Bloomberg:
Icelandic police shot dead a man who refused to stop firing at them with a shotgun in the capital of Reykjavik earlier today — and then they apologized. It was the first time that anyone in the country was killed by police gunfire.
“The police regret this incident and wishes to extend its condolences to the man’s family,” said national police chief Haraldur Johannessen.
Details of the event have yet to emerge, but this much is clear: Iceland is a weird place.
Sad that you have to describe such a peaceful country as “weird”.
I lived in Iceland for 2 years. 35mph of wind every day and almost no sunshine would make anyone “weird”.
I wouldn’t apologize to the family of someone who was trying to kill me. So maybe the entire country is “weird”, but that apology by the police chief is very odd.
I find it weird that Bloomberg used such terminology to describe Iceland as a whole, but it is indeed weird that the police chief apologized publicly for it as if it were some sort of a mishap on his part. He exhausted every means available to him to stop the madman and as a last resort he had to take the shot. It’d be nice if most police chiefs worldwide (especially here) operated in that manner.
Typically some law enforcement official here will privately apologize to the family of a gunman, though.
Iceland is awesome, but it has some weirdness. http://disinfo.com/2013/10/horrifying-necropants-iceland/
Not sad, consequent. An entity that focuses on an economic set of tools that kills more people than Iceland has inhabitants every month… must think that this is weird. If not they would have to start thinking.
By that token, Iceland must think America is the Land of the Lunatics.
To be fair, the Whole Rest of the World thinks America is the “Land of the Lunatics”. 🙂
Phrasing this as an apology seems off to me. Let’s break it down:
“The police regret this incident…”
Regret having to shoot someone? Yeah. I bet the person who had to shoot and kill someone for the first time in their life regrets it. He probably wonders if it was the right thing to do. Even if it certainly was. (I don’t know the details.)
“… and wishes to extend its condolences to the man’s family.”
Also, pretty uncontroversial. It’s (probably) not the family’s fault. There’s two groups in serious pain over this: The police hat had to pull the trigger, and the family of the person killed.
Seems pretty un-weird to me.
Yeah, I don’t think they regret shooting the guy but they would rather not have taken his life. It’d have been better to disable him but that would be hard without a sniper on hand.
Agreed. If expressing regret and condolences for the taking of or loss of a life, no matter the circumstance, is weird, then normal seems pretty messed up to me.