Discussion for article #239777
I guess he was asking for death by cop.
Sad.
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Mental health care in this country is a joke.
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And THAT’s why everyone should have their own hand gun! 
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Were that it was.
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This happened in my home town. The town he’s from is seriously depressed economically and it’s not a surprise if he wasn’t getting the psychiatric care he seems to have needed.
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Truly sad but the NRA will soon say that he would still be alive if he’d been carrying a concealed weapon.
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So he wasn’t armed? And they still shot him?
Shouldn’t they have been confident he was unarmed as this was in a courthouse?
I worked in a mental hospital years ago and never had to kill any of the hundereds of patients I needed to restrain. Of course instead of guns they have us training.
I was I’m my early 20s as we’re many of my underpaid coworkers and I was about 140 lbs soaking wet. Its not that hard to subdue a person if you try and have at least one other individual to assist.
This makes me sick.
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Hogan said Smith, 34, entered the Chester County Justice Center just before noon on Tuesday and charged at a sheriff’s deputy with knife, the station reported.
He seems to have had a knife. Maybe it was the security checkpoint guards that he charged?
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Dude had a knife and cut one of the deputies. That’s when he was shot. Unarmed he wasn’t. It may have been possible to restrain him without shooting him, but that’s not the way cops are trained these days.
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I stand corrected… I missed that.
However, I also stand by my point. My experiences at the hospital certainly involved patients with knives, syringes, and blunt objects.
You point regarding training dovetails with mine.
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Suicide By Cop is what you do when you can’t afford a gun or meds, or gird your own loins for the act.
This courthouse has heavy activity through most of the day. I am sure the Deputies were concerned about other bystanders being stabbed or slashed by the assailant. That is why they took the shots.
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Um … @MattinPA … do you still live around here? I’m just north of Exton. Been here for most of my life.
Coatesville is sad. When we still actually made steel in the US it was a thriving place. And it hasn’t bounced back the way Phoenixville has lately, although the mills in Phoenixville closed first.
((Just did the ‘Phlight of the Phoenix Bar Tour’ on Saturday … 2 breweries, 2 wine tasting rooms and a distillery in Phoenixville. And that’s not all that’s there.))
Here’s the article from our local paper : Daily Local News article
False
He charged the security guard when he came in and slashed him. That guard is the one who would check if he was armed. He found out fast that he was.
What? That he was mentally ill and perhaps needed treatment? Understandable. But that he was shot, hey, better him than the guard getting killed.
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Exactly, he charged past the metal detectors, which is easily a sign he might have a gun, then slashed a sheriff’s deputy. It was just before noon, so probably even more people than usual at the entry (heading out for lunch, etc.). Sounds like the cop was well trained and did his job right. Yet you always have people who just won’t do a little research to find out the facts, they automatically assume the cop is wrong, even though in most situations, the opposite is true.
Sure, LOTS of times police do not have proper training, or shoot for no reason. Overall a small percentage, but still happens a lot. And that needs to be addressed. But in this specific case, all indications are the cop might have actually saved a sheriff’s deputy and prevented more people from being slashed.
And just to be clear folks, in PA, there is a difference between a police officer and a sheriff’s deputy.
And it was a Sheriff’s Deputy on duty at the entrance to the County Courthouse (which is new, and was built with security issues in mind) who was injured, and another Deputy who fired the shot.
Well, howdy, neighbor. Yes, I still live in the area. Coatesville and Phoenixville make an interesting contrast: the one never recovering from the loss of the mill jobs, the other reinventing itself as a destination for entertainment and so forth. To some extent many of the older towns in the area have revitalized themselves that way, but Coatesville has always had too many problems to get that going. Without some very aggressive training program like CETA I’m not sure what can be done about that, unfortunately.
Respectfully, the concept of training someone to disarm a knife-wielding aggressive individual is a martial-arts movie fantasy. If someone seeks to lethally attack you with a weapon, your defense should be lethal in response.
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Some of the comments I see on here are in fact funny, like shooting people in the legs when they are running at you. Yeah, it worked in Scarface in the Club scene!! Al Pacino fired through a crowd of people with a handgun and just happened to hit in the legs the guys shooting at him with automatic weapons. Meanwhile the guys with automatic weapons firing 15 rounds a second did not hit Pacino once. Just like real life…
Yes, LEO are trained in hand to hand fighting and such, but that training is for situations where you don’t have your weapon, not in lieu of using it on a person who poses a threat to the public or themselves.