Science Fiction

U.S. Transportation SecretaryAttorney General Anthony FoxxLoretta Lynch Announces Unmanned AircraftGun Registration Requirement

New Task Force to Develop Recommendations by November 20

WASHINGTON – U.S. Transportation SecretaryAttorney General Anthony FoxxLoretta Lynch and FAA AdministratorATF Director Michael HuertaTodd Jones today announced the creation of a task force to develop recommendations for a registration process for Unmanned Aircraft Systems (UAS)Guns.

The task force will be composed of 25 to 30 diverse representatives from the UAS and manned aviationfirearms industry, the federal government, and other stakeholders.  The group will advise the Department on which aircraft should be exempt from registration due to a low safety risk, including toys and certain other small UASto limit any exemptions, as all guns are dangerous.  The task force also will explore options for a streamlined system that would make registration less burdensome for commercial UAS operatorshunters in rural areas.

The task force may make additional safety recommendations as it deems appropriate.  Secretary FoxxAG Lynch directed the group to deliver its report by Nov. 20.

“Registering unmanned aircraftguns will help build a culture of accountability and responsibility, especially with new users who have no experience operating in the U.S. aviation systemfirearms safely and responsibly,” FoxxLynch said.  “It will help protect public safety in the air and on the groundthe public and at home.”

Every day, the FAAATF receives reports of potentially unsafe UAS operationshandling of guns.  PilotPolice sightings of UASopen-carry guns doubled between 2014 and 2015.  The reports ranged from incidents at major sporting eventsschools and flights near manned aircraftmovie theaters, to interference with wildfirepolice operations.

“These reports signal a troubling trend,” HuertaJones said.  “Registration will help make sure that operatorsgun owners know the rules and remain accountable to the public for flying their unmanned aircrafthandling and maintaining their guns responsibly.  When they don’t fly safely, they’ll know there will be consequences.” 

While the task force does its work, the FAAATF will continue its aggressive education and outreach efforts, including the “Know Before You Fly”“Know Before You Shoot” campaign and “No Drone Zone”“No Gun Zone” initiatives with the nation’s busiest airportsschools.  The agency also will continue to take strong enforcement action against egregious violators. At the same time, it will continue working with stakeholders to improve safety to ensure further integration and innovation in this promising segment of aviationin the United States.

Secretary FoxxAG Lynch was joined by representatives from the following stakeholder groups:

• The Association for Unmanned Vehicle Systems InternationalThe National Rifle Association 
• Academy of Model AircraftCoalition of Gun Owners against the NRA
• Air Line Pilots AssociationSensible Republicans
• American Association of Airport ExecutivesSensible Democrats 
• Helicopter Association InternationalSensible Independents
• PrecisionHawkParents 
• AirMap/ Small UAV CoalitionTeachers 
• Consumer Electronics AssociationOrdinary Americans

To read statements in support of today’s announcement, please click here. 

For non-media inquiries, please email UASRegistration@faa.govGunRegistration@atf.gov.

Monday, October 19, 2015

- See more at: https://www.transportation.gov/briefing-room/us-transportation-secretary-anthony-foxx-announces-unmanned-aircraft-registration#sthash.8Jpy9SFD.dpufhttps://www.atf.gov/briefing-room/us-attorney-general-loretta-lynch-announces-gun-registration#sthash.8Jpy9SFD.dpuf


Not everything lines up of course.  Original here, and yes I do approve of the idea.

For the record, I do support Americans' right to own guns in general.  But I don't support absolutist interpretations of the second amendment, and don't think a gun-registry is a unreasonable violation of that right, anymore than background-checks, limits on the type of weaponry available*, or limits on cartridge-capacities.  Oh, and a tax on bullets.



* I know, AR-15's are cool.  So, in their way, are surface-to-air missiles.  But do you really need one to defend yourself ?

AJ+: Young Swedes React To U.S. Democratic Presidential Debate

C'mon AJ+, surely you could have found a few fascists even in Sverige ?

Wonders...What reason might Al Jazeera's backers have to encourage a Sanders presidency ?...Feel the Bern !

Bors on Ben Carson & Mass Shootings

SNL Nails It

Still have their moments after all these years

Keith Knight on NYPD Gun Battle

Had to look up the headline in question: http://www.huffingtonpost.com/entry/nypd-84-shots-brooklyn_55ec4b31e4b093be51bbb978

I Feel Much Safer Now

This was going into the next link-dump, but for two words...

