You really gotta learn the time and place to use this argument man. Sometimes there are justified police shootings. Inevitably some people will try to argue that the police should have done something differently, and in many cases they’re right, but occasionally you’ll see a video where they were being clearly charged by a man with a gun in a small room and only had a second to react, etc etc.
Some dude standing in the woods holding an axe near his side, not in a throwing position - not the time to bust out that devil’s advocate stuff. Yeah, we get it, police aren’t expected to expose themselves to extreme risks - but this is very obviously not an extreme risk. Yes, it would be a reasonable expectation for an officer that in the off chance a person throws something at them from 10, 15 yards away, they can either stop them once they’ve actually demonstrated they’re getting ready to throw, or they can dodge the objects. People carry stuff in their hands frequently. A lot of things could hurt you if they’re thrown at you. The police should not be shooting people in the face for holding objects that could potentially be thrown at some point in the future. Just try to be reasonable about it.
Nobody’s arguing that the cop should throw himself into machine gun fire, or dodge an oncoming semi truck, and he already has his gun out - in the time it would take this gentleman to line up for a solid throw, the officer could easily have fired several shots. But that’s not what happened. Dude was just standing there, speaking calmly, and he was shot in the face for it.
“But the guy could have theoretically jumped in the car and then rammed into the cop and killed him!” “But the guy could have theoretically pushed the cop into traffic if he was that close to him!” “But the guy could have broken a stick from that tree and stabbed the cop’s eye out and taken his gun!”
Literally every second of every day, you can find some possible scenario in which a person who is acting normal suddenly snaps and tries to kill you. Doesn’t give you a right to shoot everybody who walks nearby with a potentially dangerous object, unless there’s a genuine reason to believe that that’s what they’re actively trying to do.