Only the police should have guns. Because with qualified immunity, they’re not personally liable for turning uninvolved trucks into Swiss cheese in the middle of a residential neighborhood.
If you think that the LAPD shooting up random pickup trucks in pursuit of a single threatening suspect is almost comically excessive, think about what would happen if DiFi gets her “assault weapons” ban through Congress, just a half dozen of those retrograde gun nuts decide that they won’t give up their property without a fight, and a few of L.A.’s Finest get injured or killed. The resulting mobilization and Fourth Amendment Gang Rape Party would make the L.A. riots and the Katrina aftermath look like a post-lunch corporate PowerPoint presentation.
Then multiply that kind of mayhem times, say, the number of large metropolitan areas with heavily geared and militarized police departments. Sounds like a recipe for kicking off a peaceful and violence-free America, doesn’t it?
1 other thing about the photo: there seems to be a grouping (of sorts) on both the driver side window and the passenger window as well. Wasn’t Dorner just 1 person? And they were trying to ventilate 2? Hmmm. Maybe I give them too much credit for actually aiming tho.
Bob, been awhile since I was in, but the “five round fam fire off the fantail” went away around 1980 or so. They had reduced-sized silhouettes so ships could do their own qualifications, at sea, with the targets set up on the edge of the helo decks. Before those small silhouettes came into use, the use of base ranges by ships was so difficult to schedule that the gunnery chiefs often made deals with private ranges to use their facilities– working parties, 20lb tins of coffee, that sort of stuff.
Unless they brought fam fire back. Which would have been really stupid.
Or to tell two women from one 6′ tall, 250lb male…..
This smacks of “zOMG, a pickup truck! Start shooting, Cletus!”
“If I understand it, they were looking for a black man in a gray Nissan truck. So they open fire on a blue Toyota with two Asian women. ”
Just a stab at being “colorblind”, I’m sure ……. someone should explain that the term is not really meant to be taken literally, mehbee?
Apparently the shooting took place at 5:45 in the morning. It’s probably slightly tricky to tell blue from gray under the light of those sodium street lamps. Or to tell a Nissan Titan from a Toyota Tacoma.
It’s still a rule 4 violation, and very clearly (especially in the first case) it’s attempted assassination. Murder. They shot without being in clear and present danger, and had not identified their target.
Heads should roll for this, every single officer involved should be fired and preferably prosecuted.
Exactly! So it was dark. All the more reason to be careful.
Evidently then, the LAPD has looser RoE than the .mil in the sandboxes ….. in that they can shoot first, then positively ID the target.
It then a very fortunate thing that they don’t shoot very well …… unless The Plan was to pepper the truck and surrounding neighborhood with buckshot and bullets in an attempt to frighten the suspect …….. “I meant to do that.” …….
They look like the .mil ….. they are armed like the .mil …… and are quicker on the trigger than the .mil…… ARE NOT IN A WAR ZONE …… and yet see themselves stuck in an endless Low Intensity Conflict, in which there are 3 sides (Cops, Robbers, and Everybody Else). I dunno exactly what this is a recipe for, but it not going to be very palatable, whatever it turns out to be.
Looks like they were a 71 and 40 odd year old Hispanic mother and daughter, not Asian, as I thought, my mistake,
At least I didn’t open fire on them.
Unfortunately, the City of LA is not going to pay for anything. The taxpayers of LA are going to pay for it. That’s a big part of why the police can afford to be so reckless and incompetent. They are (if corruption is factored in) almost immune to criminal liability and totally immune to financial responsibility.
I should probably turn in my internet license. This was supposed to be a reply to Comrade Misfit @3:44
If I understand it, they were looking for a black man in a gray Nissan truck. So they open fire on a blue Toyota with two Asian women.
Police work at its best, I guess.
I see no way in which this could possibly go poorly.
“Then multiply that kind of mayhem times, say, the number of large metropolitan areas with heavily geared and militarized police departments. Sounds like a recipe for kicking off a peaceful and violence-free America, doesn’t it?”
