The mom is invoking the “Chuck Norris Rule”: The good-guy can only respond to the bad-guy’s level of aggression in kind, like it it’s a duel. The good-guy is only allowed to escalate to a higher level of force if the bad-guy escalates first. The trouble is Mom, the “Chuck Norris Rule” has no basis in law. Especially not for the Police. Cops are hired by WE, THE PEOPLE to keep the peace and apprehend law-breakers. If they have to use overwhelming force to keep the peace and protect citizens’ lives and property (AND not get killed or crippled themselves in the process), so be it. Although clearly current political sentiment deems the police must NOT use overwhelming force to combat crime committed by oppressed minority youth, but that is a story for another time.
( Old White Guys and the Chuck Norris Rule)
Experienced police trainers, like Massad Ayoob, highly recommend against attempting to use non-lethal means to subdue suspects armed with lethal weapons, for the simple reason that if it fails to work, you could easily end up dead. There are all kinds of cases on record where Tasers, pepper spray and even batons failed to stop an armed assailant and the cop(s) who employed them came to grief. Keep in mind that six percent of the population is immune to pepper spray and pepper spray works much better in the aggregate than old-fashioned MACE/tear gas. Many people have the impression that cops should be able use some clever Jiu-Jitsu trick to disarm people with knives, just like in the movies. However, the average cop on the street is no more a martial arts expert with cat-like reflexes than he or she is a crack shot able to shoot a clay pigeons out of the air with a handgun. When you call for the cops, you’re going to get average people with average physical abilities and average intelligence who are going to deal with these terrifying incidents the way they were trained to do so. Not the way you’ve seen on TV and in the movies. These average people will usually opt for dealing with a violent situation in a way that they best believe will allow them to go home unharmed at the end of their shift. This case in Reno looks like another sad case of “suicide by cop”.
Jeremy, I see this as related to police and media misreporting of attacks as "fights," a social symptom of our collective delusion.
-James
Posted at 4:04 pm on December 16, 2016 by Bob Owens
Bearing Arms |
Cheryl Pitchford, the mother of a Reno (NV) teen who pulled out a pair of butcher knives and attempted to hack his classmates into kibble is demanding that school police use less-lethal systems so that violent thugs like her child stand a fighting chance...
