The shooting followed a traffic accident in which one of Yantis' bulls was injured, but it remains unclear exactly how that incident escalated into Yantis' death. – Reason Magazine

Dominant Social Theme: The police have a difficult job and maybe sometimes they shoot us in order to protect us. But, hey, at least they care.

Free-Market Analysis: Reason magazine does a good job of tracking police brutality, especially when it comes to the drug war. In this case, they report on an Idaho police shooting of a locally well-known rancher.

It's certainly a ghastly tale and deserving of the attention it is getting. According to the Reason report and other write-ups, Jack Yantis's bull wandered off his ranch onto Highway 95 where it was hit by a car. The car's passengers were injured and taken to a hospital, and the bull's leg was shattered.

The sheriff's department notified Yantis, who came to the scene and asked his nephew, Rowdy Paradis, to hand him a rifle to put the bull down. But before he could humanely kill the suffering bull, the deputies fired, wounding but not killing it.

"When Yantis pointed his rifle at the bull's head to end its suffering, Paradis said, a deputy grabbed him from behind, spun him around, and grabbed the rifle. The rifle may have gone off during the scuffle, and both deputies opened fire, killing Yantis."

Yantis died there on the highway and the bull remained alive for another two hours or so, "suffocating in his own lung blood." This was because the two deputies on the scene refused to allow Yantis's wife, Donna, or her nephew to tend to either Yantis or the bull.

Instead, the two deputies searched Donna and Paradis, "throwing" them down onto the highway, and handcuffed them. In the process, Donna had a heart attack and ended up in the hospital herself.