US cinema chain Regal introduces bag search after attacks

One of America's largest cinema chains, Regal, is now searching bags of film-goers following several attacks on movie theatres across the US.

Regal's updated policy says it wants customers and staff "to feel comfortable and safe" in its cinemas.

It is not clear when it began, but reports say some people had their bags checked at some of the company's 570 cinemas this week.

Earlier this month, a man attacked cinema-goers in Tennessee with an axe.

He was shot dead by Nashville police, but no-one else was killed.

"Security issues have become a daily part of our lives in America," Regal Entertainment Group's admission policy now reads on the company's website. The company has not yet commented publicly on the new regulations.

"To ensure the safety of our guests and employees, backpacks and bags of any kind are subject to inspection prior to admission," it continues.

Last week, police were deployed outside the Regal cinema in Los Angeles ahead of the premiere of the film Straight Outta Compton.

Two weeks before the Nashville attack, two people were shot dead and nine others injured when a man attacked a cinema in Lafayette, Louisiana.

The change in policy also comes the same month Colorado theatre killer, James Holmes, was given a life sentence for killing 12 people and injuring 70 others at a screening of a Batman film in 2012.

Bag-searches & metal-detectors make me feel comfortable & safe, how about you ?  Far more so than having rational gun-laws & freely available treatment for mental health-issues in the twenty-first-fucking-century.  And machine-guns in airports, limits on liquids, removing shoes, patdowns & body-scans, cabin-doors that can't be forced even if it turns out your pilot is a suicidal nut determined on taking everyone with him into the side of a mountain...

Well at least we don't have to worry about nuclear weapons any more...except that our leaders seem determined to provoke a new cold war with Russia.  And then we have armed drones, and the weaponisation of space.  And who knows what new biological horrors our increasing understanding of the human genome will unleash in terms of new weapons, never mind all the conventional illnesses that we thought conquered till our commercialised use of antibiotics increased resistance across the board.

If only writers in the twentieth century had had the foresight to warn us against this sort of madness...

* And yes, that is the entire 'article'.  Sorry, Beeb, but if you will limit your entire article to a tweetable length, then it does become rather harder to excerpt.

Jade Helm 15

So, years of the GOP and the right-wing media in the United States fomenting irrational fears about the Federal government and Barack Obama, led some of their followers to actually believe that a routine training-exercise by the US military represented some sort of threat of invasion/illegal takeover by the Federal government.  To the degree that actual sitting Congressmen expressed concern publicly, and the actual Governor of Texas, ordered the State Guard to monitor the activity, being carried out by...the military of the United States of America.

Sounds crazy, doesn't it.  But what could actually go wrong ?

Other than shots being fired by two white guys in a pickup, at soldiers in training.

Or a bunch of anti-government nuts hoarding guns and making explosives, to use apparently in defence against said non-existent federal takeover.

And the exercise isn't even halfway over yet, so who knows what more might be in the pipeline ?

Not that the conclusion of the exercise in September with the US somehow miraculously not under martial law will do squat to ease the paranoia of the nuts in question (ie, a huge swath of the GOP's electorate).  'No', they'll say, 'what really happened is that we spooked 'em.  We showed Obama and those other UN New World Order-types that we knew what they was up to and they warn't gonna mess with Texas**.  You wanna come here, 'n' take our, guns, then suck on this !'  Followed by the explosive sound of a gunshot as one of them accidentally blows off their own head, or that of their dog, or their child.  But they died free, see, and that Commie Muslim Kenyan interloper didn't get 'em after all.


* I didn't intend to say a word on this idiocy, but it...just...won't...go away...And now we're getting close to people actually being killed over this nonsense.

** I know, I know, these two cases in question weren't in Texas...Oh that it were only the population of one state that had gone batshit-insane.

Ted Cruz Still a Pathetic Clown. A Reminder

One would think that with the billionaire-backers showering money on these assholes, that they could hire some writers with a modicum of wit, up the production-value, and produce YouTube-ready videos, that while still showing their utter lack of gravitas and desperation for attention, would be at least...a little funny.  Instead:

Hey, we need to make a 'viral' video for Ted so it'll get played by the mainstream news and remind Americans that he still exists.  I know: everyone likes bacon, right ?*, and Americans love them some guns.  So why don't we combine the three ?  Genius !

If he were running for class-president in a school in Katy, Texas, I'd be impressed with little fifteen-year-old Rafael's efforts in the Audio/Visual Club.  But he's not.

