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anonymous908213yesterday at 6:51 PM0 repliesview on HN

> when a guy with an AK lit up on cops during the BLM riots.

It is certainly a bold choice to use this wildly misleading framing when you link to a news article that directly contradicts it. A more accurate framing would be "when a guy returned fire against a gang of thugs who were firing on random passerby from an unmarked van".

  Court documents and transcripts reveal a far different story than the one officers told investigators, as well as the tales police and prosecutors offered up to the media.

    Before the white, unmarked cargo van of the Minneapolis Police Department drove down Lake Street, an officer gave Sgt. Andrew Bittell his orders: “Drive down Lake Street. You see a group, call it out. OK great! Fuck ’em up, gas ’em, fuck ’em up.”

  At 17th Avenue and Lake Street, around 10 p.m., the SWAT team saw a group of people outside the Stop-N-Shop gas station. Bittell told the driver to head toward the station and said, “Let ’em have it boys!”

  They later learned they were shooting at the gas station owner, neighbors and relatives guarding the station from more looting, as well as bystanders, including a Vice News reporter who had his hands up and was yelling, “Press!”

  About an hour later, three blocks to the west, they opened the sliding door of the van and began firing plastic rounds at people in a parking lot.

  They hit Jaleel K. Stallings, 29, a St. Paul truck driver, who says he didn’t know they were cops because they were inside an unmarked white cargo van with the police lights off. [...] Stallings, an Army veteran, returned fire with his mini Draco pistol, for which he had a permit.
Actually, rather than framing, I would say that you are outright lying, to be honest.

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> Everything I've said is factually accurate. Hilarious how some commenters are saying I am "lying" or assume I disagree with the verdict when it could not be further from the truth. I'm only pointing out that armed fire upon police might be legal in Minnesota, and there is recent case example of that.

This is a silly way to have a conversation, but as for your response: every single word you picked was as misleading as possible. "AK" implies an assault rifle but it was a pistol. "Lit up on cops" implies that he started the conflict by attacking cops, rather than it being one of self-defense against people indistinguishable from thugs. You invoke "BLM riots", but there is no evidence he was involved in that at all. Your words are clearly chosen in such a way as to prime people towards a certain belief about the event. With the most charitable interpretation of your words possible, they might factually describe the events, but I think it crosses the line to the point where you would have to be so charitable as to actively misinterpret what words mean in order for them to remain factually accurate. At any rate, that level of charity is absolutely unwarranted given how intentionally uncharitable the selection of those words was in the first place.