FBI releases video of militiaman shooting

[nemomen]

@zikzak

None of the problems they caused were worth anywhere near a human life.

The extremists were actively working to create a situation causing the loss of human life. Law enforcement was attempting to defuse that. It’s terrible that one person died, though that’s a much better outcome than the goals of the extremists. Finicum and some others stated they wanted to go out in death by cop. It’s not a very easy problem to resolve when he’s armed and prepared to murder cops in the name of “self defense.” In an ideal world this wouldn’t be a problem, but we don’t live in an ideal world, and within the constraints of reality they managed the situation about as well as could be hoped for given the circumstances.

@zikzak

Order must be preserved, because otherwise there would be disorder!

I actually am a big fan of the rule of law.

[Modusoperandi]

Why? Did he eat fifty eggs in an hour?

[nungesser]

@zikzak

None of the problems they caused were worth anywhere near a human life.

These are people who have repeatedly said they are willing to “kill or be killed”, and have said they will not be taken alive under any circumstance. To the Oregon militia, it’s worth a human life, apparently.

[enso]

@zikzak

How do you think cops in the UK would have dealt with a situation like this? How about Germany, or Japan or Iceland?

Once he started reaching for a gun, I think they’d have shot him. You think they wouldn’t have?

[onemanmob]

I have serious doubts. Your line of reasoning relies solely on the brain processes of a man who was just involved in high speed chase that ended in a snow drift (extreme levels of adrenaline), And who also believed that the people who were chasing them meant to kill them, to think rationally (fight or flight).

There is some rationally all up in this bitch. Oh yeah!

[enso]

@TimWayne

I’m saying that there should be zero editing, ever, of any police videos, and that the videos should be routinely released immediately following any police fatality, not days later after agencies have had the opportunity to edit them.

Good luck with that windmill, Don.

[KarlS]

@zikzak

Order must be preserved, because otherwise there would be disorder!Now, I’m no discordian, but the impulse to punish people for transgressing the law itself - as opposed to causing actual harm - strikes me as inherently fascist. The response to this militia should have been proportional to the actual harm they were doing - and that harm was decidedly un-epic (and actually kind of pathetic) in scale.

So far nobody has been punished for anything. I don’t think that arrests were in any way disproportionate.

[simonize]

I think that you’re conflating the extreme rarity of facing people known to be armed with guns and a stated willingness to use them and the likely response to that eventuality. I agree that our police forces in this country are too heavily militarized. But the people in the US are much better armed than those in the countries that you have listed. And in the face of well armed men who have characterized themselves as revolutionaries I don’t think that the government’s response in this case was at all excessive, or indeed radically more violent that the response to similar provocation would have been or indeed HAS been* in those countries.

• https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Munich_massacre

[anon15383236]

@zikzak

The response to this militia should have been proportional to the actual harm they were doing - and that harm was decidedly un-epic (and actually kind of pathetic) in scale.

Straw man? Goal post shifting? I’m not sure, but what you should be arguing about is what this thread is about – the death of one man, not the actions of the entire militia. This one man’s death didn’t come about because of what the militia were doing. It came about because of what he was doing, which was driving recklessly at a roadblock, then reaching into his pocket while having guns pointed at him. All after having said in public that he’d rather be shot than end up in a prison cell.

[grimloki]

Its a technical issue.

We have zero effective ways at reasonable ranges and without risking someone’s life to take a person down.

And we don’t plan our tactics based on someone resisting deadly force.

Its a completely different paradigm we work off of. How do we keep officers safe when in the line of fire?

Shoot before getting shot. Shoot people that look like they’re dangerous. Determine what level of force you need… And shoot them as a last resort. But know that if that commanding tone, and stick, and pepper spray and taser aren’t cutting it… There’s always fucking bullets to fall back on.

And guns don’t even work well to stop people. You gotta shoot them a couple of times to make sure they don’t move. In someplace vital.

Also don’t aim for legs. We don’t want lawsuits, and if lethal force is authorized… Its best we all just make sure its used lethally. Otherwise we will muddy the waters with ‘why didn’t you try x, or y, or z as far as where or how to shoot someone’. We can’t have that. Shoot first. Shoot to kill.

When you’re plans include gunfights to get a person to behave and be detained, you already fucked up.

When your tactics are about getting an armed person to comply, and that armed person is a danger… what the fuck do you have. Reasonable arguments? Talk to the dude and get him to see his poor decisions and consequences of his actions?

When these discussions include “his jacket was to puffy for the taser bolt from the crossbow” or “we nailed him hard with a big ass bulletproof robotic linebacker shaped thing but he was wiley” or “they disabled his vehicle with an EMP pulse 50 miles from civilization and hoped he got cold and tired and would give himself up… But he was just dedicated to being a dick and getting shot” then we can probably make headway on this issue.

Do we even accept the premise that shooting people to enforce laws is a legitimate fucking practice… that the standard operating procedures involve constant loss of life and that’s OK?

Its so not.

And when cops don’t have a standard operating procedure for when they need to kill people, we won’t have to discuss cops as hitmen, or cops killing innocent peolel and putting guns in their hands, or cops shooting 12 yr olds with toy guns, or executing people who have surrendered with shotguns to the head, or ALL the other bullshit.

[nothingfuture]

Lt. Aldo Raine: DONNY!
Sgt. Donny Donowitz: [from offscreen] Yeah?
Lt. Aldo Raine: We got a German here who wants to die for his country! Oblige him!

[SamSam]

This man had always dreamed of a final gun battle with federal agents.