* Bacon is over-rated as fuck in my opinion.

The WaPo Maps Mass Shootings & Police Killings in the US

Last line of the article in the Washington Post:

What's missing from this series, of course, is a map of all of the shooting incidents that don't involve police and affected one to three people. That map, we suspect, would show an indistinguishable red blot on the United States.

Speaking of which, that last image does remind me of something...

Population-Density of the United States

Oh yeah.  Where there are people in the United States, cops are bound to be there killing them.

Bonus link for the 'guns make me safe' crowd: Gunfight or Flee: New Study Finds No Advantages to Using a Firearm in Self-Defense Situations

Obama Late to the Party on Gun-Control ?

Here's Piers Morgan on Barack Obama's 'frustration' with his failure to pass 'sufficient common-sense gun-safety-laws.'

Well, I just think it's too little, too late.  Y'know, the president's been in office now, er nearly eight years; He's had plenty of time to prioritise gun-violence in America, and it's only very recently that we've heard him talk this way.

Really ?  Seems to me that the president has been out there time and time again, after one mass shooting after another, decrying gun-violence, and urging Congress to work with him across party-lines, only for the Republicans (and some Democrats) in Congress to consistently block any efforts at gun-control.

But, perhaps not quite, memory being what it is after all.  Looking over a review the Guardian did on Obama's responses to mass-shooting on his watch, tells a slightly different story, with Obama only really pushing for action in the last two or three years.  So Piers may have a point after all.

---

As for what it will take for actual meaningful change in US gun-laws ?  Well probably a complete sweep of the Congress for one, on such a scale, that will only come about when the underlying culture changes.  And can we hope for such change as the millennials take over ?  Well...don't count on it.

Here's one more poll-result, I just have to include because it's so utterly bonkers.

Story after story in the media of gun-owners accidentally shooting themselves or their loved ones, of children accessing guns and blowing their brains out.  Never mind the increased risk of suicide.  But Americans actually believe having a gun in the house increases their safety.  This is the kind of crazy that decades of propaganda from the NRA has wrought, and with which Barack Obama has to battle.

Republican Presidential Candidates with Guns

Was actually looking for Bobby Jindal's campaign-logo, when this fun family-foto caught my eye.

Bobby & Supriya Jolly Jindal

Which got me wondering about the other Republican candidates posing for pictures with guns.

Rick Santorum

Rick Perry

Marco Rubio

Mike Huckabee

Ted Cruz (also seen in video at top with machine-gun)

Rand Paul

Lindsey Graham

Scott Walker

Worth mentioning of course that many of those above represent or hail from Southern and more rural states.  Where hunting is popular.  Which is why in half or more of the pictures, the weapons in question are...assault rifles.

Not featured above: Jeb Bush, Carly Fiorina, John Kasich, Ben Carson, George Pataki, and Donald Trump.

Jim Jefferies on America's Gun Culture

There is one argument, and one argument alone for having a gun, and this is the argument: 'Fuck off !  I like guns.'  It's not the best argument, but it's all you've got.  And there's nothing wrong with it.  There's nothing wrong with saying 'I like something, don't take it away from me', but don't give me this other bullshit.  The main one is 'I need it for protection.  I need to protect me, I need to protect my family.'  Really ?  Is that why they're called assault-rifles ?  Is it ?

Best takedown I've ever seen of America's gun-culture, by a non-American, natch., but then again I haven't really sought out such things.  Wonder if Carlin had anything to say on the subject...

Who knew Wayne LaPierre was around that far back ?


Update: Replaced the YouTube link.  Not sure if the new video is the same length as the old one.  Replacing it 'cos according to the YT, the old video was 'removed as a violation of YouTube's policy against spam, scams, and commercially deceptive content.'  No idea, what the hell that means or why...

See America Has to be Exceptional No Matter What, Whether That is in a Good Way or a Bad

By CHRISTOPHER BODEEN, Associated Press

BEIJING (AP) — Often the target of U.S. human rights accusations, China wasted little time returning such charges following the shooting at a historic black church in South Carolina that left nine people dead. Elsewhere around the world, the attack renewed perceptions that Americans have too many guns and have yet to overcome racial tensions.

Some said the attack reinforced their reservations about personal security in the U.S. — particularly as a non-white foreigner — while others said they'd still feel safe if they were to visit.

