“Plain clothed police” is a euphemism, and in other countries they are called “secret police”
Funny how powerful language can be. When I first read 1984 in my late teens/early 20s, I always thought that big chunk of the novel where Orwell discusses the use of language as a means of control was dry, boring and unrealistic.
It has become clear to me since, that it very well may have been his most prescient point.
the use of language as a means of control […] well may have been his most prescient point.
While I think Orwell’s “newspeak” was contrived, it did illustrate the point in strong relief as something unfamiliar… at least at first. But I don’t think he was predicting the future. Instead, I think he was warning the reader of what dangers are already with us.
Honestly, I think this has always been a thing. The spoken word is often inexact as a form of communication efficiency; if the other party has the same ideas in their head as you, pronouns, idioms, recalling past events, are all powerful ways to compress dialogue. However, that same inexactness leaves the door open for doublespeak, dogwhistles, and suggestion in place of fact. Language as a means of control is just in how you use it; the underlying mechanisms were always there.
I don’t think I implied it’s anything new. Nor was I trying to say he predicted the future per se. It’s been years since I’ve read it, but I don’t think the section was just about newspeak. I didn’t mind that stuff.
I recall there being a whole section where he kind of steps away from the narrative for a bit and basically writes an essay about controlling people through language. I just remember being like “lol yeah right, controlling thoughts with language? Impossible and boring… bring back Winston” when I was in my teens.
Reading it again as an adult, it didn’t particularly ring true to me at the time either. It wasn’t until I experienced 2015-now that I thought back to it and recognized how wrong I was.
Was that the original title? Because that’s not a revolver.
Edit: Ah the latter part is the subtitle, and it does say “revolver.” Good job, “journalist.”
In this case it is an important distinction. A revolver, if not cocked, requires a strong pull of the trigger to engage that double action system. A cocked revolver’s hammer is just itching to go off, which in this situation is very bad.
The photo shows what I believe is a Glock 17 pistol. The Glock does not have manual safety mechanism, which means that if there is a round in the chamber, that gun is ready to shoot. Although the Glock has a single action system that requires a full pull of the trigger before it shoots, it is a relatively soft pull (I own two), especially when compared to a double action revolver.
The photo shows the officer exercising trigger discipline by keeping his finger off the trigger, but that is where the discipline ends. You NEVER point a gun at something you are not willing to kill. Killing a prone, restrained, unarmed man is murder, plus the ricochet off the ground would likely hit another cop on that dog pile. That stupid son of a removed would have killed at least one person and spent the rest of his life in prison. Absolute gross negligence.
If I was his commander, I would restrict him to desk duty for at least a year (effectively blocking him from overtime pay) and force him to take and pass a third-party weapons safety program before he’s allowed to carry a weapon again.
While the cop is doing horrible and dangerous intimidation.
It also my makes no tactical sense. Unlike a revolver if he shoots his automatic pressing unto someone, he’ll have to at least manipulate the slide manually if he needs to make follow-up shots. He’ll probably need to clear a failure to eject and/or a failure to feed.
So in short another angry cop doing multiple stupid and dangerous things.
if he needs to make follow-up shots
Will he, though?
I don’t think it is an important distinction at all. The point of the news article is that an officer pointed a very lethal weapon at a person’s head while that person was restrained and (apparently the correct term is) supine. Does it really matter if the pull force for the gun to discharge or fire or whatever the preferred term is happens to be 5lbs vs 8lbs (made up numbers because I’m not a gun nerd who knows those things)? The point is exactly what you talk about in your third paragraph, not what you talk about in the first two.
The Glock has three safeties designed to prevent the weapon from firing if the trigger hasn’t been pulled correctly. One of these prevents the trigger from moving backwards unless it is depressed inside the trigger guard. You clearly know all this.
The term you’re looking for is “affirmative safety”, one type of which would be the common switch on the side of the frame that prevents the trigger from being pulled until it is disengaged in an action distinct from pulling the trigger. The Glock does not have an affirmative safety.
Source: certified Glock armorer
The term you’re looking for is “affirmative safety”
Thank you.
Well, I suspect he was very much ready to kill him
At the moment, I don’t doubt it. Guys that do stupid shit like this aren’t thinking. They are letting their emotions and adrenaline do the driving. That’s why you have to hammer training into their brains. It’s not because it is complicated, its because you want it to be so natural that thought doesn’t even come into play.
