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Over Thanksgiving I shot a gun for the first time. An AR15 and a Glock. The AR was fun to shoot. Kind of nerve-wracking holding a weapon that could kill some

Over Thanksgiving I shot a gun for the first time. An AR15 and a Glock. The AR was fun to shoot. Kind of nerve-wracking holding a weapon that could kill someone but fun none the less. The Glock was another story. It kicked like crazy and you could really feel the power of each shot in your arms. I didn't have any fun shooting it and I was a more than a little terrified I was going to hurt someone. Even when it was empty I had so much unease just setting it down on the table. Seeing those police officers enter someones home with their guns drawn and pointed was... a new feeling. I had an immense sense of dread just knowing how much power was behind those guns. The thought that someone was pointing it at children is just beyond my comprehension now. For what? Allegedly logging into a website? If shes guilty, go to jail, pay the fine, whatever. But the level of escalation to even walk through the front door with your gun drawn. The level of... I don't know... disrespect? Hatred? I can't even begin to describe to someone who doesn't know just how much force and how casually its being shown. Truly, these officers are a disgrace to Florida. The people who trained them are a disgrace. And the people who empower them to behave this way are a disgrace.

bigyikes 6y ago
I had an identical first-time experience a few months ago. For some reason I was expecting the Glock to be way easier and less terrifying than the AR, but it wasn't. It really blew my mind that I could aim directly at a human-sized target only 6 feet away and totally miss. Isn't the first thing they tell you about guns something like "don't point it at anything you don't intend to destroy"? How does a trained officer hear that two children are in the house and not immediately de-escalate? This is insanity.
- JamesLeonis 6y ago
  > How does a trained officer hear that two children are in the house and not immediately de-escalate? Unfortunately the police shoot kids fairly routinely, as lawyer Greg Doucette shows in this twitter thread. https://twitter.com/greg_doucette/status/1336132653481865217 https://twitter.com/greg_doucette/status/1336132653481865217
  - jgrimm 6y ago
    After reading through the linked thread I'm taken aback by the sheer number of deaths that don't seem to get any kind of coverage in the national press (and that's only for people accidentally shot as the police were trying to kill their pet). Considering the sheer number of killings, this can and really should be reported in much a similar way to a protracted war, as it does look very much to be an extended attack upon civilians by an armed forces of sorts.
- TaylorAlexander 6y ago
  Some cops receive training that teaches them to escalate. https://slate.com/news-and-politics/2020/08/warrior-cop-class-dave-grossman-killology.html https://slate.com/news-and-politics/2020/08/warrior-cop-clas...
- giardini 6y ago
  bigyikes says >"It really blew my mind that I could aim directly at a human-sized target only 6 feet away and totally miss."< No surprise. Even after years of training many, if not most, police officers miss close-up shots more often than they hit. There's a surveillance video somewhere of a security guard and a perp shooting their firearms at each other from about 3 feet apart: they miss every shot. One had a revolver and the other a semi-automatic. It is somewhat reminiscent of the "apartment scene" in Pulp Fiction but even wilder and less believable: https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=Y6YBKdmOlM8 https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=Y6YBKdmOlM8 Shooting a target at a range is very different from drawing and shooting at real people who are moving toward/away from you, possibly with ill intent and possibly armed. For police, entering a building with a search warrant is not something to be done with a firearm holstered. You have no idea what you're up against in that situation.
  - rkuykendall-com 6y ago
    > For police, entering a building with a search warrant is not something to be done with a firearm holstered. You have no idea what you're up against in that situation. This is a ridiculous rationalization that could be applied to literally anyone or anything.
vijaybritto 6y ago
> Seeing those police officers enter someones home with their guns drawn and pointed was... a new feeling. Is this not the culture in the US? Is it new cause they are doing it to someone white?
- stickyricky 6y ago
  My first sentence explains why it was a new feeling.
- pyuser583 6y ago
  No it’s not. This isn’t how arrests or searches are usually made. Even in extreme cases, officers don’t usually use more force than necessary. Source: I’ve been arrested for murder.
  - skinkestek 6y ago
    > Source: I’ve been arrested for murder. I've seen some interesting backstories here on HN over the years but this was a brand new one for me I think ..! I assume they figured out you were innocent since you are here commenting about it and I also assume you won't talk about it so I won't ask but I will say I am intrigued.