Especially in Australia and northeast Asia, where firearms are strictly controlled and gun violence almost unheard of, many were baffled by the determination among many Americans to own guns despite repeated mass shootings, such as the 2012 tragedy at Sandy Hook Elementary School in Newtown, Connecticut, where a gunman killed 20 children and six adults.

"We don't understand America's need for guns," said Philip Alpers, director of the University of Sydney's GunPolicy.org project that compares gun laws across the world. "It is very puzzling for non-Americans."

A frontier nation like the U.S., Australia had a similar attitude toward firearms prior to a 1996 mass shooting that killed 35. Soon after, tight restrictions on gun ownership were imposed and no such incidents have been reported since.

A similar effect has been seen elsewhere.

"The USA is completely out of step with the rest of the world. We've tightened our gun laws and have seen a reduction," said Claire Taylor, the director of media and public relations at Gun Free South Africa.

Ahmad Syafi'i Maarif, a prominent Indonesian intellectual and former leader of Muhammadiyah, one of the country's largest Muslim organizations, said the church shooting shocked many.

"People all over the world believed that racism had gone from the U.S. when Barack Obama was elected to lead the superpower, twice," he said. "But the Charleston shooting has reminded us that in fact, the seeds of racism still remain and were embedded in the hearts of small communities there, and can explode at any time, like a terrorist act by an individual."

A 21-year-old white man, Dylann Storm Roof, now faces nine counts of murder for the South Carolina shooting. An acquaintance said Roof had complained that "blacks were taking over the world."

Many places around the world struggle with racism and prejudice against outsiders, but mass shootings in the U.S., where the Constitution's second amendment protects the right to keep and bear arms, often receive widespread global attention.

Probably, no-one's more disturbed by or frustrated by the American obsession with guns and flat-out denial of continuing racism (shout-out for Chief Justice John Roberts ! *) than...the slight minority sane population of Americans.  Unfortunately, the history & the culture of said nation seems to have encouraged or attracted the development of an above-normal percentage of out-and-out lunatics in the population.

And as for the thing about the US being out of step with the rest of the world, the thing you have to understand, is that this is a point of pride in the US, where obsession with national greatness and inherent national superiority has turned the international and indeed consensus generally into something inherently suspicious.

One case in point being, the US' pride in being just one of three nations still refusing adoption of the metric system.  The US had pledged to do so, and presumably originally intended in fact to someday so do, but at some point, as it dragged its feet on and on, rather than let itself feel any guilt or sense of failure over the continuing delays over adopting Metric, politicians instead seized on the outlier status of the US as a point of pride, and started to turn what was once accepted consensus over international standards into an absurd bogeyman-style conspiracy.

Hence, here we are in the year 2015, such that when a Democratic candidate for the presidency says this:

Let's be bold -- let's join the rest of the world and go metric," he said during his launch. He clarified during a question-and-answer session after that it would be a "symbolic integration" meant to show goodwill to the world.

He acknowledged that shifting to the metric system could cost the U.S., but that "the economic benefits that would come in would surpass those costs of putting up new signs and the like."

The response of one of his Republican candidates for the same office is inevitably this:

Republican Louisiana Gov. Bobby Jindal has already incorporated it into an attack. In an email to POLITICO, his spokesman Michael Reed said Chafee is a “Typical Democrat — wants to make America more European. Governor Jindal would rather make the world more American.”

Because the entire rest-of-the-world would benefit so much from replacing something as easily understandable and easily calculated as a base-ten system of measurement with something from the Middle Ages based around such things at the size of a particular monarch's foot or hand !

The country is run, to the shame of its sane residents, by a bunch of childish extremists.  The sort of people who, in the wake of a historically black church being shot up by an evident white-supremacist extremist racist (the event itself in the wake of so many other acts of mass-shootings and so many other demonstrations of racial violence), argue that we must not make the event 'about race', and that those who want to bring discussions of gun-control into the debate are radical demagogues, and who insist that, really, the asshole was targeting Christians, not blacks.

Who did so, despite his own words to a survivor of the attack, explicitly outlining his motivations, and his desire to start a race-war.  Some of whom, will no doubt continue to do so, even given the recent discovery of an online manifesto making his violent racist aims and motivations even more explicit.

