Normally, you can get good police dashcam footage on YouTube, but this one was violent enough that even over there the original footage got buried into oblivion by news outlets who know how to work the algorithm and love to censor the footage for local TV. Fortunately, I was able to find it on X (or Twitter, or whatever).
In this video, Seattle police officers were waiting inside a hotel room for a man had allegedly scheduled to meet one or two underage girls (the story differs around the internet). But, when he found out that he was the prey, he decided to draw a gun, leading to a very rapid demise.
🇺🇸 PEDOPHILE KILLED IN STING OPERATION
Seattle Police released body camera footage from a sting operation targeting child predators, showing the fatal shooting of a 67-year-old man.
He expected to meet two young girls at a Tukwila hotel but was met by police officers instead.… pic.twitter.com/sNRdejKIWx
— Mario Nawfal (@MarioNawfal) April 20, 2024
What We Can Learn From This
Instead of doing what most people did in comments all over the internet, I’ll skip past celebrating the guy’s death. While that’s certainly the feeling we all share here, there’s nothing useful to glean from that.
Instead, I want to start with the raw speed at which this whole gunfight went down. There was no tense standoff, no chance to “shoot him in the hand” or anything like that. In fact, the situation changed from arresting the guy to a deadly fight so fast that the initial officer didn’t even have time to stop introducing himself. Part of his brain was starting to become engaged in wrestling over a gun while another part of him was still speaking professionally and he struggled to form the words to command him to give up the gun!
So, when someone tells you that “there are no shot timers in a gunfight”, keep this kind of thing in mind. If you’re not training to either get rounds on target fast or do something else to keep from getting killed, you’re watching too many movies and TV shows.
It’s unclear whose gun fired first, but it sounds like the man’s gun was fired in the struggle for it. At this point, another officer, who wasn’t struggling to keep a muzzle pointed away from him, did as police officers and concealed carry people who went to a good course are trained to do: two shots to the gut. Again, there’s no time for drawing, completing the grip, and forming a sight picture. In this kind of a situation, you point shoot practically on the way out of the holster and start trying to incapacitate the assailant before they get a chance to hurt you.
At this point, we get a lesson on what happens when the adrenaline hits a brain in charge of a modern handgun: emptying the magazine. No matter how much you train to do things like the Mozambique drill or otherwise fire some course of fire, things get crazy in this kind of a situation.
All in all, this was an incident that seems to have been handled professionally by police officers, and fortunately it was against an assailant who hadn’t been training with a shot timer or properly holstering his gun for fast deployment. If you’re ever faced with a violent encounter, you have to ask yourself: would you rather be like the cops here or be like the alleged pedophile?
His alleged crimes against humanity entirely aside, you don’t want to be that guy.
Read the full article here