    - pyuser583 6y ago
      Yeah - it was a weird situation. My wife - who was pregnant- received a phone call that a close relative had died. The guy had been a living off the grid. A nice guy who was into green living, etc. He was retired with a good pension and savings, so decided to build his “eco cabin” in the middle of nowhere and he self reliant via renewables. Sadly, living in the middle of nowhere means a reduction in time to arrival for emergency medical support. He had a stroke. The details were a bit gruesome: walking for miles seeking help before freezing to death. Scavengers arrived quickly. My wife got the phone call. The cousin she spoke with emphasized the gory details. My wife responded loudly and with emotion.Screaming, wailing, crying, etc. She wanted to go the impromptu funeral they were having. Apparently he’d wanted to be buried at his cabin. No service, just have his friends dig a hole and throw him in. Perfectly legal in that state, as long as death was reported. She’s need the car - which means I would have to walk to work. In the winter. With images of a man I knew dying from hypothermia fresh in my head. I said no, unless she can find her own transportation. Buses don’t go to the middle of nowhere. We had a bit of a shouting match. Anyway she said she’s going to the funeral and basically stormed out the door. She didn’t take the car. Apparently neighbors overheard. They heard my wife’s blood curtling scream, and also heard about our plan to “bury a body in the middle of nowhere.” My wife was pregnant, which substantially increases a woman’s risk of being murdered by the father. And she was gone. I wasn’t certain what state the uncle’s cabin was in, much less county or municipality. I wasn’t certain how my wife planned getting there. My wife had a smartphone but didn’t take it with her (not as odd back then). There were other incriminating things- bloody clothes, lots of used menstrual pads (wife is pregnant - does he have a mistress?), there had been several shootings in my apartment building. Etc. The police arrived in a very agitated state. They were certain I killed my wife. They asked questions I probably shouldn’t have answered: “Where is your wife? Where’s the body?” “I don’t know where she is, but the body’s in the middle of woods somewhere”. “Your wife is in the middle of the woods?” “Not yet, but she will be.” You get the drift. I was arrested and sent to the police station to be interrogated. I spent a lot of time waiting around, and very little time being interrogated. I got be treated like a murderer for the length of time it took my wife to borrow a car and drive 400 miles - when she checked in with family. Not a fun 12 hours. It’s worth pointing out we were broke and living in a high crime neighborhood. There had been three shootings in that apartment complex that year.
s1artibartfast 6y ago
I think the word you are looking for is indifference
3131s 6y ago
Two out of the three times in my life that I've had a gun pointed at me, it was the cops!
- deleted 6y ago
  [deleted]
- 1_player 6y ago
  Having had a gun pointed to you at all three times in your life is an absolutely terrifying statistic to me.
  - folkhack 6y ago
    Incredibly common here. I was a teenage passenger in a car when a friend of mine held up his wallet in the light of the back window to see if he had his bank card or w/e. Cop car was behind us in traffic, pulls us over, and two cops get out guns drawn instructing everyone to get face down on the pavement. Turns out they thought they saw a knife/gun when my friend had held us wallet up in the light, and they figured we were brandishing a weapon at them. We all got searched and when they found half of us Boy Scouts were carrying pocket knives things got really stupid really fast. We had to beg them to be rational with us, nose down on the pavement. Seriously I think the only thing that saved us was two of us had our Eagle cards... This is anecdotal in rural small-town Iowa... but having lived this sorta stuff first-hand you realize that it's not uncommon to have been harassed at gunpoint by the police.
- 0-_-0 6y ago
  The way you wrote your comment seems to imply you prefer criminals to point a gun at you
  - folkhack 6y ago
    Yea - criminals typically have more repercussions to their actions where-as a cop has lots of protection behind them. Usually the worst-case scenario for a cop pulling the trigger is a boring early retirement with one heck of a pension. I'd rather be mugged at gunpoint vs. held at gunpoint by a cop any day of the week due to game theory alone.
rolph 6y ago
this is why Absolutly NO ONE should be immune from the consequences of thier actions, and in a situation of authoritative power should be even more accountable than others, not less accountable
- greatpatton 6y ago
  Unfortunately this is not the case in the US thanks to qualified immunity...
jariel 6y ago
