Crime Scenes and Weapons of War

Given the horror of the murder of the five police officers in Dallas last Thursday, it may seem absurd or distasteful to ask whether it was a good idea to kill the sniper with a bomb mounted on a robot. Surely anything that stopped the carnage was justified in the moment, and the police seem to have had no clear shot at the sniper.

But the issue is more complicated, and it deserves to be considered carefully. There’s a legal difference between targeting a crime suspect and targeting a wartime enemy. There’s also a difference between using a weapon that can be aimed and using one that puts bystanders at greater risk. And a precedent set under emergency conditions can easily expand in future cases. The step from the robot bomb to a drone strike is barely even incremental: morally and technologically, they’re basically the same.