Guys that do stupid shit like this aren’t thinking
Eh, or they are and this is the emotion they want to feel, the power over others. Which makes them the wrong choice to be a cop, but the “right” choice when it comes to how most departments actually are right now.
It’s almost as if allowing just about anyone to purchase a semiautomatic firearm is a bad idea.
Like almost as though people have shown again and again that they should not be trusted with firearms, let alone have the ability to walk into a gun show and walk out with an AR-15 in under an hour.
But please, everyone tell me about how this is really a mental health issue (that they also refuse to address).
Law Enforcement, remember this article is about a Cop, isn’t “just anyone”. There’s two reasons for people being riled up about this, one of which is criminal and the other is user error / training.
Ignoring the criminal aspect of what he’s doing the Cop literally cannot fire that weapon without endangering himself and his fellow officers. He also can’t fire that weapon a second time without manually manipulating it because he’s using it in a manner that WILL cause it to mechanically malfunction.
It’s fucking stupid (and criminal) all the way around but it has nothing to do with the points you are making.
“You don’t rise to the occasion, you fall to your level of training.”
The point of the article is clearly the unacceptable behavior of the officer but damn does it make my teeth itch when Journalists fail basic fact checks like Pistol / Revolver. I always wonder what else they got wrong.
Removed by mod
and spent the rest of his life in prison
Hahaha I wish I had your faith
I’d reprimand him but for other reasons. Pressing the slide up against a person can cause the weapon to go out of battery. If the officer did need to pull the trigger there is a chance it would it not fire.
Edit: Nevermind, after a closer look the officer has the flashlight pressed against the suspects face. Giving some distance between the slide and his head, it should fire just fine.
The list of errors keeps growing from just a single still.
The article beneath the headline actually says
Johnson then put one hand around Joyner’s neck and took out his service weapon, putting the barrel of the Glock-22 to Joyner’s temple.
FWIW, headlines and subtitles usually aren’t written by the journalist bylining the piece, they’re typically handled by an editor who supervises a bunch of journalists reporting out a bunch of different stories and decides which to publish when (or, more likely, which to forward on to a committee of more senior editors who will decide which of those to publish and when).
So I’d bet an editor read through this story in about 90 seconds and then just said something like, “‘Glock 22’ obviously isn’t going to tell the average reader anything because I don’t know what that is, so let’s just say ‘revolver’ because it’s all the same to me. Now, on to the three dozen other stories I need to review because my bosses keep cutting our staffing and I’m doing three people’s jobs.”
The Glock does not have manual safety mechanism, which means that if there is a round in the chamber, that gun is ready to shoot.
How the fuck is this legal? Seems like requiring a manual safety mechanism on all firearms is a no-brainer.
Any of the folks who place more value in their ability to end another person’s life on a split second than the safety of their own children want to chime in and explain this one to me?
It doesn’t have a switch or button you have to manually toggle. There are safety devices that automatically disable by pulling the trigger or holding the grip, these are more common on pistols.
Glocks in particular are incredibly safe when it comes to accidental discharge. They physically can’t fire without the trigger being pulled.
How the fuck is this legal?
Glock, an Austrian company, uses a variety of common sense safeties that are automatic in nature.
With a manual safety the user has to remember to engage / dis-engage it as appropriate. This means a weapon can be left in an unsecured state simply because the user forgot (or elected not too) engage the manual safety. Conversely if the user forgets to disengage the manual safety the weapon will not fire when they need it too, which makes an awful lot of sense when you know that Glock designed these weapons for Law Enforcement.
To work around the weaknesses of a Manual Safety Glock designed what it calls its “Safe Action System” which you can read about here.. In a nutshell a Glock will not fire unless the trigger is intentionally pulled in the correct way.
Other pistol manufacturers will have some, or all, of those feature and may have other things such as “Grip Safeties” where you have to be holding the pistol both correctly and tightly enough before it can discharge.
There’s quite a variety of automatic safeties in use in the pistol world. If you are interested you can read about them here.
On balance these kinds of automatic safeties are at least as effective as a manual safety and there are valid arguments with empirical evidence showing that they can be safer.
Any of the folks who place more value in their ability to end another person’s life on a split second than the safety of their own children want to chime in and explain this one to me?
Could you explain why you are using such inflammatory language? NO safety can or is meant to make a loaded firearm safe from a child. It’s arguably easier for a child to flip the selector lever on a manual safety than it is for one to grip a firearm a specific way or pull its trigger in a specific way (or both).