There's an important detail missing from your abbreviated account and that is the individual refused to open the door for the warrant and apparently used the time to 'alter' her situation. So it's not as if the police just came in like a swat team off the bat. America is a dangerous place, and just like you're a 'regular person at the range with an AR and a Glock' - guns are everywhere. The 'normal' situation for police to be serving a warrant would be against people accused of things more physically nefarious, and it's probably very ingrained SOP to have weapons drawn if the individual wouldn't open the door and some degree of aggression needed to be used to enter the premises to serve the warrant. That they had their 'guns out of holsters' is actually perfectly reasonable because systematically, it's too dangerous for them otherwise. That said - this was a warrant for a white collar/non-violent crime and there's just no excuse for pointing guns at kids, or even the former employee frankly. Point being, we can't cherry-pick just the things that don't sound nice, and entirely decontextualise. If there weren't 500 million guns, many of them high-powered floating around out there - and Americans didn't have a propensity for shooting at cops (the level of assertion people show when being arrested in the US is way more than in other nations, car chases barely ever happen in my home country) - then the SOP (standard operating procedures) would be very different. Cops are chill where I'm from - t least in part - because they just don't face aggression or violence in a way that is really threatening. Fights, yes, guns in their faces, almost unheard of. Given the possibly political nature of the arrest, I think it probably needs to be reviewed by the local Justice Department as well because 'gun pointing aside' - the other Elephant in the room is the issue of whistleblower harassment etc..
- TheOperator 6y ago
  >There's an important detail missing from your abbreviated account and that is the individual refused to open the door for the warrant and apparently used the time to 'alter' her situation. Proof? This sounds an awful lot like something a police department who refused to publish video evidence themselves would make up out of thin air to save face.
  - jariel 6y ago
    Why would the police want to release anything? The press clearly misrepresented even the minor facts of the case ('pointed guns at children') for which there isn't any evidence - using that likely untruth as the headline item thereby making it an iron clad fact of 'truth' in the public narrative. It's possible, even likely that 1) The woman did something actually wrong and used government accounts without permission and 2) she didn't answer the door for 20 minutes, thereby requiring the police to take a more assertive posture. And frankly I doubt they pointed guns at children because that would be pointless. (Although it's possible she is entirely innocent of breaking into said systems, and possibly has some entirely good reason why she didn't answer the door for the police for 20 minutes) If you use some public system in an unauthorized way, download data, you certainly would expect police to knock in the door, and you don't answer it for 20 minutes, they might have their guns upholstered when you finally do. That's not unreasonable. Also, just because someone has a grievance with your company/government, doesn't them a whistleblower. In the entirety of her public foray, I'm not able to find the specific nature of her concerns - the more I look, the more I doubt her claims. Florida releases more data than any province here in Canada as I can tell, here is the Florida dashboard [1] here is the Ontario dashboard [2]. Florida release information specifically related to schools, LTC facilities etc. - Quebec has for example denied that data to the public. I feel the entire case, like everything, has been politicized. For reference From [3]: "Plessinger said Jones refused to answer the door for 20 minutes and hung up on agents. Jones eventually let the agents into the home, she said. Her family was upstairs when agents entered, Plessinger said. The 31-second video Jones posted on Twitter shows agents entering her home with their guns drawn. Jones tells the officers that her husband and two children are upstairs as they direct her outside of the house. One of the agents points his gun toward the stairwell. An officer shouts, “Police, come down now.” As the video ends, Jones yells, “He just pointed a gun at my children.” The video does not show any children, or agents pointing guns at any children. FDLE said agents didn’t point guns at anyone." [1] https://floridahealthcovid19.gov/ https://floridahealthcovid19.gov/ [2] https://www.publichealthontario.ca/en/data-and-analysis/infectious-disease/covid-19-data-surveillance/covid-19-data-tool https://www.publichealthontario.ca/en/data-and-analysis/infe... [3] https://www.sun-sentinel.com/coronavirus/fl-ne-whistleblower-search-warrant-20201207-rapzkgm7fnbujlhwzadunciigu-story.html https://www.sun-sentinel.com/coronavirus/fl-ne-whistleblower...
emptyfile 6y ago
I mean, you're talking about how you went shooting deadly firearms for fun on a family holiday, and then express disbelief that police would enter a suspects house with firearms drawn. I'm not american but it seems pretty obvious to me why american police are trigger happy while in most other countries they are far less so.
- FreshFries 6y ago
