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Notes -
Turning to some good news:
Article link
This is a WSJ article about the rise in justified homicides in the US in recent years. Much of it is about "Stand Your Ground Laws." I'd be interested to hear the thoughts of the more lawyer-brained Mottizens on those kind of laws and their proliferation over the past decade or so.
On the culture war angle, this article is maybe the starkest example of "erosion of trust in society" that I've come across. A few of the anecdotes are pretty hair raising. They're cherry picked, I know, but the idea that a kid loses his father over an argument about a a fence and a property line made me sad. The "road range" incident they cover in detail seems like it was unfortunate but when one guy levels a gun at another, there's only one reasonable reaction.
Violence must be tightly controlled for a society to function. This is something that's bone deep in humans. We've developed methods of conflict resolution that fall short of violence for our entire existence as a species. Even within the context of violence, there are various ways of controlling it. Duels and so forth. Even informal ones; basic Bro code dictates that when one guy falls down in a fight, the other one backs off.
But this article hints at the idea that people are zooming past any of that to full lethality. It's impossible to compile the stats to determine if that's actually the case or not, but the larger point remains; in a society with plunging basic trust, you're going to see levels of interpersonal violence spike. How should state laws governing violence respond to this? Stand Your Ground is something I generally still support, but my mind could be changed if simple Bad Neigbor fights end up with more orphans.
Oh, this story is horseshit.
Cops, even retired cops, always get the benefit of the doubt and then some in court. In all states. I don't like it but it's not going to change.
Self defense, once raised by presenting a fairly minimal amount of evidence, has to be disproven beyond a reasonable doubt (again, in all states). If only one person alive knows what happened (i.e. there's no evidence otherwise), the defense should succeed. What the widow, and the Journal, are implicitly demanding is that if one guy pulls a gun on another and the second guy then fatally shoots him, the killer should go to jail if there's no physical or other testimonial evidence.
The next example is even "better" -- a methed-up guy carrying a chainsaw and approaching an armed neighbor who is ordering him to leave. Uh, yeah, play stupid games, win stupid prizes. This has the extra twist that due to a surveying error the neighbor was on his own property, but neither man knew that at the time, so it's not really relevant. Other sources also add the detail that the dead man's son (who was with him) testified that the dead man said "I’ll cut your head off with this chainsaw." Uh, yeah.
Then we get to the Reno shootout. Woman decides to intervene in some quarrel between a man and a woman. Man starts yelling at woman. Husband of woman intervenes. Man goes back to truck, gets gun, shoots husband. No, this wasn't what was deemed justified -- things continue. Woman pulls out her gun, shoots man. Man shoots woman (and some bystander) too. Then another bystander fatally shoots the man, thinking he's going to kill the woman. The dead man turned out to boozed up, coked up, and high on pot too. If the WSJ writer had his way, presumably the bystander who killed him would be imprisoned for it. Or not shot him and maybe the woman dies instead. How would that improve things?
If you claim there are too many "justified" shootings, there's two things you might mean. One, that too many people are doing things that justify them being shot. Two, that too many people are being shot and having it deemed "justified" when it isn't. The article is saying that it's the second, but the examples say it's the first.
Its presence in the article is clearly because the journalists needed more meat to try and push his point that stand-your-ground laws are bad, but he knows the facts aren't aligning with that so he just says it's an example of how guns and alcool don't mix.
But then, the story has this important tidbit:
So it's not like the guy who turned this incident deadly had a snap lapse in judgement and the presence of the gun is what turned a likely fistfight into a shootout. The gun was not present, he had to go get it, which means we're dealing with an asshole whose brain was so fried he had murderous intent for several seconds to minutes.
Also
So why are we focusing on the gun here? He could have just as well stabbed him with a knife, with a broken bottle, concussed him with a baseball bat or tire iron, etc... Would it have been less deadly then? I'm not sure at all; what if the fact he wasn't using a gun made Reichert and the bystander less willing to pull out a gun in self-defense out of fear they'll be convicted of homicide? Would they have been able to stop Wilson before he murdered Reichert and her husband? We don't know and can't know.
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