Loaded weapons, regardless of their type(s) of safety mechanism, should not be left where they can be handled by children.
It also says the man is prone and restrained where the image clearly shows he is lying in a supine and restrained position.
He’s also laying supine, not prone.
Oh shit and they didn’t even mention the thread count of his t-shirt. How can these journalists miss “the” real important details?
If they can’t get that simple distinction correct, what does that say about the rest of their reporting?
It’s a distinction without meaningful difference. Yes, a revolver is very different from a semi-auto pistol. Yay, congrats on being factually correct. Are they both lethal devices that can misfire/accidentally fire/easily be fired with a trigger pull? Because THAT is the point of the article.
If a journalist can’t get the basic fact of revolver vs Glock right, what other basic facts have they misrepresented?
thats why factual accuracy in news stories is important, especially if the weapon in question is the articles thumbnail, making it the first thing many will notice
The journalist DID get the correct type of gun. The title is not written by the journalist and is the only place revolver is used.
And the way you say, “what other basic facts have they misrepresented” makes it seem like you think this was an intentional thing to skew the story. Only gun nerds will care about that detail, so the editor/copy person who actually wrote the headline likely did no research at all and just used what normal people think of as a generic term for a gun. The point is that the type of gun is not important. Just like if the person had said the officer was wearing a cotton shirt under his uniform when it was actually a poly-cotton blend, it’s not 100% accurate but it doesn’t change the point.
The journalist DID get the correct type of gun. The title is not written by the journalist and is the only place revolver is used.
It’s in the subtitle, and it was produced by the news organization alongside the article. It’s part of the article as released by the journalistic news outlet, it impacts the story, and it’s embarrassing
And the way you say, “what other basic facts have they misrepresented” makes it seem like you think this was an intentional thing to skew the stor
Nice assumption, don’t read shit into what other people say and you won’t get it wrong. My point wasn’t that it’s purposefully wrong at all, just that it is wrong, and an insanely basic thing to get wrong. Assume incompetence before malice, you know?
Only gun nerds will care about that detail
Lol, completely untrue. My wife has no idea about guns and her first comment was that the gun in the thumbnail wasn’t a revolver and she chuckled. It’s a really basic fact to fuck up
so the editor/copy person who actually wrote the headline likely did no research at all
Exactly? If the person doing the tag line for the article couldn’t be bothered to not make a basic error fixed with a 2s web search: why should you trust that the person who wrote the article did, or was checked properly?
The point is that the type of gun is not important
The point is that I learned in my journalism classes that missing basic facts like this erodes trust in you as a news source, for obvious reasons. Well, obvious to people with half a brain, anyway.
Just like if the person had said the officer was wearing a cotton shirt under his uniform when it was actually a poly-cotton blend, it’s not 100% accurate but it doesn’t change the point.
Absolutely not the same at all. What the office wore underneath his uniform is nether relevant nor in the thumbnail next to the article title. The type of gun is both of those things
Again, it’s a very simple concept: if the news source cannot be assed to do a basic fact check on their title when it’s blatantly false by their own thumbnail then they cannot be trusted to fact check jack shit
You complete me.
If none of the facts need to be correct except that police pointed a gun at someone’s head, why read the other 2000+ words in the article?
Where did I say none of the facts need to be correct? Nowhere, that’s where.
The important stuff needs to be clear, but the type of gun is not nearly as important as the fact the guy was restrained on the ground with a gun (any type of gun) to his head. Other facts that are more important than the type of gun are what led up to the events, whether the guy was still armed but only restrained, the color of the individuals in question, etc. The type of gun is so far down the list of details that need to be correct that I wouldn’t even expect it to be mentioned other than “gun.”
Also, even more important is the fact the story had the correct type of gun, only the title (not written by the journalist) is incorrect.
If they get one “unimportant” fact wrong, then why should I trust the “important” facts?
My theory continues to stand:
If you want to legally threaten,kill and harm people because that’s your fetish, be a police officer.
If you’re really good at it you can even join the FBI or CIA. Hell you can become a judge if you REALLY want to ruin someone’s life with zero to no consequences
DEA is also a decent option for a violent antisocial menace.
I feel this goes beyond theory at this point, sadly.
I don’t know what this person did, but that’s harrowing.
Even if he was accused of committing the most heinous crime, I don’t think this is an acceptable use of force on an already subdued suspect.
The police are to take you to jail and then court, not terrorise people.
No, neither do I.