  > I'm not american but it seems pretty obvious to me why american police are trigger happy while in most other countries they are far less so. Can not be access to guns, I live in Switzerland and 'we' shoot a lot. Have a lot of firearms at home too. Yet our cops are all but trigger happy. So the reason must be another that what I think you are implying?
  - hnarn 6y ago
    It seems pretty obvious to me that the police act partly according to how they were trained, and partly according to the esprit de corps and culture that has developed over time. I agree with you and think it’s an extreme oversimplification to say that higher rate of gun ownership would lead to a more violent police force. Like the military, they are a tool that will behave and act according to the implicit and explicit expectations placed upon them from different sides.
    - mywittyname 6y ago
      > t seems pretty obvious to me that the police act partly according to how they were trained, Not doing so is grounds for dismissal in a lot of precincts. It's why we hear stories of officers doing the ostensibly "right" thing by not killing a suspect, yet face dismissal. The department training guidelines dictate a use of deadly force in a scenario, and not doing so is seen as risking the lives of officers. This is the hill American need to climb to reduce the likelihood of death and serious injury by police. There is a lot of judicial precedent supporting such policies as part of policing guidelines, so it is very unlikely the change will come from the courts. Instead, citizens will need to work at a local level to shift training and policy towards de-escalation.
ubermonkey 6y ago
What's interesting here is how much your experience is a bit counter to the actual power and destructive energy released by the two. You aren't WRONG -- the pistol is way harder to shoot. But that hides a big delta. Essentially zero handguns produce the kind of energy downrange that an AR-15 produces. You feel more recoil with a pistol, sure, but that's misleading in the extreme. Because I am a giant nerd (I mean, look where I'm posting) I have a folder full of Excel docs I created to collate information to compare it for my own amusement. One of those is about ballistics. An AR is almost always chambered in 5.56x45mm, a NATO standard caliber. The actual projectile in a 5.56 round is super super small -- like, 62 grams. But there's a LOT of powder behind it, so it delivers on the order of 1800 J. Glocks are most often in 9mm, which is the most popular handgun round in the world. The actual bullet for 9mm is about TWICE as massive, but has so much less powder, and so much less barrel to spin up, that its downrange energy is typically less than 500J -- ie, like 28% of the AR. But the Glock will buck in your hand, for sure. It takes training and practice to be able to hit the target reliably over and over. An AR, though, is insanely stable for lots of reasons -- obviously, it's heavier than the pistol, but that's not all of it. There's some clever design involved. But the end result is a gun that most any trainable person can learn to shoot accurately very, very quickly. The marriage of 5.56 and the AR platform creates a weapon that's really insanely good at rapid, accurate fire. This made it very successful as a military rifle, and makes it a serious terror in the hands of someone bent on bad acts.
- nostrademons 6y ago
  For physics nerds: momentum is mv, kinetic energy is 1/2mv^2. Upon firing, the chemical energy of the powder is converted to kinetic energy in the bullet. When the bullet hits the target kinetic energy is converted to tissue damage. More powder = more kinetic energy = more damage. Heavier bullet = more momentum = more recoil. That's why the Glock has so much more kick, while the AR-15 has more penetrating power and range. There are also pretty massive differences in the aerodynamics of the bullet, which probably helps the AR-15's range a lot: https://qph.fs.quoracdn.net/main-qimg-ab7ec2e9df26a1afc268032e6ddd41ab https://qph.fs.quoracdn.net/main-qimg-ab7ec2e9df26a1afc26803...
  - 6y ago
tim333 6y ago
Ms Jones own take "They claimed it was about a security breach. This was DeSantis. He sent the gestapo." doesn't seem far off.
stjohnswarts 6y ago
The AR15 is shooting a much more potent round than the glock. It just is more fun to shoot because it is about 5-6x as heavy as the glock and your shoulder is a much stouter backrest than your wrists.
jkhdigital 6y ago
How about we let the facts come out in a court of law before calling someone you’ve never met a “disgrace”?
- tga_d 6y ago
  Are you under the impression that unless something is both illegal, and produced enough evidence to be convicted in court, it cannot be disgraceful? There's no possibility of a world where the police do disgraceful things legally, let alone disgraceful illegal things and get away with it?
  - jkhdigital 6y ago
    No. You read an awful lot into that.
    - tga_d 6y ago
      Then please, enlighten me as to what exactly is stopping anyone from calling these people disgraceful until it ends up in court, particularly considering the fact that the video isn't especially ambiguous as to what happened. In fact, how is "a court of law" at all relevant to the matter of their being disgraceful?

