[hej]

Reckless? Hardly.

Think about risk and probability. The probability of any of these warning shots actually hitting, hurting or even killing someone is extremely low. I'm not aware of any warning shot fired by the German police ever hurting anyone.

So, 50 years or so of warning shots and no one was hurt. If a warning shot kills someone today, those 50 years of warning shots only had to save two lives (someone decides to give up instead of seeking confrontation and being killed) to be worth it.

I think it's pretty simple, actually. On the whole, warning shots seem quite beneficial, that more than outweighs the low probability of hurting or killing someone.

But humans are bad at dealing with probability, so your error is understandable.

[drone]

Interesting that you know the probability of -any- warning shot, fired in -any- direction, at -any- time...

Bullets fired into the air have regularly caused deaths and injuries around the world. [1]

In several US states firing a bullet into the air is a crime, in some, a felony. [1, below]

I find it difficult to believe that any person is well trained enough to take all critical factors into account during an armed encounter to determine whether or not a bullet will ricochet off a non-target surface, and in what direction it will ricochet. [2]

"So, 50 years or so of warning shots and no one was hurt. If a warning shot kills someone today, those 50 years of warning shots only had to save two lives (someone decides to give up instead of seeking confrontation and being killed) to be worth it.

I think it's pretty simple, actually. On the whole, warning shots seem quite beneficial, that more than outweighs the low probability of hurting or killing someone."

I find this a starkly terrible calculus. Are you really saying that cops can kill one innocent person for every two potential deaths they may or may not have prevented?

"But humans are bad at dealing with probability, so your error is understandable."

Consider this statement in light of actual statistics.

[1] http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Celebratory_gunfire#Falling-bul... (Numerous citations)

[2] http://books.google.com/books?id=VbrDbbHAflsC&pg=PA109&#...

EDIT: In the essence of improving one's self, what about this rebuttal causes so many downvotes?

[hej]

Yes, I think saving two lives is preferable to saving one life. What’s so hard about that? That’s simple math.

Firing shots at people is also illegal in most situations pretty much anywhere. The police gets an exemption from that blanket rule under very specific conditions. I’m consequently not sure of what the fact that firing shots in the air is illegal is supposed to convince me.

I don’t think people or the police should be allowed to fire in the air for no reason at all. That’s obviously stupid. That does certainly not mean that firing in the air can never be a great idea under very specific conditions.

I do not deny that bullets fired in the air are dangerous – but the probability of them actually being dangerous is extremely low. That’s the whole point.

I'm also not sure what that dig about probability is supposed to me. I think that probability is easy enough to roughly estimate and that any estimate leads to extremely low numbers. Estimate the area of humans exposed to the sky that would also lead to death if hit, compare it to the area of ground. For that second one you can use some densely populated area to get an upper bound.

That celebratory gunfire is common in some countries and that it – despite hundreds of shots being fired in the air – leads to only very few deaths should already tell you something about the low probability. (Celebratory gunfire is obviously stupid, though. There is no good reason to do it, nothing that could outweigh the probability of hurting or killing someone.)

[staunch]

1. You have no stats on what has happened with German police warning shots over the years. It's quite possible there were innocent bystanders hurt.

2. It wouldn't be worth killing a single innocent bystander to save 10 violent criminals in my book.

3. German police very rarely fire warning shots at all. That doesn't make it not reckless, it just makes a bad outcome less likely to occur.

[jarek]

1. Unless I'm missing something neither do you. It would seem to me that it should be quite easy to find mentions of people killed or hurt by warning shots as it is not common for people to die of bullets falling from the sky unexpectedly. Absence of such data would suggest that this doesn't happen rather than that we don't hear about it.

[hej]

Possible. Unlikely. I couldn’t find anything by googling around. It’s pretty obvious that those warning shots have an extremely low probability of actually hurting anyone.

Something with a low probability of hurting someone and done with good justification cannot be reckless in my eye. Celebratory gunfire? Reckless. Warning shots? Not.