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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.
So self defense claims are based on five pillars:
All the state/prosecution needs to do is show the person is guilty of breaking ONE of those pillars to knock out a self defense claim - even if the other four are met.
Did the jury think you started the deadly force fight? Guilty.
Did the jury think you escalated the fight into deadly force? Guilty.
Did the jury think there no imminent threat? Guilty.
Did the jury think you were not being reasonable with your evaluation of a deadly force threat? Guilty.
Did the jury think you could have run away in the heat of the encounter? Guilty.
News and politicians frequently don't understand (or actively lie) about how self defense is determined in the law - not understanding that Stand Your Ground only removes the requirement of avoidance, but not the other four pillars. It isn't a pass for you to not be innocent, respond to non-deadly force with deadly force, react before the threat is imminent, or have your decisions not be reasonable.
If the news or politicians blame people saying "they feared for their life" on Stand Your Ground, that is arguing reasonableness, not avoidance - Stand Your Ground only deals with avoidance. This is an example of either not understanding self defense law or lying. If the jury felt the fearing for their life wasn't reasonable (or the person is lying about fearing for their life), Stand Your Ground wouldn't matter, as they'd fail the reasonableness pillar and be guilty.
Zimmerman was a classic example of Stand Your Ground being blamed - but the defense never argued it and didn't need to. When Zimmerman shot Trayvon Martin, he was pinned to the ground and being pummeled - there was nowhere to run to - so there was no need to argue he didn't need to run away (pillar five, avoidance), he physically couldn't.
What people are upset about is they feel stand your ground lets people go "looking for trouble" - Zimmerman should have minded his own business and not go looking for Martin - but that is just something that would be impossible to regulate in the real world. It also puts the cart before the horse: the attacker shouldn't have started a deadly force fight.
Are there situations where things are "awful but lawful"? Of course! If someone who couldn't walk without crutches attacks someone with a knife in a stand your ground state, instead of running to safety it allows you to stab them / shoot them legally, even if you could have easily escaped.
There are also the reverse cases wherein what should be an innocent person who used self-defense correctly only to be convicted because a good prosecutor can have the jury "Monday Morning Quarterbacking" the decision the person who used self defense made in the split second they had in a life or death fight that maybe they could have gotten away (even if the person being attacked didn't actually see a valid avenue of escape, so long as the jury felt they had one)
I'd suggest the vast majority of self defense cases never actually invoke stand your ground in a trial and it is just a boogeyman being used by people to explain increasing violence, but can't regulate a "mind your own business" ethic when something bad happens to a person who is a part of a class that gets special considerations from certain ideologies.
You don't need SYG to not flee from a drawn firearm (you can't outrun a bullet), nor from a man with a chainsaw who is much larger and faster than you (the shooter was elderly and had osteoporosis), nor to defend a person who cannot flee (the woman who had been shot). SYG made things easier, but they likely could have won the cases without it.
Anti-self-defense advocates often rely on a rather twisted version of the "innocence" pillar. Zimmerman "shouldn't have been there". The elderly man shouldn't have confronted his known-violent neighbor cutting branches with a chainsaw on the wrong side of the fence. The woman shouldn't have confronted the man who was arguing with the other woman. And I could agree with this, except the meaning of "shouldn't" is subtly different. All those things are imprudent, but they are not immoral and they certainly shouldn't be considered somehow "provocation" for legal purposes.
My favorite variation on the meaning of shouldn't, that I haven't been able to use for a while since the trial ended and it has fallen out of popular consciousness somewhat, relates to the Kyle Rittenhouse shooting. Leftists say he shouldn't have been there (implying the immoral sense) and I would respond with "Yes, he shouldn't have been there because the adults (and police etc.) in that community should have been there taking out the trash instead of letting the responsibility fall on the shoulders of a kid."
Failure of the adults to step up didn’t give him a responsibility. Not any more than a police shooting creates a responsibility for BLM to come to town, or seeing a homeless man gives you a responsibility to go volunteer at a shelter.
I say this despite thinking Rittenhouse was justified. He had a right to be there, not a responsibility.
I believe that men have a moral responsibility to protect their homes and communities, and they also have a moral responsibility to step in when the state is unable (or unwilling) to do so. The police (and politicians in charge of them) abdicated their responsibility to protect their community (moral responsibility, I know they are not actually legally required to serve and protect anyone) when they refused to stop the riots, so it fell upon the men of the community to step in.
There is no similar moral responsibility for BLM to protest police shootings or for people to volunteer at a shelter if they see a hobo.
That’s the sticking point; it’s the crux of the “shouldn’t have been there” argument. His home would be one thing, his neighborhood, his town, and so on…but he was out guarding a random car dealership in the next town over. Zero personal connection.
Which is why I brought up the BLM comparison. When people show up to the next town over because they heard its police were crooked, can they use their “community” as an excuse?
Again, I think Rittenhouse had a right to be there. But a right is not a responsibility.
His father lives there, and he works there, IIRC.
Half credit, then.
I don’t believe it becomes a responsibility until he’s actually defending his family or friends.
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Rittenhouse worked in Kenosha, and his father and several extended family members lived there. He lived 30 minutes away from there (which is actually closer than any of the three assholes he shot lived from Kenosha). It absolutely was his community and fell under the same umbrella of responsibility to be protected by its members.
My previous job (before I started telecommuting full time) was a 30 minute commute for me, and my wife's family lived (and still lives) there, and I would absolutely consider it my moral responsibility to drive down with a rifle and patrol with my father-in-law and brothers-in-law if rioters were burning down their neighborhood. And to blast any and all fuckers that threatened death or serious bodily harm against me or my family.
And I’m telling you that the same reasoning is going to apply to half the protestors at Kenosha. They’re going to say they had a responsibility to protect their not-quite-neighbors from those nasty racist cops. Peacefully, natch, but if someone just so happens to threaten death or serious bodily harm…
If you don’t buy it from them, you shouldn’t buy it from Rittenhouse. He was justified in self-defense, not because he had some responsibility to stand guard.
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However, the modern world has too many men.
This is why, when one actually does exercise the male role, we make sure to treat it as a crime.
Men (as in, people specialized in dealing with this responsibility- they're usually male, but not always) are in significant oversupply in Western society, and as such instinct dictates that it is a moral imperative that they human-wave attack into the "enemy" and get killed until there are no longer too many men.
If they're not willing to do that for whatever reason, we'll just marginalize them more and more- make them pay for the worst men there are- until they snap and a group of them stand up to fight; at that point our forces can conduct the purge (or we lose and our enemy, more worthy than us, takes us over).
This is good for me if I'm Blue and my outgroup is domestic; waging a civil war on Red, if I win, will destroy my enemy and solve my excess-men-in-society problem in one fell swoop, much like it solved it for my ancestors in 2000 BC when they had this problem, which is after all why my instincts point me in this direction.
[This doesn't necessarily need to be military; it can be done through politics if the problem isn't bad enough, as that's just war by other means.]
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