So THAT's the real name of georgeingeorgetown...
Seriously, he's been making a fool of himself for MONTHS talking about self-defense and deadly force and completely missing the important distinction that there is a difference between force that can cause death and deadly force, and between an object you could kill someone with and a deadly weapon.

Kind of in line with that celebrity asshole Ben Stein saying Michael Brown was "armed with his incredibly strong, scary self" before lamenting the dearth of lynchings of black people today.

http://talkingpointsmemo.com/livewire/be…

Also, since Dan Savage invented the t-shirt, he no doubt is the foremost expert on using the t-shirt as a deadly weapon.

You can not only strangle a person with a t-shirt, but also freeze a wet one and using it as a club or a razor, depending on how you freeze it.

Whenever there's a mass shooting and people talk about even mild gun control, the pro-ammo crowd always say something like, "You can kill someone with a frying pan! Should we ban frying pans? No! Because that would be ridiculous!"

But now they are saying, "Well, of course he was murdered! He had a deadly frying pan!"

So if Dan takes his shirt off, we should all run away and hide? Good to know.

He's an idiot, but the skateboard note did remind me of an unrelated sensationalistic pet peeve: Every time a skateboard is used to bludgeon someone, the suspect is referred to as a "skater," but a bat wielding maniac has never been labeled a "baseball player" by reporters. Shenanigans, I tell you.

Someone could be stabbed to death with one of my ribs. I'm made up entirely of atoms. I'm a potential WMD! Holy shit! I'd better go turn myself in. I'm a deadly weapon top to tail! Damn I'm dangerous.

Neale Frothingham lives in South Seattle near me. He constantly posts similar things to NextDoor and the local Facebook groups. I (and many others) have him blocked or muted. He is awful.

@4,

Dan may have been able to do that in his spry, younger days. But now that he's in his early 40's, I fear he may be slowing down some.

@7 The bat wielding maniac isn't a "baseball player"; (s)he's a "batter".

@10

Half the population is in their mid-40s and above; Dan can still murder 3,000,000,000 people with his t-shirt.

T shirt on or off, with the work he's put in the last decade or so Dan has become very well-armed indeed.

He was saddled with the name Neale Frothingham, he's bound to be a little disgruntled. And he had to learn a LOT of letters really early to be able to write that name, no wonder long-winded ass-hattery has become his favorite passtime, gotta keep using all those letters. How's THAT for some "rhetorical fallacy"!

Somebody tried to argue that displaying a firearm is no more threatening than smiling, because teeth can be lethal. I pointed out he probably shouldn't be allowed to own guns because he lacks the threat assessment capacity of a five year old.

@11 - Fair enough.

While Mr. Frothingham's tone may be pedantic and off-putting, I fail to see where he is wrong. When that Native American woodcarver was shot by Seattle police, was his knife a deadly weapon? No. Could it have been, in another context? Yes. When a man was bludgeoned to death in the U District with a skateboard, was it a deadly weapon? Obviously. When your kid is riding one in the park? Probably not.

I have no love for police in general, nor do I trust them at all. They frequently commit horrific acts, and always cover up for each other. Always. They are trained to lie. But as Mr. Frothingham said, "What we don’t know in Olympia is the manner of use of the suspect’s skateboard or skateboards toward that officer and we are not likely to definitively know." Yet many of my fellow Olympia progressives have been eager to assume the worst (or perhaps pretend to assume the worst, to score political points in the ongoing struggle to rein in the police). I'm profoundly uncomfortable with this.

Barring any witnesses emerging, the best that we can expect to come out of this tragedy is for the City of Olympia to hurry up, quit studying/stalling, and finally invest in body cams for the police. A functioning and effective civilian review board is also a possibility. Maybe even a rethinking of how police are trained to respond to potential threats, though it's unlikely that little ol' Olympia will be in the vanguard of redefining best practices for policing, all by its lonesome.

But "justice," when it's entirely one cop's word against two alleged shoplifters? Frankly, it's unlikely we'll even know what justice is in this situation.

#18, Georgeingeorgetown was trying to say that the beer can thrown while the shoplifters in Oly were fleeing was a deadly weapon. That extremism is the type that Frothingham is espousing in his diatribe. The issue isn't about edge cases like skateboards. It is about the ludicrous cases like beer cans or books.

God, this guy is an ass clown. He floods the Columbia City and Rainier Beach Facebook pages with his bullshit. Any little police call / event, he acts like some self-imposed police reporter and does nothing but fuel the issues instead of being a positive part of the community. Glad to see I'm not alone in what I think of this jackass.