There will always be bad things in the world. If not this there would be other things kids can do.
Edit: i guess i should rephrase this. I disagree that the ease of swatting in any way absolves the perputrator of any guilt or that if it wasn't possible to swat people we wouldn't have to have rules against violent crime.
I still think the ease of swatting is stupid, just that removing that ease doesn't solve the fundamental problem that bad people exist in the world. That said, im not saying that we shouldn't make swatting impossible
Whilst true, this is a situation where kids can do something relatively trivial and easy (make a phone call) and a massively disproportionate outcome in the form of extreme violence is carried out by the state. There are very very few such opportunities for kids to leverage that kind of power, and it's important to prevent them.
What extreme violence are you talking about? A bunch of cops showed up to search for a reported gunman, and by all accounts acted completely appropriately.
Nobody was shot or assaulted, nobody broke down any doors, or did anything ‘massively disproportionate’ here.
I'll leave it as an aside whether we consider it to be violent for a team of military-styled gunmen - clearly ready to kill - to descend on someone's home.
In this case nobody was shot or assaulted. In other cases people have been.
That the man in question did nothing deserving of a legitimate SWAT response means that for one to have happened was massively disproportionate. Because a SWAT team is a disproportionate response to doing absolutely nothing to provoke one.
This argument doesn't make sense. Let's go over the series of events.
1. Someone calls 911 reporting an armed conflict reporting an active shooter situation.
2. Police respond, sending a SWAT team.
3a. Tense situation was resolved, unfortunately resulting in a heart attack.
3b. Suppose there was an actual gunman. The fast response would have saved lives.
You're sitting at home knowing post event debating the situation knowing the actual events that are taking place. The police only know 1 version of the events, which they hope are in good faith. In order to argue that the police's response was disproportionate, you would have have to known beforehand the report was bogus. But this is impossible, so the police must bring enough force to deal with a legitimate call.
The trade off here is due diligence versus response time. In the fast majority of cases, people don't abuse 911, so the polices' fast reactions are beneficial. You have to leave it up to society to minimize these types of edge cases.
How can you realistically prevent them without incidentally dropping genuine calls now and then (your rate of swat calls will be extremely low in comparison).
Also, making a fake phonecall to the police and describing a graphic situation to the police is not so trivial and easy. Pouring some gasoline on your neighbors house and burning it down or emailing bomb threats are also trivial tasks that children understand are wrong.
Sure, but reducing bad things is helpful even if it isn't 100%. There's an interesting video essay on this exact style of argument, if you're interested. https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=yts2F44RqFw
Then I guess we are all screwed, as you aren't going to stop kids from doing "fucked up shit" like this as the entire problem is the idea of understanding that you might get caught for this and get sent to jail is kind of out of reach for most people--not all, but most--until you are older... and even so: there are simply always more kids, and I maintain you might not even need the kids.
