In the news

Our mate William yells at an FBI guy that his trousers are unacceptable:

https://x.com/FilmThePoliceLA/status/1799863762188751302

Balls of steel.

Bit more info on Moseley's death: https://www.bbc.co.uk/news/articles/c1dd7ekyrpyo

Got a point!

Force Balls Internally.

Today gets better

https://www.telegraph.co.uk/news/2024/06/11/police-protester-nigel-farage-campaign-visit-barnsley/

Probably paid the person to do it. Any press and all.

America is wild. Teen returning Airsoft gun to store is shot dead. It reads a lot worse than the headline could lead it to be.

https://www.theguardian.com/us-news/article/2024/jun/11/washington-teen-airsoft-gun-shot-dead

He is a scumbag so nothing would surprise me

Can it get more fucked up than this?

He can probably get let off with a slap on the wrist.

I fundamentally disagree with the approach that the prosecutor is taking against the shooter. Firstly, people should be allowed to prevent the commission of crimes legally, and a standard of reasonableness should be applied in determining what a person can do in the ‘safe prevention of crime’. Secondly, making it out that preventing a crime safely and legally is some sort of complex calculation that requires specific prior training available only to law enforcement does at least two things that are detrimental to a democratic society: it sets a baseline premise that tackling crime and using force reasonably is very difficult, so police should naturally have a degree of leeway when they fuck up and kill someone innocent; and it completely disempowers reasonable people from aiding victims of a crime, lest they be punished for stepping on the cops’ toes. I’ll caveat this by saying that intense, serious training should definitely be necessary for people given the power to use deadly force in the heat of the moment, but realistically in most of the US they don’t take it as seriously as they do in Europe. I would have hoped the prosecutor focus instead on the unreasonable and illegal use of deadly force by the accused, especially if the fucker did stand over a 17 year old and shoot him extra dead.

Altogether a tragedy, with many families ruined by a dumb fuck with a gun. The NRA and gun lobby should face lawsuits for their propaganda bs. The nauseating number of times I’ve heard or read the ‘good guy with a gun’ phrase… which leads exactly to this.

Always good to remember that the actual American police do fuck all training, are given a bunch of weapons and kill a bunch of people. It's not too surprising, but is fucking tragic, that bellends that can't even manage that piss poor gang training end up killing some poor kid for nothing, cosplaying as bastards.

You specified “reasonable people”.
The killer was an asshole who wanted to play cops and robbers.
He saw a kid with a gun and jumped to the conclusion that the kid was going to rob the store. Would he have instantly killed an old white guy carrying the same gun?

No normal person is going to want to be a cop in the USA.
Every person they encounter can go nuts and kill them at any second.

No normal person is going to want to be a cop

Because ACAB, @Constable_Savage will confirm this.

Every person they encounter can go nuts and kill them at any second.

I think this is most of the USA, cops just get sponsored to do so.

The killer was an asshole who wanted to play cops and robbers.

Yep, it’s fucked, and I think the prosecutor should focus on that. A family lost a son, two teens witnessed a friend cut down beside them in cold blood in broad daylight, and another poor confused innocent child would have had to call mom to get them from tkd because his dad was arrested for murdering a kid.

I expect he wouldn’t have drawn as readily on an old white guy or a white woman with the same bb gun, as they wouldn’t fit his preconceived notion of a nefarious persona.

The prosecutor claiming some bullshit about specialist training being required to prevent crime is absolutely unnecessary and only promotes an agenda. Any reasonable person seeing this situation can see that the problem is the guy is unhinged and committed a murder, not that he lacked some supposed magical training that somehow still results in cops killing innocent people including kids.

Quentin Letts:

Wow. What a grade A cunt.

Confirmed.
I suspect this off duty security guard had never been trained in any form of conflict management. He was probably pumped full of adrenaline and incapable of rational thought. Why the fuck do you need to carry a gun when collecting your kid from a training class. Nothing about his actions was right but then he's just a scared little man acting the hero. I've no doubt a fat useless cop waiting for his colleague's return from the doughnut shop would have acted in the same way. It's a classic example of only having a hammer so everything looks like a nail.

and it completely disempowers reasonable people from aiding victims of a crime, lest they be punished for stepping on the cops’ toes.

But bear in mind that in the US, particularly in some states, a lot of those wanting to aid are carrying guns

Isn't it often more than that though? You like the idea of hitting nails, so you buy lots of different hammers and hammer-adjacent items, and then go looking for nails or nail-adjacent or anything that looks nail-like in the dark through squinted eyes, and then hit away as soon as the opportunity arises.

He was the second kid from that high school shot dead in three days?

https://www.kentreporter.com/news/second-kent-meridian-high-school-student-in-3-days-fatally-shot/

In America, probably yes. I don't suppose there's a cop in the US who doesn't carry a gun. However the whole country seems to have the same gun culture, cop or not. If this same scenario played out in the UK the kid would have got to the shop, done his business and been given a carrier bag to carry it away in. The concerned off duty security guard would have phoned it in and if the unarmed police had got there they would have observed from a safe distance. Inquiries in the shop made and everyone goes home safe. In an ideal world that's what would happen but if UK armed cops had turned up I doubt the kid would have been shot. UK armed cops are trained to de-escalate as soon as practicable and are in pairs whenever possible. The untrained fuckwit with a gun scenario would not happen in the UK.

Maybe consider manufacturing in the UK?

Lots of military vets in the US join the police. They join the military when they're 18 because they have no prospects. 3 years later many still have no prospects so they join the police. It's not their ambition but it's better money and job security than the alternatives.