There are innocent people losing their lives in confrontations with cops (including the good cops who get killed just doing their job) and this guy is creating drama and looking for more attention from it. Just look at how long his posts are and at how he is begging for attention from everyone (the media, the tech community, etc). His altercation with the law (a misdemeanor at the most) doesn't warrant all of this extra drama he's creating. And what the hell does he want strangers to do about it (stop their busy lives, filled with real problems, to fight his battles and stroke his balls so he can feel validated about this self-inflicted wound?). The term "get a life" was creates specifically for these moments and types of people.
CEO of ThinkPenguin, Inc arrested for filming police
181–190 of 284 posts
Re: CEO of ThinkPenguin, Inc arrested for filming police
#182Earlier quoted context omitted.
Genuinely confused about this morality. Why is it more correct that the officers "went home to their families" than that this innocent guy died in front of his? I mean, I can understand arguing that sometimes protective violence is necessary and accepting that tragedies happen. But you're literally taking a side here and saying that police lives are more important than ours. Why?
It's not a rationalization that police lives are more important, but rather about the stupidity of holding up a phone in such a way towards the police engaged in a dangerous situation that it appears as though you are acting aggressively towards them. The officers only have a limited time to assess the threat of any given person before more lives are lost due to an unknown danger. It's a high stress situation and wro…
For the equally callous flip side, we pay LEO to put their lives at risk and potentially die every day. We do not compensate citizens to put their lives at risk when a cop is around. In this cold and calculating scenario, maybe dying is what they're paid to do, kind of like soldiers. Except soldiers have massively more training and seem to be pretty decent at verifying an individual is a combatant before opening fire.
Because LEOs were dead wrong in their immediate assessment of the danger, that means exactly that their actions were unwarranted. When you act upon a false and unwarranted belief, you don't get to say your actions were warranted.
Re: CEO of ThinkPenguin, Inc arrested for filming police
#183Interesting how the prevailing mood on HN is very much pro-cop. Kind of surprising for a hacker forum. You don't really see what a system is made of until you stress it: filming police is one way to stress the LEO system. It's an unfortunate reality that it often does not produce good results.
I'm not sure it's so much pro-cop as it is anti-asshole. The guy in the video was acting like a total turd, and that's not cool.
Re: CEO of ThinkPenguin, Inc arrested for filming police
#184Earlier quoted context omitted.
To be fair, it probably looked like a gun from a distance. The police were in the neighborhood confronting somebody with a machine gun - not smart to take an action that looks like pointing a gun in a type of situation where one side has decided they need machine guns . It's not to excuse the behavior of the police..., but if you're pointing something at the police from across the street, it's hard to see the profile…
> To be fair, it probably looked like a gun from a distance. Maybe we could train police to distinguish between rela guns and from the multitude of other things that people might hold. Maybe we could even give them binoculars or something.
Seems with the advent of body cameras, someone ought to help all the trigger-happy LEOs out by doing some auto-recognition and alerting that what the camera is aiming at does, in fact, identify as a statistically great probability of being a firearm. Maybe Google or Snapchat should offer LEOs some cool specs they can wear to do this with AR.
Re: CEO of ThinkPenguin, Inc arrested for filming police
#185Earlier quoted context omitted.
Excusable in a war zone, not in a policing action. Then again a man firing 100 machine gun rounds would be almost unheard of in any other developed country, so maybe the US does qualify as a war zone.
The news article was wrong, it wasn't a machine gun. It was a semi-automatic rifle, hardly different than the rifle that Anders Breivik used to kill scores of people in Norway. An example of actual machine guns used would be the rifles used by French citizens to kill over a hundred people in the Bataclan theater (AKMs). They also used hand grenades and high explosive (TATP) suicide belts. In the Charlie Hebdo attacks…
It seems like organized criminals in Europe have greater access to automatic firearms than in the US. I'm guessing that's because in the US you're dealing with stolen/straw-purchased legal firearms, whereas military/police arms from former Soviet-bloc countries circulate in Europe. I have nothing to back this up.
Re: CEO of ThinkPenguin, Inc arrested for filming police
#186Earlier quoted context omitted.
https://www.atf.gov/firearms/docs/atf-national-firearms-act-... That's the specific part I guess, not "the AR 15". Once it has been modified to full automatic fire the ease of conversion also isn't relevant.
Right. In the same sense that a Subaru Legacy isn't considered a sports car, but with an engine / suspension change, it becomes one. Regardless, the AR15 is not in any way considered a machine gun until and unless it has been converted to be one.
Yes, sloppy delivery on my part.
The weapon in the link had apparently been converted and thus fell under the NFA. I was pointing at the NFA definition and included the broader provision in my summary, I didn't mean to imply that the convertibility would have been an issue in the incident being discussed.
Re: CEO of ThinkPenguin, Inc arrested for filming police
#187Earlier quoted context omitted.
And why shouldn't they? Police departments and city officials across the US routinely lie, obsfucate and remove any sense of accountability for police officers who commit crimes or make mistakes. Look at the case of the murder of Laquan McDonald in Chicago. The lying and stonewalling is a common occurrence. It's not just a few bad apples, it's a bad system that promotes escalation and grants power without accountabil…
> And why shouldn't they? This is a leading question, which is to say it's not a question that can be answered in a rational way. If one desires removal of choice in the conversation, they may answer it irrationally. > Look at the case of the murder of Laquan McDonald in Chicago. The use of a separate case of an individual having choice removed, or individuals in a group removing choice for an individual, applied to…
If these people didn't antagonize and harass the police, they'd rarely obtain any interesting footage. That says a lot.
These people have an agenda. They need to show the police in the worst light possible, and they don't have time to sit around waiting for news to happen. They have to make the news.
Re: CEO of ThinkPenguin, Inc arrested for filming police
#188Earlier quoted context omitted.
I dont understand all the downvotes. Just a few comments up someone talked about a cop firing on someone filming, which sounds awful, but when added with context (there had been 100's of rounds shot from a machine gun earlier), seems understandable. I agree this is only one side of the story, and more info would be great.
Except that was a lie - it was rounds fired from a rifle, not a 'machine gun', and that's STILL a pretty flimsy excuse.
Tell me you've been in a gunfight before and I'll accept you as a subject matter expert in quantifying what is "flimsy" or
is not a "flimsy" excuse is when it comes to shooting or not shooting.
Re: CEO of ThinkPenguin, Inc arrested for filming police
#189Earlier quoted context omitted.
Excusable in a war zone, not in a policing action. Then again a man firing 100 machine gun rounds would be almost unheard of in any other developed country, so maybe the US does qualify as a war zone.
I think the fact that this us unheard of makes it even more excusable. I don't think that the police had faced this kind of sitiation too often.
That it was so unheard of should have invoked far greater caution and hesitancy to fire.
Re: CEO of ThinkPenguin, Inc arrested for filming police
#190In my county they opened fire on someone filming the police recently. Turns out having video evidence is the ONLY way a policeman can be wrong.
>Turns out having video evidence is the ONLY way a policeman can be wrong.
Even then, video evidence of police wrongdoing is hardly a guarantee that they'll face any or proportionate consequences. See: the murders of Eric Garner, Tamir Rice, Oscar Grant, Jamar Clark, and countless others; oh and of course the assault of Rodney King.