What is to be expected? A dog bred SPECIFICALLY to kill in the fighting arena - bred with thick and powerful jaws - and with a killer inborn instinct to kill...
And then people act surprised when their little “Fi-Fi” Pit Bull mauls or kills someone “without warning”.
Let me just go get a .357 revolver, load only one round, then spin the cylinder and aim it at someone at random and pull the trigger. I might get away with this for a lifetime... or I might get a “surprise” and blow away a person’s body part or their life.
Some Pits remain sweet and loving their entire lives. Unfortunately, this gives people a false sense of security (that they frequently throw in people’s faces). And then something like this happens.
No dog is “perfect”. Even some otherwise awesome “family” dog breeds have a bad apple every so often (nearly always a case of seriously bad breeding or horrible mistreatment). But I go back to my original statement in this post - start off with a loaded weapon...
I’d like to see more attention paid in the media to the sex and spay/neuter status of the dogs that attack. I suspect the great majority are intact males, followed by intact females who currently have puppies. I’d really like to see less generalizing about “pit bulls” and more focus on specifics. The Best Friends organization is having great success at socializing pits, including some of Michael Vicks’ dogs that were sent to Best Friends under court order. But I guarantee that they are spay/neutering every single animal as step one.
I’d really like to know what percentage of the pits involved in attacks are spayed/neutered, and I suspect it’s quite small. They’ll always be dogs that were bred for fighting and have exceptionally strong jaws, but it may well be that the basic step of spaying/neutering hugely reduces the incidence of serious attacks. If so, then local laws should not focus on banning the breed/type of dog, but on banning ownership of intact dogs of this breed and type, except for people with special licenses and huge insurance policies.