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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.
There's a moderately interesting documentary now on Netflix called 'The Perfect Neighbor', which uses police footage to tell the story of one case of Stand your Ground (SyG) killing. The way the piece is framed attempts to demonstrate that the killing was racially motivated. The mixed-race community is shown in a positive light, and includes plenty of footage of the kids in the community reporting that the eventual killer used racial epithets towards them, although there's no hard evidence of this. They also put up some statistics at the end that indicate that killings have increased in SyG states, and that SyG killings target blacks at a higher rate. In the end, the Stand your Ground defense doesn't hold up and the killer is convicted of manslaughter.
The publication and pushing of this documentary, to me, shows that SyG is on the rise culturally - otherwise why would Hollywood feel the need to push back against it? What's striking to me is that this was the case they chose to highlight, given the fact that the SyG defense failed. I won't go too into the details of the case, but the main weakness was that the killer reported a longer timeline from when she called the police to come help here to when she shot and killed the woman on her doorstep, which they argued indicated she didn't really fear for her life but instead set the whole thing up to get away with killing her neighbor. Franky, if I were on the jury I would probably have acquitted, just on the basis of how SyG works. As far as I understand (IANAL), the only requirement for self-defense under SyG laws is reasonable fear of death/harm. In this case, it really seems like the jury concluded there wasn't a reasonable fear because the killer was racist.
My takeaway from the whole thing is that it seems the makers of the documentary are implicitly arguing that juries should nullify the SyG defense. The documentary was not directed towards the voting populations of states likely to adopt SyG laws, but rather towards blue tribe types who sympathize with minority communities. I don't think it's a mistake that this outcome was publicized on Netflix, I think it's meant to be an example. (Edit: I'll add that I initially thought the takeaway would be the opposite - that the woman would be acquitted and this would be an example of why these laws shouldn't exist. I was quite surprised when they convicted her.)
I'm curious if anyone else watched this documentary and had a different take.
Oooooor it’s on the outs and thus an easy target. Or it was a prominent tribal signifier. Or the studio wanted to bait controversy. Or the writer had a personal stake in a similar case. Or the random number generator demanded it. There are plenty of other explanations.
Applying your reasoning to other cases: Friday Night Lights meant racism was really on the rise. Apocalypse Now was trying to stamp down on anti-war sentiment. The eternal popularity of Nazis as villains, from Inglorious Basterds to Star Wars to *Casablanca, is proof that they hold too much sway over society.
Sorry, is your objection that I didn't specify this was a hypothesis?
The impression that I got from watching the documentary is the hypothesis that they are trying to raise awareness of SyG laws, and in particular couching it as a racial justice issue. My hypothetical conclusion is that they may be supportive of juries ruling against SyG defendants. Do you have anything interesting to say about this, or are you just being reflexively combative?
Uh, no. I assumed you were correct about the makers’ preference. I was arguing about the bit I quoted: the publication and pushing of this documentary does not imply that SyG is on the rise culturally.
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