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Car Chase in White House Capitol

A woman with a young child was shot to death after turning her vehicle into a weapon on Thursday afternoon, ramming her way through barriers at the White House and on Capitol Hill.

»www.nytimes.com/2013/10/04/us/gu···tol.html

Re: Car Chase in White House / Capitol

Re: Car Chase in White House Capitol

I wonder why they did not ever use a spike strip or shoot the tires?
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[65 Arcanist]Filan(High Elf) Zone: Broadband Reports

To use a spike strip you have to have some time, and to know where the car is going. This was very fluid and very quick.

Consider also the tension of the times, and that there was just a mass shooting at the Washington navy yard....

A car can STILL travel even if tires are shot out. Suppose the car had been full of a fertilizer bomb or some other explosive?

And just because a child is in the car does not prove anything. Surely a terrorist would not hesitate to sacrifice their own child---or someone elses---as a prop so that proves nothing.

This is very sad, but I'm not going to second-guess the officers especially after two of them were injured....

Trigger happy jack boot thugs. She had a baby in the car. For all we know she made a wrong turn and the goons jump into action trying to force her to stop as she was simply trying to turn around. With them throwing barricades at her car, it simply became fight or flight and she was in flight mode. I am willing to bet the only barricade that she hit was the one that was flung into her path! Sad tragic ending when instead of disabling the car or boxing it in, these goons resorted to gunning down a frightened woman with a small child!
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When somebody tells you nothing is impossible, ask him to dribble a football.

It is a really sad situation, but I wouldn't resort to calling those that defended our country "goons". I do think retraining them for this type of situation would be a good idea. We also need to properly equip them. This was a person that needed medical help. She had a perfectly treatable disorder of a part of her body that caused her to believe things that had no basis in realty. I've seen it before up close and it is a medical disorder. Fortunately this is a disorder which can be controlled and that woman, should she have kept up with her medications and physicians would have been able to lead a normal life. Unfortunately it was a life cut short. Most of the time people like this don't endanger the public, but sometimes they do. This woman did not make a wrong turn. For you to suggest that possibility is ludicrous. She in a severe way endangered the public. She also endangered her child.

How might the event ended differently? There was a point before the shooting started that an officer had her passenger door open. She should have been tased at that point. Tasers do kill, but only rarely and she almost certainly would have been stopped and her life could have been spared. There are often situations where an officer is dealing with a threat and has to pull a weapon out. I think someone needs to figure a way to mount a taser on a conventional firearm. Maybe they have. When a situation arises where force needs to be applied to neutralize a threat, I would imagine there are plenty of times where an officer would like to have a final choice of using deadly or non-deadly force. Once a firearm is chosen, it isn't easy to change your mind. We need to give police the chance to use non-deadly force when they pull out a weapon that applies deadly force. They need to be able to set their phasers to stun.