"I disagree. If the report is true stating the wife was shouting to inform everyone he was suffering from a mental illness, the airline stewardesses or Feds could have asked her a quick question about it - how long does it take to ask the wife a question?"
Look, I am sensitive to your special situation. The fact of the matter is that the marshals involved didn't have complete information. Did the wife inform the airlines before hand that her husband had special problems? If so, then they have a problem. If not, which is the likely case, they don't. The marshals only have seconds to make a decision. This goes back to gaming theory. The odds of making a poor decision that involves the death of a single person versus the death of some unknown multiple, what do you do? We could debate this forever, but he reality is that it is better to sacrifice the single instead of suffering the multiple.
This is what is known as a tragedy. It should have been avoidable, but it wasn't. You could lay the blame on the wife, or the marshals. The reality is that neither can bear the blame. Both did the best they could given the information they had. That wasn't sufficient under these circumstances. Yeah, you could claim that full disclosure and perfect execution is what is expected. But that ignores the human aspect of the equation. I grieve for the wife, she has lost her husband. I also grieve for the marshal who pulled the trigger. He has to live with the consequences of his actions. If he is the least little bit human, he will always live the the "what if". Why do vets of D-day or Vietnam visit the sites of their most heroic actions? Because they alway wonder "what if". Was it worth it? That is human.
Let us take the biggest "what if" of the US. What if the South had won the War of Northern Aggression? Now personally I feel that the South would have abandoned slavery sooner or later. But the US would have been divided, and it would not have had the role on the world stage that it had. I think the world would have been poorer for that. In women's rights, which the US has been the leader in many respects, but also in individual rights. Could we have been a better model? Sure. But we have been the only only model for more than a century. |
