Multiple People Shot, Two Dead, Outside Empire State Building

****Warning, some, but not all of the pictures in the article are pretty bloody. The one you see when you click on the link shouldn’t be, so you can still read the story.****

Holy shit. I showed up for work two blocks away about an hour after it had happened. The area was teeming with bewildered tourists, police, ambulances, news crews, and helicopters. The gunman, who had been fired from his job a while ago, came to midtown today to confront his supervisor, who he shot at point blank range. He started to walk around the corner, but a construction worker who saw the shooting told two police officers. When they approached the gunman, he pulled his gun (though it looks like he didn’t fire), and they shot him 16 times. There’s footage of them shooting the gunman in this New York Times article. 

Some bullet fragments and ricochets off the planters that are all over that area hit civilians, and nine people were wounded, probably all by the police officers’ bullets.

I’m not going to pretend to know how many shots it may take to know for sure that a suspect is no longer a threat. Two people firing sixteen shots sounds excessive on face, but it’s pretty clear that, considering how close he was to the officers (seriously watch the video), had the gunman been given the opportunity to shoot, he likely would have hit one of the cops. What if they only shot twice and the gunman could still physically shoot back? There’s also the fact that their guns are not the most accurate things in the world, so they regularly fire multiple shots, and shoot to completely incapacitate, when fire is used.

Obviously we need to look into how the gunman got his weapon. Legally? Illegally? Would he still be the type who could get a gun if we strengthened gun laws? Considering this and the recent police shooting in Times Square, do our trigger-happy officers need to be trained differently? Or are they just doing what needs to be done? Are all of these incidents going to be enough to spark a real conversation about the proliferation of destructive weapons in the US? Or will just be wringing our hands again in a couple weeks after the next mass shooting with fatalities?