A step in the right direction for the RNC

[stone]

I'd imagine it is very very difficult being an armed police officer (or anyone else having to use guns).

Only if you are a very poor shot.    And, from my perspective, guns are a tool that can be used or misused according to the mental/emotional/physical acumen and stability of the user/abuser.  From the perspective of a dead person on the receiving end of any misused tool, does it really significantly matter whether he/she was shot, stabbed, speared, brass knuckled, clubbed, drowned, choked, smothered, bitten by a snake, smashed by a brick, squeezed by a giant nutcracker, or stabbed in the eye with a pencil?

... Mountaineer

I guess it's the split second decision making that seemed hard to me. Those police perhaps panicked and started shooting.

[MachineGhost]

I often wonder at how, what we ascribe to individual exceptionalism (good or bad), could just be more a case of a societal movement. It seems too much of a coincidence that da Vinci and Michelangelo were at the same place at the same time or Wallace and Darwin etc.

I'm pretty sure hyperinflation is a social movement...  of capital out of the country.  In a situation like that, it's almost a Mad Max-style Thunderdome.  Nature abhors a vacuum.

[MachineGhost]

From the perspective of a dead person on the receiving end of any misused tool, does it really significantly matter whether he/she was shot, stabbed, speared, brass knuckled, clubbed, drowned, choked, smothered, bitten by a snake, smashed by a brick, squeezed by a giant nutcracker, or stabbed in the eye with a pencil?

It does because we're now empathetic and civilized enough that we don't want to suffer on the way to our death as many of the options above surely would be exqusitely painful, gruesome and slow.  Nor anyone else.  Instant death is largely a fiction of Hollywood.

But average IQ cops?  Boy, I gotta seriously wonder if they're very self-aware.

[Mountaineer]

From the perspective of a dead person on the receiving end of any misused tool, does it really significantly matter whether he/she was shot, stabbed, speared, brass knuckled, clubbed, drowned, choked, smothered, bitten by a snake, smashed by a brick, squeezed by a giant nutcracker, or stabbed in the eye with a pencil?

It does because we're now empathetic and civilized enough that we don't want to suffer on the way to our death as many of the options above surely would be exqusitely painful, gruesome and slow.  Nor anyone else.  Instant death is largely a fiction of Hollywood.

But average IQ cops?  Boy, I gotta seriously wonder if they're very self-aware.

I may have misunderstood your answer, but are you saying dead people actually have a perspective and care about how they died?

... Mountaineer

[MachineGhost]

I may have misunderstood your answer, but are you saying dead people actually have a perspective and care about how they died?

You don't believe that they're going to still be feeling the emotional pain/trauma of how they died long after they are no longer corporeal?  You don't need physical sensory input for continual emotional trauma in a consciousness essence.  There's a reason those RIF whackjobs are executional sadists.