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Message: <blockquote data-quote="argo" data-source="post: 1566684" data-attributes="member: 5752">He most certanly WOULD NOT!  <img src="https://cdn.jsdelivr.net/joypixels/assets/8.0/png/unicode/64/1f621.png" class="smilie smilie--emoji" loading="lazy" width="64" height="64" alt=":mad:" title="Mad    :mad:"  data-smilie="4"data-shortname=":mad:" /> The first thing they teach you at the academy is that you only draw your weapon if you are prepared to shoot and you ONLY shoot to kill.  Period, end of story.  "Shoot to maim" is pure holywood fantasy.  There are two very good reasons for this mindset.  One: the idea that every cop should be expected to be enough of a marksman to hit the knee of a moving man-sized target under combat conditions is absurd: center of mass is difficult enough.  Two: they do not want the cop underestimating the seriousness of his weapon and the lethality of the situation nor do they want him thinking about all sorts of wacky comic-book scenarios when he has enough to worry about trying to decide weither or not to kill another human being in a split second.You are correct that a cop faced with an unarmed suspect would perfer to use non letheal methods to subdue him.  But then again, police recieve a great deal of tranning and specalized equipment for non letheal force, the only core class that can say that is monk, not paladin.  Fruthermore if a police officer were confronting the suspect alone, as this paladin was, he would probably choose to draw his weapon instead of rush in and wrestle him because he has no idea if the suspect has accompliaces elsewhere or if there is some other unknown factor (there is a posibility nobody has brought up in this thread: the paly didnt' know if the guy had friends.  Could he take the chance?) and if the suspect so much as twitched towards the girl or made any kind of threatening gesture towards the officer he would probably shoot the suspect.  Once again, officers are trained to shoot even an unarmed man before letting him close the distance with him.  Why?  Because a gun is a liability in melee.  You would not believe how many officers are killed with their own weapon every year.I apologize for this little thread hijack but the whole "shoot to maim" thing is a pet peeve of mine.  The more people who believe that garbage the fewer who understand what an officer-involved shooting really looks like.[/RANT]</blockquote>

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