A Columbus, Ohio, cop shooting at a dog missed and shot a 4-year-old girl this afternoon. The girl reportedly is in stable condition. (Click here for story)
Dog owners typically are very attached to their animals, and there have been a number of controversial police shootings of people’s pets. In one of the most notorious incidents, shown in the hideous video below (warning: graphic images), a cop shot a loose Rottweiler that attacked him. The dog’s owner is suing the city of Hawthorne, California, over this incident. A similar suit is pending against Salt Lake City police for entering a yard to search for a lost child and shooting the homeowner’s dog.
In today’s incident, the cop apparently felt threatened by the dog, although the news report doesn’t explain why, but apparently wasn’t injured by the dog even though he missed when shooting at it. This suggests the dog wasn’t much of a threat and didn’t have to be killed.
This isn’t the first time a cop’s effort to shoot a dog has gone awry. In July 2014, a Georgia cop shooting at a dog wounded a 10-year-old boy; in January 2015, an Iowa cop shooting at a dog killed a 34-year-old woman. These incidents are all part and parcel of a tendency for American cops to reach for their guns on minor or no provocation. Police are just too damned trigger-happy, because our culture allows it, and that needs to change across the board.