bigyikes 6y ago

I had an identical first-time experience a few months ago. For some reason I was expecting the Glock to be way easier and less terrifying than the AR, but it wasn't. It really blew my mind that I could aim directly at a human-sized target only 6 feet away and totally miss. Isn't the first thing they tell you about guns something like "don't point it at anything you don't intend to destroy"? How does a trained officer hear that two children are in the house and not immediately de-escalate? This is insanity.

JamesLeonis 6y ago
> How does a trained officer hear that two children are in the house and not immediately de-escalate? Unfortunately the police shoot kids fairly routinely, as lawyer Greg Doucette shows in this twitter thread. https://twitter.com/greg_doucette/status/1336132653481865217 https://twitter.com/greg_doucette/status/1336132653481865217
- jgrimm 6y ago
  After reading through the linked thread I'm taken aback by the sheer number of deaths that don't seem to get any kind of coverage in the national press (and that's only for people accidentally shot as the police were trying to kill their pet). Considering the sheer number of killings, this can and really should be reported in much a similar way to a protracted war, as it does look very much to be an extended attack upon civilians by an armed forces of sorts.
TaylorAlexander 6y ago
Some cops receive training that teaches them to escalate. https://slate.com/news-and-politics/2020/08/warrior-cop-class-dave-grossman-killology.html https://slate.com/news-and-politics/2020/08/warrior-cop-clas...
giardini 6y ago
bigyikes says >"It really blew my mind that I could aim directly at a human-sized target only 6 feet away and totally miss."< No surprise. Even after years of training many, if not most, police officers miss close-up shots more often than they hit. There's a surveillance video somewhere of a security guard and a perp shooting their firearms at each other from about 3 feet apart: they miss every shot. One had a revolver and the other a semi-automatic. It is somewhat reminiscent of the "apartment scene" in Pulp Fiction but even wilder and less believable: https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=Y6YBKdmOlM8 https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=Y6YBKdmOlM8 Shooting a target at a range is very different from drawing and shooting at real people who are moving toward/away from you, possibly with ill intent and possibly armed. For police, entering a building with a search warrant is not something to be done with a firearm holstered. You have no idea what you're up against in that situation.
- rkuykendall-com 6y ago
  > For police, entering a building with a search warrant is not something to be done with a firearm holstered. You have no idea what you're up against in that situation. This is a ridiculous rationalization that could be applied to literally anyone or anything.

vijaybritto 6y ago

> Seeing those police officers enter someones home with their guns drawn and pointed was... a new feeling. Is this not the culture in the US? Is it new cause they are doing it to someone white?

