Another few thoughts regarding the amount of time it took police to enter the scene in Binghamton.

• We’re always hearing about no-knock raids on suspected drug dealers and such. Sometimes people get shot because the cops went in heavy and hard. Things happen fast and the cops are in a tactical mind-set when they do this, so the odds of shots being fired skyrockets. But they didn’t try with a known gunman in the place.
• I know it’s easy to critique after the fact, but this was clearly a case where heavy reaction was easily justified. And they didn’t go in. I worry a bit about “militarization” of police forces, then something like this happens and I wonder where all the Rambos went.
• Finally, and maybe most importantly, we’re often told that an armed citizen intervening in a shooting crime situation will just make things worse because the cops won’t be able to tell who’s the criminal and who’s the helpful bystander. This is often mentioned when discussing concealed carry on college campuses. But how big of a problem can that be if the cops don’t go in?

Tags: NY

This entry was posted on Monday, April 6th, 2009 at 1:01 pm and is filed under Crime and Violence, Law Enforcement, Self Defense. You can follow any responses to this entry through the RSS 2.0 feed. You can leave a response, or trackback from your own site.