That said, I'd encourage everybody with a generalized "Fuck the police!" mentality to watch this, and try to be objective.
I've never had an officer treat me this well during a traffic stop. The only time I've seen an officer be this cordial with anyone during a stop was letting a friend know that his taillight was out.
In this case, officer Adams was dealing with a wrong-way driver (wrong-way drivers kill more people than rifles every year, by the way), and he's calm.
Officer Adams keeps his cool even as she refuses to roll down her window. He's calm during his questioning even when she doesn't respond. He never mentions a citation. To me, everything seems to indicate that officer Adams was approaching the situation with the thought in mind that she was simply turned around, and he would just get her pointed in the right direction. He asks if she needs an ambulance. Even when he asks if she's been drinking, his tone isn't that of an interrogator; and, he quickly follows the inquiry by saying that she doesn't look like she had been drinking.
Then, she puts him into an impossible situation by pulling a gun on him. He responded the only way he could.
This seems like a plausible suicide by cop situation. I don't know. I know that this woman was behaving strangely the entire time. The officer didn't escalate at all -- she did.
I know that they say to never read the comments; but, I had to see if anybody had a good reason to say that officer Adams wasn't justified.
Surely enough, most of them just declared him a murderer without backing it up.
Some made bizarre comments about how officer Adams should have let her explain why she had the gun.
Ummm, no. She'd barely said a word to him during the entire encounter. Now she pulls a gun and that's when Adams is supposed to expect a conversation?
Another odd statement was made on Nate the Lawyer's page wherein someone said that maybe her registration was next to her gun.
Two big problems with that: 1) Adams hadn't asked for her registration; 2) if you're stupid enough to drive with your gun in the way of your vehicle registration, ya get what's coming to you. I drive with my gun on my person and my license and registration in plain view specifically for this kind of a situation.
Finally, people are falling back on the Monday Morning Quarterback position that Adams acted too hastily. I'm absolutely sure that all of these people would have taken the perfect amount of time if they had been in Adams' shoes (note the sarcasm).
The reality is that, even when the world does finally become sane, and we get rid of governments, and all of the roads are private, we're still gonna have people who are tasked with keeping those roads profitable. A component of that is keeping them safe and moving. Fixing systems will never fix mental illness or broken people.
Mr. Adams deserves nothing but our sympathy. The antipathy shown to him, seemingly exclusively from the left, is troubling.
He clearly had no desire to cause this woman any harm. He definitely didn't want to shoot her. There was no malice intent. Therefore, if you think that murder is even on the table here, you're a stupid person.
Sometimes, cops have to deal with this shit. The only way I could broadly hate cops the way leftists tend to nowadays would be if I were narcissistic enough to think that you need to agree with me to be a good person. I'm not a leftist; so, that level of narcissism isn't achievable for me.
But, I guess a could be wrong. If you've got anything better than, "I'm Captain Hindsight, and this is what he should have done." have at me.