SWAT Team Shoots 'Armed' Fla. 8th-Grader.

According to The Washington Post, an eighth-grader was shot and wounded by a SWAT team officer in a school bathroom Friday after he pulled out a pellet gun. Sheriff Don Eslinger said the 15-year-old boy brought the gun to Milwee Middle School in his backpack. The alleged gunman, Christopher David Penley, locked a classmate in a closet, gallavanted around campus with the weapon, eventually leading police into the bathroom. Eslinger said negotiators tried unsuccessfully to negotiate the boy, and when Penley raised the gun at a deputy, he shot the youth. No one else was injured. The weapon was later identified as a pellet gun fashioned to look like a 9mm handgun. Penley is now brain dead, but on life support so his organs can be harvested and donated.

Police brutality or self defense? There have been arguments for both sides on the news. Some say that the officers should have known that it was a pellet gun, and others argue that when a weapon is pointed at you, you do everything in your power to defend yourself.

A famous case of police brutality in the U.S. was the case of Glen "Rodney" King. King was an African-American motorist who, while being videotaped by a bystander. was forcibly subdued and arrested by the LAPD during a police traffic stop on March 3, 1991. He refused arrest, much like Penley did. In King's case, however, he was not shot. The police instead tried to subdue him with 50,000 volt tasers. When he tried to fight back, he was severly beaten with police batons. King survived the ordeal, but this occurence helped open the eyes of many to police brutality.

In both cases, there are those that argue that the extent of the force used by police was necessary, while the opposition says that it was excessive and unneeded.