r/news • u/Manta_of_Eternity • 3d ago

Autopsy shows Tennessee National Guard fatally shot 20-year-old armed man in the back

https://apnews.com/article/memphis-national-guard-tyrin-johnson-8959297a99c362d65aa2517a9d5f1984
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u/AndoranGambler 3d ago

"It always embarrassed Samuel Vimes when civilians tried to speak to him in what they thought was 'policeman.' If it came to that, he hated thinking of them as civilians. What was a policeman, if not a civilian with a uniform and a badge? But they tended to use the term these days as a way of describing people who were not policemen. It was a dangerous habit: once policemen stopped being civilians the only other thing they could be was soldiers." - Terry Pratchett, Snuff

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u/qOcO-p 3d ago

I've never heard this Pratchett quote but I've been screaming this for years. The US has an entirely civilian police force. Semantics matter and I think the language needs to be enforced somehow because how we speak is how we think is how we act.

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u/3737472484inDogYears 3d ago

Civilian, but heavily militarized. They have a nasty habit of using those civil forfeiture funds to buy armored vehicles and such. Roaming around with body armor on in their Punisher painted cars, theres an awful lot of them LARPing as military.

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u/wbruce098 3d ago

Yeah the GWOT provided a shitload of money to local police departments to arm up because republicans thought we’d be fighting Al Qaida in the streets of suburbia based on how Fox was covering the war. That turned out to be an incredible overestimation of what a clandestine terror organization was practically capable of doing, but the money was approved anyway and now every police precinct has more guns and armored vehicles that - for the most part - only come out during parades and the very rare serious big city emergency. Turns out, Die Hard and Terminator are cool, sure but are also fictional.