stickyricky 6y ago
My first sentence explains why it was a new feeling.
pyuser583 6y ago
No it’s not. This isn’t how arrests or searches are usually made. Even in extreme cases, officers don’t usually use more force than necessary. Source: I’ve been arrested for murder.
- skinkestek 6y ago
  > Source: I’ve been arrested for murder. I've seen some interesting backstories here on HN over the years but this was a brand new one for me I think ..! I assume they figured out you were innocent since you are here commenting about it and I also assume you won't talk about it so I won't ask but I will say I am intrigued.
  - pyuser583 6y ago
    Yeah - it was a weird situation. My wife - who was pregnant- received a phone call that a close relative had died. The guy had been a living off the grid. A nice guy who was into green living, etc. He was retired with a good pension and savings, so decided to build his “eco cabin” in the middle of nowhere and he self reliant via renewables. Sadly, living in the middle of nowhere means a reduction in time to arrival for emergency medical support. He had a stroke. The details were a bit gruesome: walking for miles seeking help before freezing to death. Scavengers arrived quickly. My wife got the phone call. The cousin she spoke with emphasized the gory details. My wife responded loudly and with emotion.Screaming, wailing, crying, etc. She wanted to go the impromptu funeral they were having. Apparently he’d wanted to be buried at his cabin. No service, just have his friends dig a hole and throw him in. Perfectly legal in that state, as long as death was reported. She’s need the car - which means I would have to walk to work. In the winter. With images of a man I knew dying from hypothermia fresh in my head. I said no, unless she can find her own transportation. Buses don’t go to the middle of nowhere. We had a bit of a shouting match. Anyway she said she’s going to the funeral and basically stormed out the door. She didn’t take the car. Apparently neighbors overheard. They heard my wife’s blood curtling scream, and also heard about our plan to “bury a body in the middle of nowhere.” My wife was pregnant, which substantially increases a woman’s risk of being murdered by the father. And she was gone. I wasn’t certain what state the uncle’s cabin was in, much less county or municipality. I wasn’t certain how my wife planned getting there. My wife had a smartphone but didn’t take it with her (not as odd back then). There were other incriminating things- bloody clothes, lots of used menstrual pads (wife is pregnant - does he have a mistress?), there had been several shootings in my apartment building. Etc. The police arrived in a very agitated state. They were certain I killed my wife. They asked questions I probably shouldn’t have answered: “Where is your wife? Where’s the body?” “I don’t know where she is, but the body’s in the middle of woods somewhere”. “Your wife is in the middle of the woods?” “Not yet, but she will be.” You get the drift. I was arrested and sent to the police station to be interrogated. I spent a lot of time waiting around, and very little time being interrogated. I got be treated like a murderer for the length of time it took my wife to borrow a car and drive 400 miles - when she checked in with family. Not a fun 12 hours. It’s worth pointing out we were broke and living in a high crime neighborhood. There had been three shootings in that apartment complex that year.

s1artibartfast 6y ago

I think the word you are looking for is indifference

3131s 6y ago

Two out of the three times in my life that I've had a gun pointed at me, it was the cops!

deleted 6y ago
[deleted]
1_player 6y ago
Having had a gun pointed to you at all three times in your life is an absolutely terrifying statistic to me.
- folkhack 6y ago
  Incredibly common here. I was a teenage passenger in a car when a friend of mine held up his wallet in the light of the back window to see if he had his bank card or w/e. Cop car was behind us in traffic, pulls us over, and two cops get out guns drawn instructing everyone to get face down on the pavement. Turns out they thought they saw a knife/gun when my friend had held us wallet up in the light, and they figured we were brandishing a weapon at them. We all got searched and when they found half of us Boy Scouts were carrying pocket knives things got really stupid really fast. We had to beg them to be rational with us, nose down on the pavement. Seriously I think the only thing that saved us was two of us had our Eagle cards... This is anecdotal in rural small-town Iowa... but having lived this sorta stuff first-hand you realize that it's not uncommon to have been harassed at gunpoint by the police.
0-_-0 6y ago
The way you wrote your comment seems to imply you prefer criminals to point a gun at you
- folkhack 6y ago
  Yea - criminals typically have more repercussions to their actions where-as a cop has lots of protection behind them. Usually the worst-case scenario for a cop pulling the trigger is a boring early retirement with one heck of a pension. I'd rather be mugged at gunpoint vs. held at gunpoint by a cop any day of the week due to game theory alone.

rolph 6y ago

this is why Absolutly NO ONE should be immune from the consequences of thier actions, and in a situation of authoritative power should be even more accountable than others, not less accountable

greatpatton 6y ago
Unfortunately this is not the case in the US thanks to qualified immunity...

