There Is No Limit To How Many Times A Law Enforcement Officer Can Shoot Your Stupid Ass
Any number of bullets is fine with the United States Supreme Court
An armed man was shot while resisting ICE agents in Minneapolis today. I am not going to litigate the details of the incident here. Instead, I think we all need to collectively educate ourselves about a few very important points that apply to any violent interaction your stupid ass chooses to undertake with any American law enforcement officer.
First, that officer is trained to swarm your stupid ass if you resist arrest, along with all the other officers on the scene. The purpose of swarming you is to quickly overwhelm you so that you can be taken into custody with minimal fuss, injury, or death involved. This is not a sportsball game where you get a fair contest under Marquess de Queensberry rules. It is a kindness to your stupid ass for resisting arrest.
Point the second: contrary to what a whole lot of people who are very high on their own activism supply want you to believe, IT IS EXTREMELY EASY TO NOT GET SHOT BY COPS. If 330 million Americans can manage it today, so can you.
Do not be an asshole. Do not resist arrest. Remain calm and cooperate. I have personally witnessed police disarm lawfully armed citizens and conduct searches, release them after a clean search, and hand them their weapons back, so do not whatabout me with your Second Amendment concern-trolling.
Just don’t be a stupid ass. Stop pretending you don’t know what I am talking about.
Third, no trained shooter in America is going to shoot you anywhere except somewhere extremely vital if they can help it. A properly-educated and conditioned law enforcement professional will aim for dead center mass. That’s why target silhouettes at the gun range look like this, and not some other way.
Shooting scores do not award points for leg shots, trick shots, or shooting the gun out of someone’s hand like a TV cowboy. A person who knows how to shoot will not shoot you like a stupid ass. They will shoot you like someone who knows how to aim at the above target. Look at it. Consider the implications.
Fourthly, finally, and most important, per the title of this post, is the 2014 Plumhoff v Rickard decision by the unanimous United States Supreme Court which specifically refused to recognize any limitation on the number of bullets a law enforcement officer can shoot into your body if they perceive that you are a threat.
One bullet.
Two bullets.
Three bullets.
Four bullets.
Five bullets.
Six bullets.
Seven bullets.
Eight bullets.
Nine bullets.
Ten bullets.
Eleven bullets.
Twelve bullets.
Thirteen bullets.
Fourteen bullets.
Fifteen bullets.
Large pistol magazines usually run out here, but note that if the law enforcement officer perceives that you are still a threat after shooting you sixteen times, the United States Supreme Court says they are perfectly free to load a fresh magazine and continue shooting your stupid ass that got yourself shot.
Furthermore, if they still perceive you are a threat at that point, the law enforcement officer is free to retrieve the shotgun from their vehicle and use every shell they were issued until they no longer perceive that you are a threat.
The only standard for threat perception is whether a reasonable law enforcement professional would still consider you to be a threat. No other standard will apply. All you have to do to be perceived as a threat is act like a stupid ass.
If you think I am exaggerating, look up the Plumhoff v Rickard decision and the facts of the case. Read the law of the land for yourself and then tell me I am wrong about these facts. Plumhoff is likely to remain the law of the land for the foreseeable future, too, and the laws apply to all of us, including the people who think they are above the law, or that the laws are wrong.
Empirically speaking, it is very easy to not get shot by law enforcement in America. You have to actually try hard to get yourself shot by them. Once they start shooting, you don’t get to call the shots, and there can be any number of shots.
The one neat trick here is to just don’t be the asshole who gets themselves shot.
Lots of people want to pretend this is not true so they can weaponize your empathy. It is a manipulation. Of course, one might object that this is not the ideal world, that the rules ought to be different. The reader might object that this is a terrible standard, authoritarian even, jackbooted thuggery.
These rules are based on the realities of semiautomatic gunfire, however, as well as the laboratory testing of live gunfights between police and criminals. The dataset was earned with blood. As long as people resist arrest violently, they will be shot dead with gunfire, sometimes a lot of it, and there is nothing to be done about that.