At Least 5 Dead In Shooting At Central Florida Bank; Suspect In Custody

From the article: "At approximately 12:36 p.m., Sebring police and Highlands County Sheriff's deputies responded to a SunTrust bank branch after a man called police dispatchers and said he had fired shots in the bank.

Responding law enforcement agents began negotiating with the barricaded shooter, trying to get him to surrender."

And from this I have a question: Setting aside this particular situation as we don't know very much about it. Discussing instead this category of problem; a category defined as containing problems in which an adversary is capable of inflicting great harm on others around them at whim. Doesn't have to be a police situation - could be something bigger (think North Korea's threat to Seoul via artillery, for example). In this category of problems, it seems to me that the best solution is to take away the prerogative of the adversary to cause such harm by rendering the adversary physically incapable of voluntary action. To me, all other things being equal, all other solutions are inferior because they place the outcome of the situation in the hands of the adversary. Yet, there seems to be a strong reluctance to choose a direct, decisive solution. The reasons given are frequently tangentially at best in relation to the problem: - That the force that would implement that solution (the police in this case) are not the "judge, jury, and executioner"; - That "cooler heads should prevail" and so forth. I've never accepted those reasons. I reject the first as irrelevant in that when an immediate threat exists, we're not talking about criminal justice - we're talking about removing the threat without getting the subjects of that threat harmed. I reject the second because it's not really a reason at all - it's just a platitude. Furthermore, it seems to me (perhaps I'm wrong) that when politicians look at such problems they see a scenario in which if the government does nothing and the adversary inflicts the threatened harm, the politician can simply blame the adversary whereas if the government takes action upon the order of the politician, then whatever happens will be blamed on the politician. But, that's just a theory.

So the question: in the above-described category of problems, should leadership tend toward choosing a decisive solution over a negotiated solution? (IOW, if leadership (political or operational) currently tends toward a default of a negotiated solution, should that be reevaluated, and greater weight given to controlling and decisively resolving an instance of this category of problems?)