Discussion for article #231216
I guess when police decide to take that course of action, innocent people die. Do they not have sharpshooters in the New South Wales police force - or does that just happen on tee-vee.
Do not confuse reality with Hollywood. Hollywood is not real. Hollywood is not real.
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It’s my understanding that he had hostages facing the windows with their hands pressed against it. Doesn’t sound like a safe shot to take…plus he apparently got pretty enraged when some hostages escaped. It doesn’t sound like they had much of a choice.
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Yeah, I remember Inspector Erskine in the FBI series could shoot a guy dead from 100 yards with his pistol after they shot at him with rifles and missed. I see your point (eyeroll…)
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Yes, the escaping hostages was a key part of this, and they probably had some good info for the police as well. Not an easy situation.
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And the NRA, ignoring all the evidence of how little gun violence there is in Australia as a result of their laws and buyback programs, will now loudly and vehemently blame these two civilian deaths on Australia’s “anti-self-defense culture” and give us the usual proclamation that this could all have been avoided, or at least ended swiftly, if everyone in that cafe was packing heat in the first place.
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They do have sharpshooters, but it’s not quite that easy.
I used to work about 50 metres from that building. The café is on the ground floor of a large pedestrian only street, but with really tall buildings all around. It’s right in the middle of the city.
To be honest, if he was even a few metres back from the front of the shop, there wouldn’t have been any angles to shoot at him from. There’s large buildings in the way.
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Actually a typical muzzle velocity for a sniper round is about 800 m/s - three times the speed of sound. In an urban setting where distances are short, any shot is point blank and basically instantaneous. All the shooter needs to do is wait for the target to move in front of his sights and squeeze. If you know who the bad guy is and there is only one and he’s walking around, he would never know what hit him.
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I’m not on twitter but I’d like to draw your attention to #I’llRideWithYou
There have been a few heavily-publicised instances of racism (anti-muslim, I suppose that’s technically anti-Semitism?) on Sydney’s Public Transport system in recent months and years.
The hashtag is conveying the attempt by the rest of Sydney to provide solidarity to the vast majority of Muslims who are just trying to get where they are going on the train without any trouble.
That outpouring is one of the things making today ever so slightly easier to take.
No deflection from the bullet penetrating the glass?
If that shot is not a perfect hit, this guy starts shooting everyone. Shooting through glass would be very difficult.
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It doesn’t matter about the glass… I’d be more concerned about the three feet of concrete. Martin place is on a sharp slope. A lot of the ground floor is actually below street level.
Sure technically that’s anti-Semitism but the usual usage of the phrase is an attempt to prove that Semitic Muslims can’t be bigoted against the Jews because some of each religious group is ethnically Semitic. It’s a bit of word play designed to allow bigotry to appear acceptable. I’d avoid the usuge if I were you.
I’m glad that #I’I’llRide with you exists. Automatically tarring every member of a group with responsibility for all the actions of their extremists is ridiculous.
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Yeah - I know the word’s not accurate but there’s no equivalent word though, is there? At least not one in common use.
Animus against gays (homophobia), Jews (anti-Semitism), women (misogyny) and lots of others have separate distinct words.
Animus against Muslims is now wide-spread enough that it needs a word.
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If the TV cameras were capturing it, obviously a sharpshooter could get a shot too. I think the glass was the big issue. If there is no glass, he gets bullet to head.
Not quite that simple. The cafe is opposite a TV studio, there were lots of cameras there well before the police. The images of the shooter don’t come with a time stamp, but from the sun they’re all from the early morning, when the siege started and before the cops got there.
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The real mystery is why Monis (the hostage-taker) was out on bail in the first place. He would seem to qualify as a menace to society, best kept off the streets. From the NYT:
Mr. Monis was known to the police. According to The Sydney Morning Herald, he was free on bail in two separate criminal cases. He was charged in November 2013 with being an accessory before and after the fact in the murder of his ex-wife, Noleen Hayson Pal, and in April 2014, he was charged with the indecent and sexual assault of a woman in western Sydney in 2002. Forty more counts of indecent or sexual assault relating to six other women were later added in that case.
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Why would it matter what time of day it was? The view from the studio to the shop is still the same, just different lighting. They have ways to adjust for lighting. I guarantee that the only thing preventing a sniper from taking this guy out was the glass deflecting a bullet. Even a deflection of a few inches is a miss. Remember they can’t aim torso, he might have a vest on. It’s got to be a head shot, and that’s a tough shot through glass. But with no glass, he takes a bullet to the head.
Assumes facts not in evidence. Assumes police made a considered decision to raid the place while the terrorist was calmly moving forward with this non-lethal plans, even though he posed no immediate treat.
In reality gunshots first rang out from inside according to all accounts, presumably the violent misfit’s own in murdering hostages, and police responded to the desperate situation. Maybe you could have done it better I suppose, but you should stick to the established facts.
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The guy might have figured he could not hold out any longer without sleep, and decided to start killing hostages.
Yes, that might be a good time to storm the place. Unless you just love to hate cops, like the poster you replied to.