"Armed" is a proxy for criminals being criminals, and almost always reaching for, displaying, or using the weapon in some antisocial way prior to being shot dead.
Legal gun owners not committing obvious crimes are only rarely accosted by police, and shootings are exceedingly rare, and they usually make the news and result in legal action. They also usually involve the victim doing something that's not advisable, even if they're not doing anything legally wrong. Philando Castile, for instance, or Johnny Hurley.
"Unarmed" doesn't represent what the suspect was doing that got them shot. Were they resisting arrest or being noncompliant and reaching for their waist or a center console or glove compartment?
There are cases where police shoot suspects, armed or unarmed, unjustifiably. They're not as rare as anyone wishes they were. They're still fairly rare. Behaving civilly, even while recognizing that many police are like barely constrained wild animals, goes a long way toward ensuring that an accidental furtive gesture isn't interpreted as reaching for a weapon.
No, “armed” isn’t a proxy for anything. It means they were found to be carrying a gun. It doesn’t matter whether they were committing a crime or doing something inadvisable — the point is that if merely being armed justifies your extrajudicial murder by police, then the Second Amendment doesn’t actually exist.
It is, because cops never shoot someone just for being armed. They just don't. It's a combination of being armed plus (believed) criminal status, or behavior during the encounter.
(And it's exceedingly rare that cops will believe an upstanding citizen who's legally armed and behaving civilly is a criminal. It happens, for instance in the two cases I cited, but it's rare. They're a rounding error in the police killing stats.)
Why do you believe that? We routinely see police break the law, harass people and otherwise abuse their power, but when it comes to encounters with armed civilians they become upstanding professionals with perfect judgment?
> They also usually involve the victim doing something that's not advisable, even if they're not doing anything legally wrong. Philando Castile, for instance, or Johnny Hurley.
“Not advisable”, of course, being a goalpost on wheels that allows them to justify police misconduct.
Legal gun owners not committing obvious crimes are only rarely accosted by police, and shootings are exceedingly rare, and they usually make the news and result in legal action. They also usually involve the victim doing something that's not advisable, even if they're not doing anything legally wrong. Philando Castile, for instance, or Johnny Hurley.
"Unarmed" doesn't represent what the suspect was doing that got them shot. Were they resisting arrest or being noncompliant and reaching for their waist or a center console or glove compartment?
There are cases where police shoot suspects, armed or unarmed, unjustifiably. They're not as rare as anyone wishes they were. They're still fairly rare. Behaving civilly, even while recognizing that many police are like barely constrained wild animals, goes a long way toward ensuring that an accidental furtive gesture isn't interpreted as reaching for a weapon.