45Broomhandle,
I wasn't the least bit hard on ka50. If ka50 wants to suggest that commander on the scene should have taken a different course of action, then he (or any other member for that matter) should be prepared to tell us what experience he has that made him form that opinion and be able to offer an alternate course of action.
How else are we to judge if he's right or just blowing smoke. Anyone can sit at his keyboard an hide his identity behind a screen name and type anything he/she wants to. To make the suggestion that another course of action should have been taken, based soley on the meager, unreliable and incompete information in a news article is just venting. Other members who have felt that the shooting was wrong have suggested alternatives and other members are discussing why those alternatives, may or may not work. That's civil discussion which is what we try to have here at THR. These threads usually go on for 100+ posts and they usually end up with the membership divided into two camps, the discussion loses any semblance of civility and the thread is closed, maybe with one or more members banned because they lost their temper.
In an earlier post, ka50 said this:
Scope to see if anyone else is inside besides the kid (using high tech devices, such as robot cameras) and then gas the whole thing, toss a bang and clear it.
This a friggin swat we're talking about.
Does anyone know if the SWAT team in question had access to these devices? Robot cameras are very expensive, just because you saw one on
Texas SWAT last week doesn't mean every agency in the country has one. If they didn't have one, where was the closest one? Did they even have a mutual aid agreement with the agency that owned it to use it if they needed it? If they did in fact have a mutual aid agreement with the agency that owned one, what would it's response time have been?
As for the suggestion of using gas, does anyone know what kind of gas the team in question had available? Was it aerosol or incendiary? What was the ventilation system in the building like? How long would it have taken to evacuate the school?
As for deploying a distration device, what was the condition of the bathroom where the boy was? Were there possible hazards from secondary missiles? How big was the bathroom? Any chance that they could have permanently damaged the boy's hearing? What if they only had the Def Tec 25 and there was a danger the body of the device could hit the boy in such a confined space?
If you don't know the answers to questions like that then you shouldn't make imflammatory comments like this:
But no, swat team went to peek inside and got a gun pointed at them... whooptie-doo what a surprise! The field commander of that swat team should be re-trained or replaced to be suited for this kind of duty.
I see nothing wrong with being challenged to present your bona fides when you make statements like that.
I am in no way, shape or form suggesting that you have to have experience to have an opinion. I do think that we are entitled to know from what knowledge and experience base that opinion is drawn from.
I would fully expect you to ask me exactly what I knew about the telecommunications business were I to opine that the chief engineer at my local phone company should be replaced, based on a newspaper article.
Jeff