At the risk of offending the strong anti-law enforcement element here on Free Republic, try to put yourself, for a moment, in this police officer’s shoes.
You have responded to a frightened citizen’s 911 call and you come upon a heavily armed man acting in an unstable, erratic, uncooperative, and confrontational manner. What would you do to defuse the situation?
Your options are to either double-tap or disarm. You can’t just walk away.
That is an interesting hypothetical but I haven't seen any evidence at all that Grisham was acting in an unstable, erratic, uncooperative, and confrontational manner.
“At the risk of offending the strong anti-law enforcement element here on Free Republic, try to put yourself, for a moment, in this police officer’s shoes.”
Police officers on this Freerepublic topic have already stated the Temple police officers violated the law and normal police doctrine in this incident.
“You have responded to a frightened citizen’s 911 call and you come upon a heavily armed man acting in an unstable, erratic, uncooperative, and confrontational manner. What would you do to defuse the situation?”
There is no evidence of there being a frightened citizen’s 911 call”, but there is evidence of a person calling 911 to voice a concern about a man carrying a rifle. There are no laws which say a person must not open carry a long rifle just because another person wants to hysterically or maliciously direct the police to investigate a person bearing firearms in a normal and legal manner. Furthermore, there is circumstantial evidence which has not yet ruled out the possibility the caller could have been staging the incident on behalf of the county prosecutor as retaliation for Grisham’s defense of the Second Amendment rights at a city council meeting shortly before the arrest.
Grisham was not “heavily armed” as you false stated, nor was he armed with a “high power rifle” as the news media falsely reported. Grisham was bearing an AR-15 rifle and a sidearm, which is about as lightly armed as most hunters with a lick of sense for the past century.
Furthermore, your outrageously false accusations that Grisham was “unstable, erratic, uncooperative, and confrontational” are nothing short of deliberate and heinous character assassination. You owe Grisham an apology for those slanderous statements. Grisham acted with the most commendable restraint, astute questioning of the detaining officers to elicit appropriate evidence, and entirely appropriate cooperation where cooperation was in fact due or necessary under the extreme circumstances created by the police officers.
“Your options are to either double-tap or disarm. You can’t just walk away.”
That is a flat out lie and deserves the most severe condemnation of an incitement to the murder of Grisham in this incident or some future incident the Temple police should ever choose to create.
There is reason to suspect the county prosecutor and chief of police could have engineered this incident in retaliation for Grisham’s comments at the city council meeting preceding this incident.