Protests resume in fatal Sacramento police shooting of Stephon Clark - Sensationalist Headlines

Your post is reductio ad absurdum Yes, I follow your logic and apply it to situations where it yields absurd results, thus demonstrating that the initial assumption, your argument, isn't a viable principle to hold in its current form. That's what reductio ad absurdum is, indeed. This is a legitimate form of demonstration. What's your point? You're no longer arguing my argument, but an extreme version you've made up Oh, really? You're saying here that nobody should be forced to put their safety at risk for a job. Yet it is evidently what happens in most lines of work, as there is always some amount of risk in them. OSHA doesn't prescribe never forcing anybody to take any risk for their job, it limits the extent of risks that are acceptable. If zero risks were acceptable, undertaking any job would be impossible. Which is why you need nuance, you can't simply claim that nobody should be forced to take any risks in their line of work, you have to set the bar somewhere where it won't unreasonably impede the feasibility of the job. You have to do the same for the police, and justify it, especially since their job is particularly important to society, and people's lives hang in the balance.

Cops aren't forced to be cops, they sign up voluntarily. You volunteered, trained, and accepted the risks of your job, and as such you don't go out of your way to protect JUST yourself if danger is present. The same should apply to cops. They should be fully aware of the dangers of the job, no? I mean you might not see this as an issue, until it happens to you, of course, but knowing that all it takes is a "perceived threat" to excuse officers to shoot you dead makes people even more leery of police in an already observably unstable society.

It's not really a question of having little available information. What legitimate reason could there possibly be to do this? In fact, why the fuck is that even possible in the first place? Why are police officers allowed to mute their own bodycam at will?

Part of the reason the American police is so quick to react to anything remotely shaped like a gun is partly caused by the fact they serve in a country which, by and large, has the highest concentration of firearms in any developed country in the world. There's an abundance of them and the legal ease with which an individual can acquire one means that they'll have to be considerably more on their toes than in countries where firearms are statistically less common. Also it's incredibly counterproductive how people are now trying to claim the dude wasn't a criminal or that his past crimes in no way had an impact on the night of his death. It serves no purpose to try and downplay the guy's own shiftiness even if it should not be used as a basic excuse to handwave the fact he ended up in a situation where he was shot and killed.

Not just the ease in acquiring them legally, but also illegally. Even if most guns are legally purchased, many illegal guns are simply out-right stolen, and as many as we have, it's impossible to keep track of them all without a registry.

Yeah it's a combination of both factors, but they're linked together. Guns can only be stolen so easily because there's no shortage of legally acquired weapons to steal.

Mmm, it may be unnecessary force to shoot an unarmed person from across the street/while they're crawling(It is), but I don't give a fuck what someone's coming after me with. If they're attacking me I'm responding with the most force I have at my disposal until the attack stops. If that's a firearm, they're getting shot. If that's a crowbar, they're getting Freeman'd. If that's my bare hands then I'm going Mohammed Ali on their arse. If they pull a gun and stick it out the window of their car at me I'm going to run their arse right off the fucking road. Reasonable force for reasonable force, and if someone's making a credible threat to someone else that someone is entitled to respond with whatever means they have to defend themselves. It's 100% unreasonable to shoot an unarmed, submissive criminal who's begging for mercy, but it's just as unreasonable to put officers in a position where they're afraid to defend themselves from real, tangible, credible threats to their very lives.