A jury has found a delivery driver not guilty in the shooting of a YouTube prankster who was following him around a mall food court earlier this year
I would have thought it common sense, but sure: https://nij.ojp.gov/topics/articles/use-force-continuum
Firearms are at the bottom, under lethal force. There is no way to use firearms to be less-lethal.
Understood. I know that firearms can kill. Stabbing too.
But not every use of a firearm is with the intent to kill. Someone could just shoot to a foot or a hand. Foolish? Sure. Intent to kill? Nah.
Those are very small targets. They’d be hard enough to hit on a static range with no pressure. They’d be even harder to hit when moving, in a stressful situation, at close range. If you miss, you could hit someone else. Even if you hit them, the bullet will probably go right through and into whatever is beyond. This is why you aim for center of mass. Easier to hit, less chance of overpenetration, and more effective in stopping an attacker in a life-or-death situation.
Despite what the movies may show, you can’t just shoot to wound. If you shoot someone in the leg, and hit the femoral artery, they can bleed to death in seconds: https://pubmed.ncbi.nlm.nih.gov/17334183/
Those are just strawmen. It doesn’t matter if “those are small targets” or if “you can still hit an artery.” What matters in the persons’s intent.
That’s like saying that “any person delivering a punch to someone else’s face intends to kill them because of the possibility of the punched falling down and cracking their skull open on the floor.”
Nobody that’s ever used a gun is taught to shoot at the edge of the target. Aim center-mass or don’t even pull the weapon.
Making a lot of assumptions here. What about people who use guns without that kind of training? Because those people exist, or else you wouldn’t see gun-related accidents being reported in the news.
Regardless, and again, not the point. As there were no people killed here, and the shooter was acquited, so…
