Archive for January 16th, 2004
Two Fort Collins police officers were cleared of any charges in a shooting which occurred last week. In the case, the suspect threatened the officers, saying that he had a gun. “[Officer] Spaulding then fired two rounds and [Officer] Ivers fired another shot as the suspect approached them, pretending to point a gun at them…. The suspect was hit once in the abdomen. The officers then determined that Evans did not have a weapon.”
The problem here isn’t so much that the officers shot an unarmed man. In the same situation, I might’ve pulled the trigger, too. The problem is that the default training for an officer is to use a gun. If the officers had had tazers or some other non-lethal weapon, they could’ve just as effectively neutralized the suspect without such grave circumstances.
One of the worst things the Bush administration has done over the past three years is the deconstruction of the Environmental Protection Agency. The EPA has gone from defending the environment to actively participating in the destruction of our environment. Things got bad enough that Christie Todd Whitman - not the world’s most ardent environmentalist - resigned as head of the EPA due to the administration’s contempt for the environment.
An article on Wired shows just how far the EPA has sunk. The EPA is prepared to accept new guidelines created by a pesticide and chemical company organization. There are some truly scary changes being suggested: “The draft recommends… not allowing the EPA to act until it has conclusive proof that an agent harms a species. Also, if a chemical doesn’t directly kill a species but only harms its ability to survive, the EPA would not act, according to documents obtained by Earthjustice.”