jariel 6y ago

There's an important detail missing from your abbreviated account and that is the individual refused to open the door for the warrant and apparently used the time to 'alter' her situation. So it's not as if the police just came in like a swat team off the bat. America is a dangerous place, and just like you're a 'regular person at the range with an AR and a Glock' - guns are everywhere. The 'normal' situation for police to be serving a warrant would be against people accused of things more physically nefarious, and it's probably very ingrained SOP to have weapons drawn if the individual wouldn't open the door and some degree of aggression needed to be used to enter the premises to serve the warrant. That they had their 'guns out of holsters' is actually perfectly reasonable because systematically, it's too dangerous for them otherwise. That said - this was a warrant for a white collar/non-violent crime and there's just no excuse for pointing guns at kids, or even the former employee frankly. Point being, we can't cherry-pick just the things that don't sound nice, and entirely decontextualise. If there weren't 500 million guns, many of them high-powered floating around out there - and Americans didn't have a propensity for shooting at cops (the level of assertion people show when being arrested in the US is way more than in other nations, car chases barely ever happen in my home country) - then the SOP (standard operating procedures) would be very different. Cops are chill where I'm from - t least in part - because they just don't face aggression or violence in a way that is really threatening. Fights, yes, guns in their faces, almost unheard of. Given the possibly political nature of the arrest, I think it probably needs to be reviewed by the local Justice Department as well because 'gun pointing aside' - the other Elephant in the room is the issue of whistleblower harassment etc..

TheOperator 6y ago
>There's an important detail missing from your abbreviated account and that is the individual refused to open the door for the warrant and apparently used the time to 'alter' her situation. Proof? This sounds an awful lot like something a police department who refused to publish video evidence themselves would make up out of thin air to save face.
- jariel 6y ago
  Why would the police want to release anything? The press clearly misrepresented even the minor facts of the case ('pointed guns at children') for which there isn't any evidence - using that likely untruth as the headline item thereby making it an iron clad fact of 'truth' in the public narrative. It's possible, even likely that 1) The woman did something actually wrong and used government accounts without permission and 2) she didn't answer the door for 20 minutes, thereby requiring the police to take a more assertive posture. And frankly I doubt they pointed guns at children because that would be pointless. (Although it's possible she is entirely innocent of breaking into said systems, and possibly has some entirely good reason why she didn't answer the door for the police for 20 minutes) If you use some public system in an unauthorized way, download data, you certainly would expect police to knock in the door, and you don't answer it for 20 minutes, they might have their guns upholstered when you finally do. That's not unreasonable. Also, just because someone has a grievance with your company/government, doesn't them a whistleblower. In the entirety of her public foray, I'm not able to find the specific nature of her concerns - the more I look, the more I doubt her claims. Florida releases more data than any province here in Canada as I can tell, here is the Florida dashboard [1] here is the Ontario dashboard [2]. Florida release information specifically related to schools, LTC facilities etc. - Quebec has for example denied that data to the public. I feel the entire case, like everything, has been politicized. For reference From [3]: "Plessinger said Jones refused to answer the door for 20 minutes and hung up on agents. Jones eventually let the agents into the home, she said. Her family was upstairs when agents entered, Plessinger said. The 31-second video Jones posted on Twitter shows agents entering her home with their guns drawn. Jones tells the officers that her husband and two children are upstairs as they direct her outside of the house. One of the agents points his gun toward the stairwell. An officer shouts, “Police, come down now.” As the video ends, Jones yells, “He just pointed a gun at my children.” The video does not show any children, or agents pointing guns at any children. FDLE said agents didn’t point guns at anyone." [1] https://floridahealthcovid19.gov/ https://floridahealthcovid19.gov/ [2] https://www.publichealthontario.ca/en/data-and-analysis/infectious-disease/covid-19-data-surveillance/covid-19-data-tool https://www.publichealthontario.ca/en/data-and-analysis/infe... [3] https://www.sun-sentinel.com/coronavirus/fl-ne-whistleblower-search-warrant-20201207-rapzkgm7fnbujlhwzadunciigu-story.html https://www.sun-sentinel.com/coronavirus/fl-ne-whistleblower...

emptyfile 6y ago

I mean, you're talking about how you went shooting deadly firearms for fun on a family holiday, and then express disbelief that police would enter a suspects house with firearms drawn. I'm not american but it seems pretty obvious to me why american police are trigger happy while in most other countries they are far less so.

