A 22-year-old man who was shot dead by Vancouver police this week was an Oregon Army National Guard soldier who recently had returned from a yearlong deployment to Iraq.
Spc. Nikkolas W. Lookabill was carrying a handgun, acting in a threatening manner and refusing to follow police orders when three officers fired at him early Tuesday, said Kim Kapp, a police spokeswoman. Vancouver police did not release more specifics about what spurred officers to open fire.
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Expect more stories like this. Dealing with the PTSD of Vietnam veterans will have been a cakewalk compared to the fallout that our adventures in Afghanistan and Iraq will produce over the next 10-20 years, from a medical, psychological, and social welfare perspective. It’s going to be a shitstorm.
I don’t care how fucked-up you are, you’ve got to know that pointing a gun at a cop will get you killed faster than just about anything. A sad story, especially because it’s so pointless.
7 killed by WA police in 3 weeks. WTF?
“Some call me half-retarded, but I like to make people laugh.” – from his MySpace page.
@2 Every question why that is? Has the system won when people don’t even question that police can kill you on sight?
Its funny how many people get shot by cops in their own houses during raids, and how police out of uniform frequently shoot people and get away with it for the same reason.
I certainly don’t question people pointing guns at cops getting killed. I doubt very many other people have a problem with it either.
@2, surely you should know that the guy who was killed was plainly aware of that fact.
What we’re seeing is in large part a great increase in damaged and desperate people on the street. Call it “suicide by cop” or just lost people with blown fuses, but this is what our economic catastrophe and decade of pointless war have wrought.
@5, are you suggesting that cops SHOULDN’T shoot people who point guns at them? That’s ridiculous. There is no better example of a situation when deadly force is not only justified but mandatory. Very few people get shot in their homes during raids, or by officers out of uniform, actually, considering.
The problem is, we’ll never know what was running through this poor guys head prior to being shot down. Maybe he was in a dissociative state and thought the cops were insurgents trying to blow him up. Or maybe he was indeed suicidal. Or maybe he really was intentionally up to no good. The police did exactly what they are trained to do, and rightly so. But now law enforcement has to cope with the possibilty of taking down fellow countrymen who served in a pointless war and are irrevocably damaged. Just call it another layer of collateral damage. As Fnarf said, times are already desperate and fearful enough, now tack on PTSD to that and we have a real fucking mess on our hands. This is a topic that I spend a great deal of time contemplating, and the ramifications worry me greatly.
@7 http://www.google.com/search?-8&q=shot+d…
http://www.google.com/search?-&q=out+of+…
man that was hard.
@2: Where did it say he was “pointing a gun at a cop”? The article merely states he was “carrying”. I would expect that if he had been pointing his gun at the officer, the policy dept. would’ve made that very clear in their report. As it is, we can’t even be sure the officer knew Lookabill was carrying before he killed him.
@10, the article clearly says”carrying a handgun, acting in a threatening manner and refusing to follow police orders.”
How would pointing be required? If he a) put down the gun, b) ceased to act in a threatening manner and/or c) began following police orders, the cops would not have fired. And because Canadians do not habitually carry guns, cops do not habitually assume that they are. Without knowledge that a gun was involved their own guns would not have been drawn. (We might kill people with excessive use of tasers, but not guns).
In the US, cops shoot on suspicion that a gun is involved; in Canada, a little more effort is required – but in both countries, there are legitimate reasons for firing in any situation in which lives are at risk. Specifically, BECAUSE LIVES ARE AT RISK.
So, @2, you can question why US cops find it so easy to shoot and/or get away with shooting, but this is not an example of that. This is a man, in public, “carrying a handgun, acting in a threatening manner and refusing to follow police orders.” Clear?
As for it being suicide by cop and/or a result of PTSD – sadly, both are likely to be true. But that doesn’t change the basic fact that this man put others’ lives at risk and needed to be stopped.
And if you think the gun HAS to be pointed at someone in order to be a risk – well, that just proves you’re American. Bullets kill people through walls, trees, bushes and all kinds of other visual barriers where the shooter can’t even see that someone is there, let alone form an intent to shoot them. Even shooting straight up can kill – because that little ball of lead has just as much kinetic energy coming down as it had going up – and since the upward trajectory is highly unlikely to be precisely (or even close to) 90 degrees vertical, the person least likely to get hit is the shooter.