Here is, kid you not, the end of the book he wrote:

I can only imagine that, as he was running out into the snow, his hands kept darting to his loaded gun in his pocket, and then back up in the air, and then down again to his loaded gun, because of his final internal struggle between his fantasy and his self-preservation instinct.

[nemomen]

@zikzak

the impulse to punish people for transgressing the law itself - as opposed to causing actual harm - strikes me as inherently fascist. The response to this militia should have been proportional to the actual harm they were doing

As a birder/environmentalist/citizen scientist I saw a bunch of armed yahoos take over the management center of a wildlife preserve that was in the middle of managing a serious ecological crisis (the carp). They did so with a demand to be permitted to privatize and destroy that wildlife preserve. They’re really on my bad side, and they are working to cause not only the loss of wildlife, but were cool with harming endangered species. They’ve already done real long term harm to the management of the wildlife preserve and I hope they’re charged and serve time for it.

“You know how many endangered species we’re dealing with on our ranch right now? Zero, because it doesn’t matter anymore.” - Ryan Bundy, Ecological Bond Villain

They also were threatening violence against law enforcement, damaging a Native American archaeological site, making demands by threat of force rather pursuing legal channels, and were creating problems for the community, so action was warranted. The Feds. were attempting to negotiate, the extremists refused to negotiate because they were delusional, so they captured their leaders in the most peaceful way they could manage. This is not like fascism on the part of law enforcement, but a very measured response to armed, delusional extremists.

[renke]

Interestingly Munich 72 was the reason why the German police founded SWAT-like units.

Without a clear proof I have the feeling that those specialist units are less likely to kill suspects: Normal LEOs here do shoot more or less often distressed persons (e.g. Berlin 2013, a naked man armed with a knife, standing in a fountain). otoh SWAT members seem to be better trained to work under stress, a raid of a Hell’s Angels home in 2010 ended in one dead officer and one living handcuffed suspect.

[wrecksdart]

@onemanmob

I have serious doubts. Your line of reasoning relies solely on the brain processes of a man who was just involved in high speed chase that ended in a snow drift (extreme levels of adrenaline), And who also believed that the people who were chasing them meant to kill them, to think rationally (fight or flight).

In the days just prior to this episode, he’d already watched federal officials arrest other militia members without their desired OK Corral standoff and without anyone being killed, feds or otherwise. LEOs hadn’t sniped him while he slept under his tarp. They hadn’t killed anyone who’d gone into town to buy groceries or to get a room at the hotel for a shower and good night’s sleep. Perhaps a rapidly inflated sense of self-importance made him think, “Oh, the Feds, they’re just a-waiting for ME and only ME to come out of here, then it’s gonna be guns a-blazin”?

In addition, Finicum was driving a large vehicle with, from what I’ve read, three other people, at least one of whom was a woman who we might suspect was a wife/daughter (certainly, women are more than capable of being gun-totin’ militia members, but between this group’s honor culture and their belief in Jeebus needing the women to stay barefoot and pregnant, I have to assume she was helping cook meals and such). He put everyone in that vehicle at risk from being killed by stray bullets, stupid Feds, stupid militia members, deer or other animals on the road, etc. etc. So he was starting from a stupid place to begin with and putting people’s lives in jeopardy that did not need to be there in the first place. Were I more cynical, I might wonder if he’d had those people in the vehicle, thinking that the Feds might shoot a militia person, but not militia person’s wife/daughter.

The whole episode is tragic, and especially for Finicum, but he made that bed himself through a long series of terrible judgement calls.

[Franko]

i watched this last night, and aside from all the arguments going back and forth in this thread, i have to just say on a basic human level that watching it has really sort of haunted me. i’m not good with watching people actually die, apparently.

[onemanmob]

So what your saying was that he was thinking rationally. Or did you mean thinking rationally for a extreme right terrorist?

I’m not trying to pick a fight, but you keep making assertions that you know exactly how he was thinking and that he was thinking rationally (which still seems like an odd choice because how many “rational” people would end up in an extremist group in the first place). Everyone at the camp claimed they would kill/die for their “mission” or whatever. Yet only one person died. Why didn’t the other people in the truck start shooting? If Finicum was planning on shooting his way out or die trying, why the hell would he wait until he was out of the truck to even reach for his gun? and be so blatant about it?

[zikzak]

@nemomeno

take over the management center of a wildlife preserve that was in the middle of managing a serious ecological crisis (the carp). They did so with a demand to be permitted to privatize and destroy that wildlife preserve. They’re really on my bad side, and they are working to cause not only the loss of wildlife, but were cool with harming endangered species.

This is the stuff we should be focused on, because it’s pretty fucked up. They are trying to spark a populist movement against environmentalism and collective stewardship of the land. Their vision for the future is unlimited exploitation of natural resources, and keeping all the profits from said exploitation for themselves, the “owners”. It’s disgustingly self-centered and destructive.

That really has no bearing on whether law enforcement should’ve sought a violent confrontation with this guy, but it’s definitely worth drawing attention to.

[mindfu]

I would normally agree with you. But this is a case with a definitely armed arrest suspect who had publicly stated multiple times that he would rather die than go to jail, who ran out of his car and took his hands out of the air to go towards a possible gun - twice. I’m finding it hard to fault the feds in this instance.

[Brainspore]

@zikzak

a lot of comments here are uncharacteristically credulous when it comes to this particular police narrative.

This is an uncharacteristic situation. Most of the recent police killings discussed on this site involved unarmed suspects, or at most a suspect armed with a knife facing a large group of police holding guns.

In this case the man who was shot is known to have been armed, is known to have threatened lethal force, and explicitly stated that he’d die before submitting to arrest.