FreshFries 6y ago
> I'm not american but it seems pretty obvious to me why american police are trigger happy while in most other countries they are far less so. Can not be access to guns, I live in Switzerland and 'we' shoot a lot. Have a lot of firearms at home too. Yet our cops are all but trigger happy. So the reason must be another that what I think you are implying?
- hnarn 6y ago
  It seems pretty obvious to me that the police act partly according to how they were trained, and partly according to the esprit de corps and culture that has developed over time. I agree with you and think it’s an extreme oversimplification to say that higher rate of gun ownership would lead to a more violent police force. Like the military, they are a tool that will behave and act according to the implicit and explicit expectations placed upon them from different sides.
  - mywittyname 6y ago
    > t seems pretty obvious to me that the police act partly according to how they were trained, Not doing so is grounds for dismissal in a lot of precincts. It's why we hear stories of officers doing the ostensibly "right" thing by not killing a suspect, yet face dismissal. The department training guidelines dictate a use of deadly force in a scenario, and not doing so is seen as risking the lives of officers. This is the hill American need to climb to reduce the likelihood of death and serious injury by police. There is a lot of judicial precedent supporting such policies as part of policing guidelines, so it is very unlikely the change will come from the courts. Instead, citizens will need to work at a local level to shift training and policy towards de-escalation.

ubermonkey 6y ago

What's interesting here is how much your experience is a bit counter to the actual power and destructive energy released by the two. You aren't WRONG -- the pistol is way harder to shoot. But that hides a big delta. Essentially zero handguns produce the kind of energy downrange that an AR-15 produces. You feel more recoil with a pistol, sure, but that's misleading in the extreme. Because I am a giant nerd (I mean, look where I'm posting) I have a folder full of Excel docs I created to collate information to compare it for my own amusement. One of those is about ballistics. An AR is almost always chambered in 5.56x45mm, a NATO standard caliber. The actual projectile in a 5.56 round is super super small -- like, 62 grams. But there's a LOT of powder behind it, so it delivers on the order of 1800 J. Glocks are most often in 9mm, which is the most popular handgun round in the world. The actual bullet for 9mm is about TWICE as massive, but has so much less powder, and so much less barrel to spin up, that its downrange energy is typically less than 500J -- ie, like 28% of the AR. But the Glock will buck in your hand, for sure. It takes training and practice to be able to hit the target reliably over and over. An AR, though, is insanely stable for lots of reasons -- obviously, it's heavier than the pistol, but that's not all of it. There's some clever design involved. But the end result is a gun that most any trainable person can learn to shoot accurately very, very quickly. The marriage of 5.56 and the AR platform creates a weapon that's really insanely good at rapid, accurate fire. This made it very successful as a military rifle, and makes it a serious terror in the hands of someone bent on bad acts.

nostrademons 6y ago
For physics nerds: momentum is mv, kinetic energy is 1/2mv^2. Upon firing, the chemical energy of the powder is converted to kinetic energy in the bullet. When the bullet hits the target kinetic energy is converted to tissue damage. More powder = more kinetic energy = more damage. Heavier bullet = more momentum = more recoil. That's why the Glock has so much more kick, while the AR-15 has more penetrating power and range. There are also pretty massive differences in the aerodynamics of the bullet, which probably helps the AR-15's range a lot: https://qph.fs.quoracdn.net/main-qimg-ab7ec2e9df26a1afc268032e6ddd41ab https://qph.fs.quoracdn.net/main-qimg-ab7ec2e9df26a1afc26803...
- 6y ago

tim333 6y ago

Ms Jones own take "They claimed it was about a security breach. This was DeSantis. He sent the gestapo." doesn't seem far off.

stjohnswarts 6y ago

The AR15 is shooting a much more potent round than the glock. It just is more fun to shoot because it is about 5-6x as heavy as the glock and your shoulder is a much stouter backrest than your wrists.

jkhdigital 6y ago

How about we let the facts come out in a court of law before calling someone you’ve never met a “disgrace”?

tga_d 6y ago
Are you under the impression that unless something is both illegal, and produced enough evidence to be convicted in court, it cannot be disgraceful? There's no possibility of a world where the police do disgraceful things legally, let alone disgraceful illegal things and get away with it?
- jkhdigital 6y ago
  No. You read an awful lot into that.
  - tga_d 6y ago
    Then please, enlighten me as to what exactly is stopping anyone from calling these people disgraceful until it ends up in court, particularly considering the fact that the video isn't especially ambiguous as to what happened. In fact, how is "a court of law" at all relevant to the matter of their being disgraceful?