Dan McLaughlin of National Review Online takes aim at President Biden’s latest clueless pronouncement related to public policy.
Joe Biden has spent decades saying things about topics he doesn’t understand. The latest is this nonsense:
“We have to retrain cops,” Biden said. “Why should you always shoot with deadly force? The fact is if you need to use your weapon, you don’t have to do that,” Biden said. Biden offered similar advice to police officers during a 2020 campaign town hall. “Instead of anybody coming at you and the first thing you do is shoot to kill, you shoot them in the leg,” Biden said.
To start with, any time you fire a gun at another human being, that is deadly force. This is drilled into cops from Day One. If you don’t have a good reason to shoot to kill, you don’t have a good reason to shoot, period. If you hit an artery, you can kill with a shot to the leg. If you shoot at the leg and miss — not an uncommon thing in a chaotic situation, because this isn’t the movies — you can easily hit them in the chest, or the head. Worse, if you are aiming for someone’s extremities instead of firing at their chest, you stand a much higher chance not only of failing to stop them, but also of missing and shooting an innocent bystander. Democrats love to talk about deferring to experts, but literally anybody who has ever been in law enforcement or the military, or has taken a basic gun-safety class, could explain this.
This was terrible advice when David Paterson was pushing it back in 2006, but at least Paterson had the excuse that he was blind and didn’t totally grasp how this all works. Biden’s excuse is that, well, he’s Joe Biden.
