We learned today some of the gruesome details about the outrageous March 18 Sacramento police shooting of Stephon Clark www.nytimes.com/.... Clark was shot by two police officers responding to a radio call involving a man breaking car windows. The officers found Clark in his grandmother’s backyard, where he was almost immediately shot and killed. The autopsy results show that Clark was shot eight times (seven of them in the back). Stephon Clark’s death was not instantaneous — the autopsy also reveals that he suffered for between 3 and 10 minutes before he bleed out and died — during which time, Mr. Clark received no medical attention.
While my point in this diary is perhaps the least disturbing aspect of this police shooting, I think it is important to consider the number of shots fired — and the fact that just eight of those twenty shots hit their intended target — only 40% of the police officer’s bullets hit Clark.
When you can work past your rage at the tragic injustice of this police shooting, think for a moment about those numbers. Once again the police shot and killed an unarmed black man — under circumstances where it seems impossible to justify their having fired any shots at all — I mean, how the hell could those two officers positively identify the suspect, the person they were shooting at, or if he had a gun or not.
Breaking car windows isn’t the sort of crime that could ever be justification for the police use of deadly force — it appears that the officers couldn’t see Clark well enough to know if he had a gun or not, let alone well enough to identify him as their suspect or even to hit him with half their shots. If you can get beyond that injustice, think about where the other 12 bullets ended up — and then think about where all the stray bullets might have gone had this tragedy been played out in another setting - not the backyard of a private home, but in a schoolroom or playground.
In the aftermath of the MSD school shooting in Florida, the president was quick to suggest that we could limit the the extent of the carnage during future school shootings by arming teachers, so they could shoot back www.cnn.com/.... Considering the shooting performance of the officers in the Stephon Clark tragedy, everyone who thinks that arming teachers to protect schools and students should think again. Officers may be trained to shoot with accuracy and precision at paper targets on the practice range, and some teachers might be trained to do likewise, but in the adrenalin fueled chaos of a real world crisis, there is an alarming potential for shooters to make horrible decisions, to shoot unnecessarily and to shoot frequently and wildly, missing their intended targets often.
In this instance, under stress, in the dark, trained firearms qualified police officers shot at and missed their human target with 60% of their shots. Mr. Clark had not taken cover, nor was he running away or shooting back — but the officers still shot at but missed him from close range 60% of the time. www.thetruthaboutguns.com/...
Now imagine a classroom or school corridor or playground in which armed school teachers rather than police officers face off with an active shooter — or a suspected shooter — then imagine the classroom or corridor or playground with dozens of bystanders - teachers, school staff, children.
How many stray casualties should we expect if armed teachers are empowered to shoot back at active school shooters. If armed teachers perform with the same accuracy as the police officers in Stephon Clark shooting, we could expect a tragic number of bystanders to be shot and killed or maimed by mistake.
I grieve for Stephon Clark and his family and friends. I grieve for the families of the 1000 Americans who are shot and killed by the police year in and year out.
There must be a better way.
I don’t pretend know how, but there must be better way to police our society than to shoot and kill so many so often.
I do know this, there is no place for guns in schools, because guns in schools will never make students or teachers safer — arming teachers with guns will only increase the risk that more people are shot at school and not always the ones that the shooters are aiming at.