Amid rioting across the country not seen since the 1960s, Joe Biden gave new advice to police. While rioters kill officers in cities across America, Biden wants police to shoot bad guys in the leg. Of course, the ridiculous notion brought fire from nearly every single law enforcement group.
Joe Biden Wants Police to Shoot Suspects in the Leg
“The idea that instead of standing there and teaching a cop when there’s an unarmed person coming at ‘em with a knife or something, shoot ‘em in the leg instead of in the heart, is a very different thing,” Biden said, reported foxnews.com. “There are a lot of things that can change.”
First off, he’s right about one thing. Shooting bad guys in the leg would change the outcome severely for officers. It wouldn’t put down threats, and more officers would die as a result.
“Former VP Biden’s remark is not just indecipherable (‘an unarmed person coming at ’em with a knife’?!), it’s also misleading to the point of being deceitful,” Bill Johnson, the executive director of the National Association of Police Organizations, told Fox News.
“Officers are not trained to ‘shoot somebody in the heart’ as Biden says, but rather to aim for the biggest part of the body, so as to be most likely to hit the person presenting the threat and not hit anybody else,” he said. “This always includes the condition that the officer or somebody else is in peril of death or great bodily harm, and certainly someone charging at you with a knife satisfies that requirement.”
Center Mass, Not Heart Shots
Officers shoot center mass, period. Yet Biden sees a knife-wielding attacker as an “unarmed person coming at ’em with a knife.” Yet officers know all-too-well how dangerous a knife attack can be. And attempting to take a leg shot won’t work out for anyone involved.
“He’s not living in the real world because people with knives, those are deadly threats,” Federal Law Enforcement Officers Association National President Larry Cosme, told Fox News.
“With all due respect to Mr. Biden, he’s mixing the two, ’unarmed person with a knife’ – I’ve never heard of an unarmed person with a knife,” he said.
But this isn’t about police safety. The remarks stem from Biden attempting to capitalize on tragedy in the name of election. It’s a sad narrative, one where he asks officers to take unnecessary risks.
“It is a harder dynamic to execute, all officers are trained to hit center mass, you’re not trained to hit an extremity,” Cosme said. “That is so difficult on a moving target.”
But we all know politicians don’t know procedure. They don’t know training. So in many ways, the ridiculous notion of shot placement doesn’t even become the most offensive part. Instead, it’s the notion that cops are killers. Biden’s comments suggest cops shoot people in the heart, to kill.
“The same officer who fires his weapon is also the officer who then calls for EMT to come to the scene and save the attacker. Officers don’t want the attacker dead, they want him stopped,” Johnson said. “Biden knows this, and for him to publicly state otherwise is the worst kind of cynical pandering. He squandered an opportunity to present a difficult truth.”
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