The United States' problem is perhaps its own success.  A nation rich and powerful for much of its short history, and so rich and powerful since the end of the Second World War that it has come to see itself as beyond criticism, as beyond the purview of mere mortals.  The US is/has long been suffering from a sort of God-complex.  Rather than embracing criticism, and learning from its mistakes, the tendency is to demonise the critics, and to celebrate even its own failings (such as say the dismal state of healthcare in America) as successes (it's a sign of how free we how we compared to you Euro-commies !).  Live free, die young and poor; But opportunity abounds; You could have been rich and successful...theoretically...

Perhaps demographic changes will one day reduce the ageing lunatic fringe to enough of a minority that the non-maniacs can take over the asylum.  The numbers are promising.  Then again, the lunatics may just burn down the asylum before that could/in order that that never be allowed to...happen.

Especially as the tool of choice in burning down this particular asylum would likely be not lighters, but cheap, readily-available, and hugely (especially, thanks to the NRA, since the inauguration of a certain black president) stockpiled bullets.


* As always, Thanks Harriet Miers !

Newsflash: US Cops Kill...a Lot

I highly doubt this is a new statistic, but it bears repeating.

U.S. Cops Kill more People on an Average Day than U.K. Police do in a Year

The difference between law enforcement in the United States and in Britain is startling when it comes to the number of fatal police shootings.

A recent investigation by The Washington Post found that American police shot and killed an average of more than two people a day so far in 2015. The average was based on 385 fatal shootings by cops in the first five months of this year.

By contrast, British police fatally shot less than one person a year. In fact, British police have used firearms to kill only two people in the past three years.

Police officers in the United Kingdom, known as bobbies, operate in a much different climate and culture than do police in America, the Post’s Griffe Witte noted. Britain has banned handguns and assault rifles among its populace, whereas U.S. citizens are generally able to purchase a wide variety of pistols and rifles legally.

Unlike American cops, most British police officers patrol their streets armed with no more than batons and pepper spray. The elite police who do carry guns, as the study shows, almost never use them.

“But there are also enough similarities that the British model carries special relevance,” Witte wrote. “Like the United States, Britain is large, urbanized, democratic and diverse. Police have to reckon with gang violence, organized crime and Islamist extremists, all amid persistent allegations that they unfairly target minority communities.”

And while “few here would argue that the United States should adopt Britain’s nearly firearms-free approach,” Witte added, British officers and commanders “say they hope that some of their strategies and practices can be translated across the Atlantic” to the U.S.

One example: Bobbies are trained “to back away from any situation that might otherwise escalate and to not feel that they have to ‘win’ every confrontation with suspects.”

'Bobbies', huh ?  Yeah, that's what they're called these days.


* Link via Skippy

Just Madness Everywhere

2015, and we still seemingly have racially motivated attacks on historically black churches in the Southern United States. Wonder what the cooling-off-period is between a shooting and the inevitable right-wing response that it all could have been prevented if only everyone were armed.  Elementary Schools, Universities...why not Churches ?  Arm the congregation and clergy alike.

Elsewhere in the news, Hong Kong still seemingly hasn't come to terms with the consequences of returning to mainland-rule and the fact that the PRC never had any intention whatsoever of allowing actual democracy to prevail under its rule, even in its special administrative regions,...NATO is continuing its lunatic tit-for-tat escalation with Russia by acting out war-games off the coast of Kaliningrad,...and bankers Goldman Sachs are attempting to show how humane they are and how great their concern for their staffinterns desperate for any foothold on the jobs-ladder to pay off student-debt, by insisting that they only work a maximum seventeen-hour workday.

And then there's this:

The increasingly tense relationship between the United States and Russia might be about to face a new challenge: a Russian investigation into American moon landings.

In an op-ed published by Russian newspaper Izvestia, Vladimir Markin, a spokesman for the government's official Investigative Committee, argued that such an investigation could reveal new insights into the historical space journeys.

According to a translation by the Moscow Times, Markin would support an inquiry into the disappearance of original footage from the first moon landing in 1969 and the whereabouts of lunar rock, which was brought back to Earth during several missions.

“We are not contending that they did not fly [to the moon], and simply made a film about it. But all of these scientific — or perhaps cultural — artifacts are part of the legacy of humanity, and their disappearance without a trace is our common loss. An investigation will reveal what happened,” Markin wrote, according to the Moscow Times translation.

Er, what, why ?.

So, why is Investigative Committee member Markin speculating about conspiracy theories surrounding US moon landings that happened decades ago? In his op-ed, the Russian official also emphasized that “US authorities had crossed a line by launching a large-scale corruption probe targeting nine Fifa officials,” according to the Moscow Times.

