Sometimes The Police Are Right To Shoot

If you pull out a gun and point it at the coppers, you can hardly expect them not to shoot you, particularly if you are a known criminal and the police are executing a search warrant on your house.

There have been multiple, recent cases of unjustifiable deaths at the hands of police, but the above is not one of them.

Nor is the shooting of Darren Neill at Westfield Parramatta or the shooting of Ryan Pringle at Tenterfield by police after he pointed a crossbow at them and other people. They even did the right thing in the latter instance and tasered Pringle first, but apparently it didn’t work.

The men in the three cases above were shot dead rather than police shooting to merely disable eg. by aiming for the thigh. Society can’t expect police to endanger their own lives by taking low percentage shots when confronted by someone wielding a gun or a crossbow. It is even unreasonable to expect police to take low percentage shots if they are cornered by someone with a knife. If they can back off, then take a shot, then more measured action is appropriate, but not when a split second decision is required and the consequences of failure are quite possibly death.

Update: The Police Were Right To Shoot These Fuckwits As Well:

Police in King's Cross shot the driver and front seat passenger of a stolen car which had deliberately mounted the kerb to escape pursuit and driven along a pavement packed with pedestrians. The police opened fire to stop the car after it hit a woman, who fell under the front of the vehicle and was dragged along.

What's the problem then? She was an innocent bystander who could easily have been killed. There was a choice between shooting the driver to stop the car and save the woman's life or being more concerned for the welfare of a bunch of scummy cunts who couldn't care less about other people's safety and right to walk on a footpath without being run over. The police made the right one. 
Were I one of the woman's family or friends, I'd be thanking the police. Conversely, I'd have been raising hell had they made the opposite choice.

The question was asked whether police should have opened fire in a crowded street. 
To save a woman's life? Of course they should. One would expect them to be able to hit their target, given that it was about six feet wide.

There was predictable hand wringing and accusations from the usual suspects over the fact the shot driver was a 14 year old boy and moreover, that the occupants of the stolen car were Aboriginals.
How would the police have known his age prior to shooting? What does it matter that they were Aboriginals? Why should it have changed the police's decision? Would the woman under the car have been any less dead?

More should be made of the obvious question: "What is a 14 year old boy doing driving a stolen car through Kings Cross at 4am?"

Have a look at the family of the driver about 2.00 min into the ABC TV coverage. It explains a lot. The police may want to ask them how they arrived on the scene so quickly.

All society's fault, of course.

Actually, it is partly: the lefty, identity politics hand wringers and pseudo intellectual onanists who bend over backwards to give this so called "community" equal rights, without the commensurate expectation of equal standards of behaviour.