- cross-posted to:
- news@lemmy.world
- cross-posted to:
- news@lemmy.world
A man who was believed to be part of a peacekeeping team for the “No Kings” protest in Salt Lake City shot at a person who was brandishing a rifle at demonstrators, striking both the rifleman and a bystander who later died at the hospital, authorities said Sunday.
Police took the alleged rifleman, Arturo Gamboa, 24, into custody Saturday evening on a murder charge, Salt Lake City Police Chief Brian Redd said at a Sunday news conference. The bystander was Arthur Folasa Ah Loo, 39, a fashion designer from Samoa.
Detectives don’t yet know why Gamboa pulled out a rifle or ran from the peacekeepers, but they accused him of creating the dangerous situation that led to Ah Loo’s death. The Associated Press did not immediately find an attorney listed for Gamboa or contact information for his family in public records.
Exactly. The level of cultural brainwashing in this thread is insane. You don’t just let any random volunteer perform jobs like this.
Volunteers were told not to carry a weapon because of outcomes like this. They’re not trained professionals, and they’re definitely not action heroes. And now someone has to explain to a child, a parent, a partner, etc., that the civillian death here was just an unfortunate outcome of a wonderful American citizen protecting his country. It’s actually fucking despicible.
You’d rather the protesters rely on the police to do this kind of thing? The group shooting them with rubber bullets and tear gas canisters?
Sorry, how many protesters were shot and killed by law enforcement this weekend?
Listen, I take your point, but the killing of random civilians isn’t better.
It’s hard to tell from this one report but it doesn’t seem like this was a particularly bad outcome. Of course it’s unfortunate that a bystander was killed but it sounds like they successfully prevented an even worse outcome. Besides, there are tons of stories of cops injuring or killing more than one bystander in situations like this. When it comes down to it I’m more inclined to trust the judgment of a commited private citizen than the police.
Now that I’ve discovered the rest of the article beyond the wall of ads, I agree. I had partial information, and wrongly believed it was all the information, as the blob of ads on my mobile device was a whole screen. That, combined with being on the way out the door in the morning, led me to believe I had read everything and everyone in this thread is insane. Thenn, someone made a specific reference to something I hadn’t read and I was prompted to go look, discovering there is much more article beyond our corporate sponsored break.
I legit thought they scared a dude with a rifle into fleeing, and then shot at him instead of letting him get away.
Let’s try out the counterfactual: the assailant pulls out a rifle, aims it into the crowd, and nobody else in the immediate vicinity is armed. What happens next?
There’s a small chance he was just trying to scare people and disrupt the protest, but that sounds like the prelude to a mass shooting to me. It’s likely many more people would have died in that case. We can’t know of course and neither could the security volunteer; he had to make a hard decision in a split second in an emergency. He had to weigh the risk of shooting when he did against the risk of waiting, and he had the disadvantage of fighting a rifle with a pistol; it’s much easier to shoot accurately with a rifle, and the ammunition is more deadly.
The dude with the rifle was running. That whole argument is fine when someone is draw weapons and making threats, but they shot at someone trying to flee the scene after causing no harm and killed an innocent. Everything else is imaginary justification.
EDIT: Wondering where the hell everyone else got so much more information, I reloaded the article, scrolled past the ad wall and found the rest of the text, which makes clear that the dude with the rifle pulled his gun into a firing position on the crowd. Fair enough, I was wrong and the citizen was right to have taken the shot. I blame the ad wall for convincing me that the news article was over.
That explains the confusion. Do you need a recommendation for an ad blocker?
Apparently using an adblocker and reading an entire article is American exceptionalism now.