We're descending to this level of pettiness in our new cold war already ?

Well, why ever not ?  The US hadn't even started its war in Iraq (you know the one I mean, don't quibble) before it was going after its own erstwhile allies with that 'freedom fries' & 'old Europe' nonsense.  This is how we do geopolitics in the twenty-first century apparently.  The grownups left the game long ago.

On Police Shootings

US police kill more than two people a day, report suggests

Data collected by the Washington Post newspaper suggests that the number of people shot by US police is twice as high as official figures claim.
The paper said that during the first five months of this year, 385 people - more than two a day - were killed.
The number of black people was disproportionately high among the victims, especially unarmed ones.

Well, that's not really surprising.  Probably even more than that.

A national debate is raging about police use of deadly force, especially against minorities. To understand why and how often these shootings occur, The Washington Post is compiling a database of every fatal shooting by police in 2015, as well as of every officer killed by gunfire in the line of duty.

Do we have to pretend there's some mysterious secret here ?  The cops are trained to behave in a certain way, are encouraged to see every civilian on the street as a potential threat, especially since the era of the 'War on Drugs' and then the 'War on Terror.'  They are heavily armed, and have access to military-grade firearms.  They often wear body-armour.  Their departments obtain armoured vehicles scarcely distinguishable from tanks, along with all kinds of ex-military equipment via generous federal programmes.  The cops themselves are sometimes scarcely distinguishable from soldiers, even wearing camouflage uniforms.  And they are trained to value their own safety over that of those they supposedly serve.  And they are human.

Fear is the strongest emotion in the human brain.  And humans are hard-wired to distinguish between in-groups and out-groups, to see out-groups as a potential threat.  Our fears are of course often deeply irrational, and rooted in internal prejudices, often including, partly as a result of our inherent wiring, racism.  But generally, we are given to fear The Other.  (A fear frequently manipulated by the political classes, but that's another subject).  The Other may have a different skin-colour, may be of a different class, may wear different clothing, may suffer from a mental illness, may speak with a different accent, may have a slightly different form of worship.  In a way, it doesn't matter.  They are Other, and we fear them, even when we know our fears are irrational.

Just about everyone knows this experience, and probably from both sides.  That homeless guy mumbling to himself looks a little suspect.  Better step over to the other side of the street.  Every person of colour in America has been on the receiving end, probably for most of their lives.  Everyone who in any way looks or sounds a little different from their peers has experienced it.  Teenagers experience it from their elders.  Every man at some point has probably experienced it, from women understandably wary of physical assault or rape at the hands of men, not knowing who that guy on the subway or walking in the park is, what kind of person he might be.  Ninety-nine percent of the time, the imagined threat is non-existent.  But it could be so very real.

Of course, the majority of cops aren't women.  And the majority aren't from minority racial groups.  They're mostly white men, often policing communities in which they don't themselves live.  On foreign turf.  On what, with their increasingly military-style training they eventually come to see as a battlefield.  And the primary tool with which they are equipped as they do their rounds is a gun.  Not on a rack back at the precinct.  Not a gun securely stowed away in the patrol-car.  A gun strapped to their hip.  Ready at hand for all eventualities.

And then they come into contact with The Other.  Maybe they were called to the scene.  Maybe they were on patrol.  But there he or she is.  The possibly dangerous drug-addict or homeless person.  The woman with the scary tattoos.  The possibly Middle-Eastern-looking (quick, they do wear turbans over there right ?) guy speaking in a foreign language.  The sixteen-year-old black kid who somehow becomes magnified in the cop's imagination into a hulking monster.  Senses on high-alert, pulse racing, hand on hip...  Wait, is he reaching for ?...<BAM>  He was just reaching for his driver's licence ?  Too late.  He's dead.  Shit.  Better get the story straight.  Call it in.  'Shots fired.'  What will you tell the interviewing panel ?

Police are authorized to use deadly force only when they fear for their lives or the lives of others. So far, just three of the 385 fatal shootings have resulted in an officer being charged with a crime — less than 1 percent.

Well, it doesn't really matter.  You're not going to be charged.  Your fellow officers may even help cover up evidence if it keeps you out of trouble.  And why not ?  You were just doing your job.  Following training.  What if he had a knife ?  He could have been on me in an instant.  Twenty-one foot rule, remember.  Got to get home safe at the end of the day.  And you were afraid.