[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.)