Nor does even a clear hit always render the wounded person harmless. When your life is on the line, you keep on firing until you are damn sure it is safe to stop.

Only afterwards does anybody count how many shots were fired. That is when the editorial office heroes give vent to their righteous indignation and their ignorant assumption that better "training" or better "rules" can solve the problem.

Such people seem to have no sense of the tragedy of the human condition, that there are times when decisions have to be made and acted upon immediately, whether or not we know as much as we would like to know or can carry out our decisions as perfectly as we wish we could.

People who are full of excuses for criminals-- bad childhood, unemployment, unfair world-- sit in the safety and comfort of their editorial offices and presume policemen to be guilty until proved innocent.

And they concoct clever headlines about killing an "unarmed" person, as if someone trying to run you over with a car poses no danger.

Where the person killed is black, as in the present case, that settles it, as far as the politically correct commentators are concerned, even though two of the three policemen who shot him are also black.

Not only do the people who put their lives on the line to protect the rest of us deserve better, we all deserve better than to have our own security undermined by those who undermine law enforcement.

The police themselves can back off on law enforcement when irresponsible charges can ruin their careers and their lives. No one pays a higher price for that than low-income minority communities where crime flourishes.