Hot take, but I think it’s within the realm of reason that the officer did mean to go for their tazer but was confused in the heat of the moment. This reaffirms my belief that an armed police force so willing to meet escalation with escalation mostly serves to make tense situations worse.

If you’re looking for a libertarian view to latch onto here, consider that I (and any criminal not sentenced to death) have a constitutionally guaranteed right to life. The idea that some officer of the state can just ride on up to you, shoot you, and consider it justified because you said something provocative or moved a certain way flies in the face of the whole thing. We should expect people in such positions to do everything possible to prevent death, not sanction it as our default position.

If anything, we should be asking the police to assume way more risk (pay them more, but end qualified immunity), and basically make the bar so high that it would extremely hard for any state actors to ever justify killing a citizen. Perhaps in most cases, they wouldn’t even possess the means because ideally the expectation that a police officer doesn’t kill would be reinforced by not having them carry a killing device at all times. The current way things are structured, no wonder this shit happens constantly.