Police apologize, but will shoot to the head
I found this interesting article on Google News:
The British police on Sunday accepted ‘full responsibility’ for shooting a Brazilian who turned out to be totally unconnected to the July 21 London blasts, but said they will have to shoot suicide bombing suspects in the head to prevent them from detonating explosives.
“There is no point in shooting somebody’s chest because that’s where the bomb is likely to be. There is no point in shooting anywhere else because if they fall down they detonate it. This is drawn on the experience from other countries including Sri Lanka,” London’s Police Chief Ian Blair said about the way Jean Charles de Menezes was killed on Friday in South London’s Stockwell underground station.
Another article makes an interesting point on the murder of this Brazilian by these officers:
“They had to kill someone to show the whole population they are working and make the country safe,” Pereira told the BBC.
I’m sorry, has everyone gone insane? Not only did they kill this 27-year old kid by accident, but 3 cops held him down and then shot him in the head.. 5 times!!!
Shooting someone in the head does not stop them from detonating a bomb. A grenade is a perfect example of this. Pull the pin and carry it in your hand. Now, if someone were to shoot the person holding the grenade in the head, especially from a distance, muscle control to the hand would relax, and the grenade’s handle would spring out. Of course a more sophisticated system would be necessary to work with a “chest-mounted” device as this article claims, but come on now.
If a terrorist is willing to blow himself up (and any other people who happen to be in the vicinity), do you really think threatening to shoot them in the head is going to stop them? They don’t care about their “human shell” of a body, that’s not the point. They don’t value life in the way that many other cultures do. These threats will do nothing to stop them, and in fact may just motivate them further. There are probably more terrorists out there (or supporters of terrorists) in any one location than cops-with-guns to stop them..
This is nothing more than the typical fear-mongering running rampantly out of control in our society. You can’t control people with fear, and guess what… THAT IS THE DEFINITION OF TERRORISM.
Main Entry: ter·ror·ism
Pronunciation: 'ter-&r-"i-z&m
Function: noun
1 : the unlawful use or threat of violence esp. against the
state or the public as a politically motivated means of attack or coercion
2 : violent and intimidating gang activity <street terrorism>—ter·ror·ist /-ist/ adj or noun —ter·ror·is·tic /"ter-&r-'is-tik/ adjective
I found a great comment on Slashdot that touches on some of these exact issues. Its a bit long, but well worth the read.
The irony of all of these attacks, is that Osama has already stated that the attacks would stop when we pulled out of Saudi Arabia. We all know why we can’t, however. I’ve been wondering what $182,862,244,509.00 (the current cost of this “war” so far) would have done if we invested it in alternative fuel solutions instead. Maybe dig a 300 mile lake in the middle of the Sahara Desert to help feed the millions of people there. We could have used it to do hundreds of things other than try to steal someone else’s property (cough, oil) under the pretense of a false war.
The Saudi’s attacked us on 9/11, why are we in Iraq? Why don’t we have Osama? Where are the WMD? What happened to all of these stolen, lost and faked votes from the 2004 election? Why aren’t we aggressively persuing these answers?
The current state of affairs sure is making George Orwell’s world seem closer to reality. I have to wonder if someone in office isn’t reading the book “1984” and confusing it with a congressional guidebook to running a country.
“Declaring things that clearly aren’t terrorism as terrorism is terrorism!”
One final thought: Our founding fathers were terrorists, by definition. Terrorists created this country. Repeat that over and over and you’ll see what a sad state of affairs we live in now.
Apologies for the rant, but this country and the growing invasive policies of other countries makes me so sick I could vomit.