And what a magical thing it is, eh? Now, the narrative has become “he was going for his gun”, with the caveat that “they knew he was armed”. How special. A guy known to own and carry firearms — quite openly — had a gun! Oh, my!
Now, show me the unlawful action he took with that weapon — you know, like actually POINTING IT at someone — and I’ll conclude that any LEO had justification to drop him on the spot. Failure to do so, however, would seem to indicate that the shooter wasn’t acting in strict accordance with the law.
Isn’t it ironic that our soldiers, in a war zone, facing a known enemy, aren’t allowed by their “rules of engagement” to fire except and until they are first fired upon, but we’ve come to accept the notion that it is somehow ok (and even expected) that a LEO will shoot a non-criminal citizen in this country because of an imagined, potential danger that was never actually manifested?
I still see an ambush of demonstrated superiority where the feds controlled the total scene from the minute they left the town..
If this were in Afghanistan, there’d have had to be a line to POTUS to get the final go ahead for the engagement. In this case, it was some old fart that had the effing audacity to tell the government he would RESIST - and they called him on it with several bullets.