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Thanks for the effortful reply.
Not only the walking up, but he also has a Hollywood level of "badass walking away badass-edly" after the shooting.
Disagree, but in the direction, I think, you would agree with. Big dude comes over and the first thing he does is hard two hand shove. That's straight up an initiation of a fight with no pretense. If I'm on my ass after that and I have a pistol on me, I'm reaching, pulling, and firing.
If the big guy comes over, starts talking shit, and there's a kind of mutual combat tussle that ends up with the shooter on the ground then, I would agree, it's more of a grey area.
Completely agree. I'm as pro-gun as they come and believe in the adage of an armed populace is a polite populace.
Thank you for validating my travel paranoia. I had to visit San Francisco, of all places, for work earlier in the year. I spent the entire plane ride obsessing over this idea that I was going to have to punch out a fentanyl zombie trying to rob me, only to have a blue hair they-them'er sentence me to thirty years of critical re-education for not displaying enough learned-experience-empathy.
On the other hand, we want to discourage 6'6" MMA fighters from talking shit because everyone is afraid to talk back to them or from insisting it was a "mutual combat tussle" and "they only defended themselves".
"The jury might find the other party guilty of murder, but will not un-shoot you" is a deterrent that promotes gentlemanly behavior.
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Its an edge case. If the guy shoving was armed, I would probably be all-in on 'good shoot.'
I know from lots and lots of training that the person on the ground is at a massive disadvantage.
Problem is that a shove isn't really an escalation to deadly force. Just because you end up on the ground you're not really able to say "oh I thought he was going to kill me."
Else there'd be a "loophole" where one person could just lay down on the ground and shoot the other person b/c "what if he jumped on me."
Likewise, the guy who did the shove was seemingly coming to support his GF, where the shooter had actually started the conflict.
I do think that if I were in the shooter's shoes, I probably would not have drawn the gun on the spot, but I also could probably have gotten to my feet faster than that dude. I would not have instigated a conflict like that in the first place.
I don't know how the law sees it, but if I'm standing over a hard surface like a sidewalk or even asphalt, I would consider an unprompted shove as escalation to deadly force. A simple fall that results in your head smacking the ground can be fatal and often are, and someone shoving you with intent to disturb you is someone who is clearly fine with a very high probability of you falling over, with high likelihood of you lacking enough control to protect your head during the fall.
Not many people who shove someone to have them hit their head and die on a hard surface actually intend to kill the person, though; it's a result of a combination of ignorance and bad judgment, as opposed to trying to stab you or drawing a gun on you. The threat profile is different, a kind of action that we're adapted to think of as a low escalation part of conflict but in our modern built environments is often deadly. And by the time you're thinking of drawing your own deadly weapon, the threat is past if it was this kind of bad judgment (though, if you're about to be curb stomped...)
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Right, but if you ask the law to treat any intentional shove on concrete as possibly 'deadly force,' there's a can of worms to open right there.
Especially since its pretty unlikely that the dead guy intended to use deadly force when he shoved him. Yes, falling to the ground is a predictable outcome, but unless he was verbally shouting "I'm gonna kill you" or similar, its a bit harder to gauge whether he would have continued the attack after that point.
And more directly, if the guy shoved, then immediately turned and started walking away, surely you'd say its not justifiable to shoot him in the back, on the premise of "well, he could have turned around and came back!"
These are the things that make these fact situations messy.
Guy was pretty clearly starting to retreat once the gun was pulled IMO. I think it's fair to pull the gun but firing on an unarmed individual who's retreating is outside the bounds of self defense.
It's clear to the camera. It's not clear that the shooter, having just been blindsided, knocked flat, and then advanced on, had time and cognition to process the half-step back.
I opined at the time that I was willing to accept convictions like that one in an edge case for pragmatic reasons of keeping the peace. That willingness has pretty much gone away given subsequent events.
wasn't it an important point that the shooter had been yelling at the pushers GF over something minor? If you are going to shoot someone it better not be because of an escalated situation that you started.
As it turns out, this is not the law. It's what anti-self-defense people would like to be the law, but it isn't. Provocation spoils a self-defense claim, but starting the confrontation is not always provocation. In Massachusetts, "conduct involving only the use of nonthreatening words will not be sufficient to qualify a defendant as a first aggressor”
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Welcome to the Grey Area.
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