but when we're talking about known thugs, like gentle Ben, what's a cop to do?....he didn't have rubber bullets....he didn't have bear spray or a fire hose to stop the 300#er....
like little sweet trayvon, gentle ben just went too far to be ignored....
I’ve seen physically abusive cops before. I’ve seen them assault white males, hispanics, whatever. I have not seem them go into assault mode based strictly on skin color nor avoid going into assault mode simply because someone was white.
Officer Wilson is not a dainty little flower. He is a large and presumably powerful man, though admittedly not as large as Brown. It should be noted that much of Brown's weight advantage was pretty obviously fat, not entirely a help in a fight.
Wilson was presumably carrying a Taser and a nightstick or something resembling one.
At the time of the shooting both men were in the middle of the street, with Brown charging Wilson.
And there was nothing at all Wilson could do except shoot Brown?
Would a Taser have stopped him? Could a nightstick have made up the difference in weight sufficiently for Brown to be taken down? If Wilson had not shot Brown, would he have gotten hold of the officer's gun and used it on him?
We'll never know the answer to any of those questions, because Wilson made the choice to use lethal force before Brown could reach him.
I'm not going to sit here and decide it was the wrong choice, because I wasn't there. But I am going to object to claims that Wilson had no choice, because they are objectively inaccurate. He had a number of choices. The choice he made was to use lethal force rather than engage in additional physical combat with Brown.
BTW, the article was interesting in that it implies agreement with Brown being a thug, but claims that this doesn't matter. This varies from other articles I've seen in which Thug status is vehemently denied.
Which is entirely reasonable. Except that it appears the presence of a gun turned what might have been a physical assault with both participants surviving into an existential struggle of kill or be killed. Each participant, accurately, may have believed he had no choice but to gain possession of the gun to potentially keep it from being used on him. Once in possession there was no choice but to use it to keep from losing possession.
IOW, the presence of a highly deadly weapon took options off the board rather than increasing them.
I support 2A rights, but the mere presence of a gun can create a situation in which its use becomes almost imperative.
In each of these cases, is it possible, perhaps even likely, that somebody (cop or thug) would have wound up dead even without a gun being present? Sure, but the gun made it almost certain.