Quote:
Originally Posted by Rathji
Unless I have mis-understood his posts, he thinks if he was x meters away while charging a cop with a knife and baseball bat then it was fine, but if he was x+y meters away then it wasn't.
Which is a reasonable stance, especially if the "y" you are thinking about is 20 meters or something. Does it change anything? Not really, unless the 3-4 seconds it takes to cover that 20 m would make all the difference in the world. I don't recall it saying the distance, but I highly doubt the cop shot a kid from any further than 5-10m, just because of the extreme difficulty of such a feat.
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There use to be a somewhat "older" rule regarding edged weapons, called the 21 foot rule, which essentially stated that an average person, running at a cop with an edged weapon, would mean that the cop would need 21 feet of distance between himself and the subject to assess the threat, draw his firearm, fire shots, and stop the threat. Anything closer than that 21 feet would mean that the offender could possibly land a slash/stab at the officer.
That being said, the 21 foot rule has definitely been discussed a lot in law enforcement circles and whether or not it still applies, due to many factors. The most recent article I could find was
here, which is from ForceScience.org, a really good website based on law enforcement use of force and the science behind it.