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Notes -
The Washington Times claims:
Other organizations have given numbers into the 50+ fatality range. This is pretty much the nightmare scenario for the Trump takeover of the aid program: removing Palestinian or UNRWA control of incoming aid prevents diversion or theft, but a single security failure or panicked guard could be both a political and humanitarian nightmare, and because the organization managing the aid deliveries is tied to US sources, it'd be a worldwide political and humanitarian nightmare.
It's also not clear it's actually happened.
The IDF and GHF have denied it, which, well, they would, wouldn't they? But there's no video of the event, despite the large crowds that must have been present. The Israelis, meanwhile, have released video of gunmen firing on crowds not far from the aid distribution site in question, and said gunmen at least aren't wearing uniforms for the IDF or GHF or GHF-security, and Hamas has been making pretty loud noises about punishing Palestinians who cooperate with the GHF program. Fog of war makes things hard, and trust is difficult in a situation like this, but it's enough that a lot of headlines in even Arabic-focused orgs have switched to the passive voice.
The Washington Times reports:
With eight people, all older than fifty and some over eighty, facing serious burns, it'll be a minor miracle if there are no fatalities. 'We may never know the motive' and some CNN apologetics (why is McCabe anywhere near a camera?) or
CBSNBC gymnastics aside, the alleged perp has since been charged pretty harshly and has received as high a bail as Colorado meaningfully goes, and the state governor has condemned the attack (he's running!). The feds have another bit or two at the apple if needed, and absolutely would love to chew this guy and spit him out.There's some easy if morbid memes, here, but I don't expect this guy to get quite as much a Western fandom as, say, Luigi. I'm gonna make a wild ass guess and assume that the shirtless molotov-tosser falls pretty deep into the Hradzka garbage person scale. It's hard to overstate how radicalizing it's going to be as an example, though. The alleged perpetrator was a visa overstay from Egypt who'd gotten work authorization and an asylum claim in under Biden; the victims had been making (kinda goofy) protests over the October 7 hostages for over a year and were hit directly outside of the county courthouse.
We don't know whether he heard 'about' the GHF aid massacre. Again, garbage person, for all we know today, the man was lashing out about 'zionists' because the radio waves in his molars thought it was the best way to help free gerbils. But I think there's some components worth spelling out:
nuttieststrongest pro-Palestinian voices congregate are pretty similar in effect, if not in text. You'd think that would be a violation of Bruen? Yeah, but that's a matter for my other post today on Snope. That's not going to stop everyone, but it's going to get a lot of the people who might be test cases to just to go elsewhere...Pepper-Gel (i.e., the active ingredient in pepper-spray, but in a medium with much greater viscosity) is a good less-lethal weapon. Even setting aside legal questions, firearms have a genuine practical problem of only really being a good self-defense weapon in situations when only firearms are a sufficient self-defense weapon. In the case of someone throwing an incendiary device into a crowd, how would carrying a firearm help? Even if you wanted to shoot a hypothetical fleeing perpetrator in the back (and I hope you wouldn't), a lot of people would presumably be running away from the incendiary device at the same time. Supposing you successfully identified the perpetrator and chased them down, adding a gun to the situation may make restraining them more difficult and dangerous. Supposing you successfully restrained them and held them at gunpoint to effectuate a citizen's arrest, you risk being shot by another good-guy-with-a-gun who sees you holding someone at gunpoint.
In this case, the perp had brought a weedsprayer retrofitted to act as a flamethrower. There's a pretty wide variety of situations in which "shirtless guy with flamethrower" can be distinguished from "burning people and people running from flamethrower-dude", where the perpetrator would easily fit within all three corners of ability, opportunity, and jeopardy for self-defense or defense-of-others purposes. Even for other molotov attacks, these people haven't typically done anywhere near as good of a job 'fading back into the crowd' as they think.
Target discernment and backstop are things that matter, but they're vastly overstated as unsolved and unsolvable problems among antigunners.
Using "incendiary device" as a hypothetical, after the same words were used to describe a makeshift flame thrower, was poor communication. However, I think the point remains that less-lethal weapons address the problems you wrote about, and that a firearm may have been a good defense weapon against this specific attacker is not a good reason to opt for firearms over less-lethal weapons.
How do you know?
I'm not an "antigunner" (I'd eliminate practically all restrictions on personal ownership of small arms, if I had my way), but it's difficult to overstate a problem that is literally deathly serious.
No, I don't think they do. I linked the Dolloff case for a few different reasons, here, both that pepper spray did not work there, and that quite a lot of the left that even heard of this case thought it justified the shooting, including the prosecutor.
Continuity of force has a lot of utility in self-defense considerations. When someone has pointed a flamethrower, or thrown a molotov at an elderly innocent and is carrying two more, these considerations become 'what part of my continuity of force is best or most ethical', not 'what part of my continuity of force did I not leave at hom- and I got beaten to death'.
... because I've written at length about a number of Molotov-launchers over the last five years, as well as followed both the court cases and a number of self-defense experts specifically highlighting the threat model they and similar groups represent.
Yes. Yes it is. I would prefer that to be a problem that the defender has to consider than the attacker or attackers gets to exploit.
Could you please clarify this? I'm unsure if I'm interpreting the implication of you disagreeing with me disagreeing with you disagreeing with me correctly.
To be very explicit:
Barring a tiny number of exceptions not relevant here and not demonstrated in past attacks of this class, the moral value of a person who is in the process of attempting to kill or cause permanent injury to innocents rounds to zero, from the negative side. Any considerations regarding their lives either need to actually challenge that belief in a deeper way than ispe dixit, or rely on tactical, strategic, or legal grounds.
Near-universally, those tactical matters overwhelmingly favor firearms, and lethal force with firearms, over less-lethal tools. They provide range, they provide greater accuracy, and they can respond to many more attackers, so on. Less-lethal tools can and maybe should supplement firearms; they can not replace them. The only times a less-lethal tool can not be replaced by a firearm, conversely, reflect either legal or moral constraints.
And those tactical matters weight extremely heavily. I am not going to encourage people take a 10% risk to life or limb or concussion in exchange for even completely removed risk of legal or social attack. I'm not I'm willing to demand at a 1% chance. People should be aware of, and responsive to, the legal constraints for their jurisdictions, but they have no moral obligation to commit suicide over them.
And I don't think that offer is seriously on the table, either. The courts and news media are, in fact, willing to make national news and a jail sentence out of someone leaving a tire skidmark on a crosswalk; the theory that prosecutors and activists will say 'all good' after a taser strike under all but the clearest examples is far from clearly-supported, and most of these future attacks will not be clearly documented. Again, that Dolloff is not just a free man, but one that leftists and media are quite willing to describe as innocent, tells us exactly how much sticking solely to pepper spray buys you. That Hayes is on trial in a week tells us how much it matters if your 'victim' survives; I will bet you cash money he does not get a prosecutor giving him the last-minute Dolloff treatment.
Yes, on net, this leaves a number of circumstances where someone defending themselves, legally and morally, may 'cause' greater total deaths, and not just in the sense of shooting someone that might have been possible to just pepper spray. It's imaginable that an alternative-universe Rittenhouse (or Gardner) situation could result in prolonged violent protests aimed at other people who are not able to defend themselves. I'm not willing to demand Gardner shoot himself in the head lest Omaha burn down.
That's because I don't accept that 'cause' as true, honest, or a norm applied across all political valiances. The people burning down a city over a morally correct self-defense shooting are not the fault of someone defending themselves: they are the fault of people burning down the city. In many cases, they are intentionally cultivated, by centralized organizations justifying their violence and providing false information encouraging them.
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