I appreciate this perspective, I definitely hadn’t considered all of the ways a hostage situation can arise. A very quick Googling turned up an article that sa

I appreciate this perspective, I definitely hadn’t considered all of the ways a hostage situation can arise. A very quick Googling turned up an article that said that 85-90% of hostage situations are resolved nonviolently. Another article said that police in the US receive something like 100,000,000 non-emergency calls (including pranks calls) in a year, so we’re probably talking at least tens of thousands of prank calls (not just swatting though, obviously). Based on admittedly sensational news stories, violence seems to happen more often when people get swatted than it should and it doesn’t seem silly to think that overreacting to elaborate prank calls isn’t capable of causing harm that’s greater than the harm caused by underreacting to real calls.