CNN:

Nearly a week after police shot and killed a Kansas man while responding to a prank call, the victim’s mother pleaded with authorities to allow her to see her deceased son.

Lisa Finch wrote in a letter to the Wichita, Kansas, mayor and police chief that she doesn’t know where they’re keeping his body and that she wants to give her son “a proper funeral service and burial.”

She questioned “why Wichita City leadership is compounding our grief and sorrow, by keeping my son from us?”

“Please let me see my son’s lifeless body,” she wrote in a letter dated Tuesday. “I want to hold him and say goodbye. Please immediately return his body to us.”

Her son, Andrew Finch was killed by police last week in his home in a case of swatting. Swatting refers to when a person makes a false report to draw a major police response or SWAT teams to a certain location.

The cops won’t even release the body to the family.  What a bunch of bastards.  In other news, remember I said this?

There are a number of misdirects in this report.  Let’s address two of the most prominent and important.  First of all, the blame will be placed on the illegal practice of Swatting, or calling the police and reporting an active shooting or hostage situation.  The perpetrator will likely be found and dealt with, and the blame will be placed squarely on him.

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It doesn’t matter if he was armed, any more than it matters whether he was a gamer or if he was Swatted by another gamer.  While Swatting is illegal, the perpetrator didn’t do the shooting.  Being armed while answering the door isn’t illegal or immoral.  Gaming isn’t illegal or immoral.

True to form, the gaming community is self examining.

A joke gone bad ended in tragedy last week, and it brings into the spotlight one of the worst aspects of gaming culture.

Last week, someone made a fake emergency call (known as swatting) to police in Wichita, Kansas, and the police shot an innocent man. On Friday, police in Los Angeles arrested 25-year-old Tyler Raj Barriss, who reportedly goes by the name SWAuTistic, for allegedly calling in the false report. Social media posts on the incident have continued this week. Let’s hope that this leads to increased awareness of these prank calls among law enforcement and realization that toxic behavior like swatting can have deadly consequences.

While it’s deplorable that someone would do this, it wouldn’t be a problem if cops wore uniforms, didn’t assume that the call was legitimate, and simply knocked on the door to chat with the occupants since, after all, it is their property.

The practice of swatting is a problem only because of the hero soldier-boy complex that infects the police forces around the nation.  Take their guns away from them and they won’t be able to shoot anyone.