dozens of protesters gathered outside the police department Sunday, eastidahonews.com reported.
These cops a shitheel attempted murderers for shooting someone who wasn’t a threat to anyone through a fence. They should both be sent to prison and permanently barred from posessing firearms.
But their form in committing that attempted murder isn’t the issue here. As far as mag dumping goes, that’s pretty standard practice when it comes to handguns. With hand guns it’s assumed that you’re going to be using them in a high stress situation where you aren’t going to have a whole lot of time to aim carefully and your adrenaline will be interfering with your aim. Plus handguns are harder to aim accurately and just plain more inaccurate than long guns. In addition, in a high stress situation someone can be shot and not even realize they got shot until the adrenaline wears off or they drop dead. It takes a pretty immediately critical wound to actually stop a human running on adrenaline and, while gunshot wounds are easily lethal given a little bit of time, there are shockingly few areas on the body where a gunshot wound is immediately lethal or immediately crippling. All this means that training for using handguns is to aim center of mass and keep pulling the trigger until your target actually drops or otherwise completely stops being a threat. They are really only meant to be last resort weapons even for cops. If you are planning on shooting someone then you get out a long gun.
The thing to criticize here is that these two subhuman skidmarks decided to immediately gun down someone who was no immediate threat to them or anyone else. Criticizing their form durring that attempted murder just gives you less credibility around those who have firearms training and is irrelevant to the fact that they just decided on murder as plan A. Bringing up their form just deflects from the fact that their reason for shooting the victim could only be that they just wanted to.
As a guy who enjoys guns(though chill with them being banned for obvious reasons) I can happily say that if this counts as a situation with enough stress to really psyke them out(a kid 5ft away behind a fence? Really?) then they’re still dogshit at using the only tool they every seem to reach for. Cops routinely prove to be awful drivers and terrible shots yet they will go for daytime high-speed chases and shootouts in crowded areas far too often. Fuck ‘em, they should be made fun of for this.
Also if that loses credibility, if that’s enough to make a gun nut switch sides, then they were already looking for an excuse and never cared about the human component to begin with.