Digital Brainwaves

"Perhaps instead police officers should be taught not to shoot at a man 41 times"

No they shouldn't the training they have now is correct....when you need to fire you shoot for center of mass and keep pulling the trigger until your life is no longer in danger. Often it's high numbers of bullets because officers put a whole clip (or two officers put two whole clips) in the air as fast as they can pull the trigger. While I believe that it's tragic that people get killed this way, it's more so that the most dangerous thing a cop can do is a routine traffic stop (as proved to the CHP again not long ago). Yes there are cases where the cops are wrong, yes there are cases where the cops are abusing their position; and in those cases the cops need to be dealt with though the proper procedures. They do however need to defend them selves and you do that dropping the individual who is threatining their lives. I will also note that dead with 2 bullet holes and dead with 2 million bullet holes is still dead, and when cops are shooting, and shooting to kill why count bullets?

No, there's absolutely a place for blind people in government -- and provided it's possible within the requirements of the job description, that place is right along side the seeing people. No one's really focusing on the blindness, really. It's mentioned in places, but it's not a big deal.

No, the real focus is on the absolute stupidity of trying to tell a police officer (or anyone legally permitted to carry a firearm) that, now that you've come to the point where you need to use your weapon to stop someone that's trying to kill you, you have to stop and think about where to shoot him. This is a situation that makes you DEAD. QUICKLY. In the time it takes to try to shoot an attacker in the arm or leg instead of the center of his body (the biggest and easiest of targets to hit), he's shot you three times already, or possibly come up close enough to beat you or stab you.

As always, the problem with sarcasm is that it's hard to realize it's happening in text-only. ;)

-- Pauley

Perhaps instead police officers should be taught not to shoot at a man 41 times...sort of reminds me of the Cell Block Tango: "He ran into my knife! He ran into my knife ten times!" I realize that the Diallo incident was a special one of spectacularly bad judgment; something that I wish could be legislated against, but there's really little way to legislate against really poor judgment...

Also, I really hope you're not saying that blind people have no place in government. Of course being blind doesn't uniquely qualify someone to have an opinion on this particular issue, but the way you put it makes it sound like his blindness disqualifies his views entirely, which is just, well, entirely wrong. It's like saying I'm diabetic, so I can't have views on environmental protection. If he's using his blindness to claim that he's qualified, then he's wrong. If the media are focusing on his blindness rather than his record or actual qualifications, then...well, that's pretty much expected from the media, anyway.