Thursday, May 08, 2008

"Shoot to kill"

I hate this phrase, it is always misused by newspapers and the Telegraph has managed to use it in the headline of the story of the shooting of Mark Saunders by police.

Just to be clear, everyone who is trained to shoot in Armed services or police is trained that if you are going to shoot you shoot to kill. None of the Jack Bauer crap of trying to "wing" someone so you can question them, you aim for a kill so they can't do any more damage.

Sometime the press really mean shot on sight, often in stories about IRA terrorists, but as far as I am aware there has never been such a policy.

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