To me, that sounds an awful lot like the English attempt to confiscate all the weapons and firearms that triggered the Revolutionary War.
It would be very unfortunate if the liberals got all they are asking for. But it would be even more unfortunate, if the nation turned to war against itself, again, to ensure the liberals did not get all they want.
I have no faith they will get the punishment they deserve for this soaring level of incompetence, but how does qualified immunity protect these idiots? This isn’t a question of constitutional rights. They critically wounded two innocent people and endangered everybody else in the neighborhood!
Unless you are a SEAL, all the Navy does is fam fire. They point the business end down range and fire 5 or 10 rounds and call it good. He wasn’t a SEAL so if he’s a good marksman, he got the training somewhere else or did it on his own. The time I spent on the range, I never did see any sailors come out to fire. On days we had live fire going on we always had a couple of Corpsmen, just in case.
What I think is getting missed in all the hoohah about Chris Dorner being on the loose is that no one seems to be interested in determining to what extent Dorner’s complaints are legitimate. I read his ‘manifesto’ from beginning to end, and much of what he wrote about his treatment by the LAPD has the ring of truth to it. Granted, that was *his* account, hardly an unbiased source. However, nothing he alleged struck me as at all improbable. In countless job situations I’ve witnessed exactly the sort of things he describes, and have at times looked over my shoulder to find the handle of a co-worker’s dagger protruding from my back.
Of course what Dorner has chosen to do about his complaints is morally dubious at best and outright unconscionable at worst. That reaction notwithstanding, I think somebody needs to stick a flashlight up the LAPD’s ass and find out what really happened and who was at fault.
Another aspect of Dorner’s manifesto that should occasion a closer look are his claims of his powers of retribution. He portrays himself as some kind of secret squirrel spec ops hyperninja who has access to classified intel and training that would make a Delta Force operator look like an 8yr old playing cops ‘n’ robbers. Although he did serve in the military nothing in his background suggests the kind of training he purports to have. My point here is that LAPD’s response to his threat seems to take his word at face value, and their response is almost comical in being so totally over the top. Unless they know things about him that aren’t apparent to the rest of us, responding to him as if he were Lex Luthor, James Bond, D.B. Cooper, and Nick Fury all rolled into one seems a little unwarranted.
It will be interesting indeed to see how this all plays out.
The man killed the daughter of his police union rep, and her fiancee. All other things being equal–and I don’t doubt that the LAPD has covered up stuff in the past–I’m really leaning toward believing the other cops over the guy who’s mentally unstable enough to kill the family members of those he perceives as having wronged him.
The LAPD is responding this way because they know he is probably better at this then they are. Their training mostly consists of a periodic qualification fire.
On top of that, when police go after a dangerous suspect, not being fools, they use overwhelming force, a small army of cops with bodyarmor and M-4s.
Being individually hunted down is something they have absolutely no training to deal with, so they are panicking, and shooting at shadows, or even worse, the people they were supposed to police after.
The City of LA …. NO. That’s the tax payer, I want the incompetent jerks who did it, and the stupid cretins who authorized it to personally pay.
I have nothing against immunity for “honest” mistakes, but this is just wild vicious malice aforethought combined with biblical grade incompetence.
You gotta wonder how many of those shots missed…and that looks like a house in the background.
Is it possible to even IMAGINE how the unarmed people in the truck must have felt??
They were most likely scared shitless. Right now, however, they’re using their involuntary hospital stay for gunshot wounds to list all the shit they’re going to be buying when the city settles and forks over a few big bags of taxpayer cash. Because baby, there’s a whole brigade of lawyers desperately trying to get through to their rooms.
As there should be. The City of LA should pay through the nose (and every other orifice) for this fiasco.
And the cops who committed the crime should be tossed in jail for attempted murder. They completely and utterly failed to ID their target before they opened up, which means that when they started firing they had no idea who they were dealing with or if the situation warranted deadly force.
That means they were attempting an assassination. It wasn’t a defensive act; it was intended to result in the death of their victim. Thank the gods that they were completely incompetent, or those two ladies would be in the morgue.