I'm sure that most cops have good reasons for shooting the people they shoot. For the most part, they're afraid the other person is going to kill them. If you take the time to read accounts of most police shootings, it's easy to see that most of the time, the shootings were in self defense.

But that's not good enough, just as self-defense is not good enough reason to justify allowing civilians to carry guns for self-defense.

Well-trained police officers can and should be able to de-escalate almost any situation before it gets to the shooting stage. That may seem a lot to demand, but I think we have a right to demand that of our law enforcement officers. I did background investigations on hundreds of law enforcement officers in my thirty years as a government investigator. The good ones, never had to draw a gun.

-Joe-