A Car Is Definitely a Deadly Weapon

After reading The Times story, “Police Shoot Unarmed Suspect” (March 30), I have to question your grasp on reality. A car occupied by two suspects -- whom a woman had just identified as the men who robbed her -- flees. When cornered, the driver backs up his car toward police officers. They reasonably believed their lives may be in danger and shot him. Good police work, end of story.

Any assertion that the suspect was unarmed is ludicrous. Hitting someone with a car is assault with a deadly weapon.

What would you have the officers do, allow themselves to be run over? Subdue the men with Nerf bats and interview them as to their intentions?

The Los Angeles Times’ anti-police bias is flapping in the breeze for everyone to see. Unarmed suspect, indeed.

Kevin M. Grable

Studio City

*

The defining issue at stake is whether or not a Los Angeles police officer can be precluded by political edict from the private constitutional right to use lethal force in defending oneself from the direct and obviously deadly intentions of criminals to use cars as weapons.

Neither political policy nor avoidance training can strip away the right to defend oneself. Every officer as a private citizen takes into the streets his or her own constitutional right and duty to do so. The rest is simply ignorant and hollow activist rhetoric meant to falsely appease the unknowing and undisciplined for their own inept sociologic condition.

Factually, but constitutionally silly, the only way to preclude officers from firing at suspects who use cars as weapons is to preclude officers from either chasing or attempting to arrest suspects who are in cars.

Richard M. Holbrook

Sylmar

*

I would consider a two-ton automobile a pretty good weapon. Shame on you.

Bill Simpson

Rancho Palos Verdes