[djaque]

Ummmm... Ashli Babbit was a QAnon conspiracy theorist who broke into the capital during the Jan. 6 insurrection. She was at the front of a mob trying to get into the Speaker's Lobby containing representatives sheltering in place. The mob was commanding the police to let them in and started chanting to break down the door. Police warned them multiple times. Instead, Babbit climbs through a window in front of a police officer with a gun pointed at her after being commanded to not enter. She got within feet of representatives (who... mind you the mob was screaming death threats about). There was no way to know if she had hidden weapons on her body, especially with others at the insurrection carrying assault rifles. Any reasonable person would say the shooting was justified doubly so with a mob of conspiracy theorists behind her ready to brutalize some politicians.

Don't gaslight people by just calling her "unarmed" especially when QAnon is turning her into a martyr for their movement. It's fundamentally dishonest.

[mensetmanusman]

This sounds like the type of justification of why other people who get shot by police might have been at more fault. We have way too many police shootings when other disarming methods exist.

[honkdaddy]

I don't think it's a good look to try to justify police shooting unarmed civilians. Being a QAnon conspiracy theorist shouldn't be reason enough to shoot her in cold blood.

[pfarrell]

If she had not stuck her head through the window, she’d have walked out with all the other people in that room. It’s incorrect to categorize her death as due to her beliefs. It was her actions.

[honkdaddy]

I'm trying to find a charitable way of interpreting this comment but I'm not able to. If I break the law and an officer shoots me in cold blood, it was my actions, not my beliefs which led to my death. Does that mean I deserved it?

[dragonwriter]

“Unarmed” is usually relevant because the other facts framing the event make clear that only an armed person could have been a imminent threat to officers or others so aa to justify deadly force.

Babbitt was at the head of a mob breaking through a barricade preventing them from access to members and staff of Congress, against whom the mob was threatening violence, and whom had only seconds before cleared the lobby (and who therefore were in imminent danger of being overtaken by the mob had the mob not been stopped at the barricade.) There were insufficient officers present to control the mob even with deadly force were they not stopped at the barrier.

> If I break the law and an officer shoots me in cold blood, it was my actions, not my beliefs which led to my death. Does that mean I deserved it?

If you break the law in a way which poses an imminent serious threat to other people’s lives, and no other means are available that are likely to stop you, then an officer is certainly justified in using deadly force. (Whether you deserve it is a question of the morality of your act, not the officer’s, which is not germane to the shooting. Maybe your threatening act is under some kind of external compulsion or internal mental disorder that would make you not fully culpable and thus not deserving of the consequences of the justified response to your action. That you don't, in that case, deserve death doesn't make the justified action which proximately causes your death unjustified, though.)

[freen]

If the people storming the capital has been brown, it would have been a massacre.

[honkdaddy]

You're almost certainly right. But doesn't that mean you agree that cops shooting unarmed civilians is a bad thing?

[dragonwriter]

The cops shooting people who don't pose an imminent threat to the officers or others justifying shooting is a bad thing.

In lots of circumstances, other clear and undisputed facts make it so that “unarmed” added to them implies “no imminent threat”, but “unarmed” is not, otherwise, decisive.

[freen]

Of course: police evolved out of fugitive slave posses. Their funding should be decreased and the social safety net increased.

And you agree that if it was brown people, it would have been called a coup and there would people on trial for treason.