Biden's Town Hall Answer on Police Reform Is So Ignorant, It's Scary

AP featured image — Democratic presidential candidate former Vice President Joe Biden participates in a town hall with moderator ABC News anchor George Stephanopoulos at the National Constitution Center in Philadelphia, Thursday, Oct. 15, 2020. (AP Photo/Carolyn Kaster)

Let’s just admit it.

Joe Biden is not the world’s most intelligent man.

He showed that again during his town hall on ABC last night.

While of course he got softball, tee-up kind of questions and a helpful moderator, he still seemed to have trouble coming up with coherent answers.

One of his responses was just so incredibly clueless, it was more than a little troubling and makes one really afraid if this guy were to get into the White House.

He was talking about his ideas on police reform, saying that police should deescalate situations. One way they can deescalate, he claimed, was that if “someone was coming at you” that you should “shoot ’em in the leg” rather than shoot to kill.

.@JoeBiden says police should try shooting dangerous criminals “in the leg" pic.twitter.com/u3phk3MHSq

— Tom Elliott (@tomselliott) October 16, 2020

He’s made this ignorant comment before, so it’s not a mistake or a one-off, but a basic failure of understanding the situation and the proper response.

WTF? Shooting someone in the leg IS NOT DE-ESCALATION. NO ONE TEACHES THIS. LITERALLY NO ONE. https://t.co/7Avmkmu88f

— Dana Loesch (@DLoesch) October 16, 2020

No responsible police force would ever teach to “shoot ’em in the leg,” everyone teaches to shoot center mass, at the largest part of the body to stop the person and take them down. If you shoot at a suspect rushing at you, trying to hit him in the leg, you are very likely to miss and die. That’s not a recipe for ‘deescalation’ but a recipe for getting the cop killed. The fact that he would think this is completely foolhardy.

Police also generally have to pass psychological tests to become police officers. He apparently doesn’t understand that and thinks suggesting that is novel, which again shows just raging ignorance.

Finally, as he continues to ramble on and on, he says that police have to have psychologists and social workers go out with them on 911 calls to deescalate to deal with those calls like “that guy with the knife.”

So let’s clarify what situation he’s referencing when he talks about “guy with a knife” because it’s the exact argument against social workers responding to a 911 call. It involved Ricardo Munoz bursting out of the door in Lancaster, PA, armed with a butcher knife, rushing the cop, who then shot and killed him. Had he aimed for Munoz’s leg, he’d miss and he’d be dead.

Here it is:

This is the bodycam footage of the officer-involved shooting in Lancaster, PA that Black Lives Matter is rioting over. The perpetrator charged at the police officer with a knife over his head with clear intent to strike. pic.twitter.com/xD72TweQK4

— Ian Miles Cheong (@stillgray) September 14, 2020

Now, I do think that police could always use more deescalation training and I do think a lot of these situations involve mental illness where that extra training could be helpful. But had you had a social worker in this case, she/he might have been killed because they don’t have the police training. Then the left is also pushing for police defunding so how does that help this situation when what you would need is more funding for more training?

Biden just suggested police shoot people in the leg, proving he has zero idea how police training or responding to a violent threat works.

— Katie Pavlich (@KatiePavlich) October 16, 2020