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Turning to some good news:
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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.
As a counterpoint to this, there's the case of Scott Hayes and Caleb Gannon in Newton, Massachusetts, which was discussed here when it happened I believe. Hayes had his legal weapon on him, openly carried in a holster, while at a pro-Israel protest. Gannon took offense to this, ran across the street, and tackled Hayes. Hayes shot Gannon during the struggle. No nasty SYG in Massachusetts; Hayes was prosecuted and strong-armed into accepting pre-trial probation: he loses his license to carry, he has to take a course on "civil discourse" and he's banished from the city of Newton.
Gannon also got pre-trial probation.
So in Massachusetts, you can physically attack a man without lawful provocation and if he shoots you for doing so, the state basically says you're both equally at fault.
The issue in that case wasn't that he had an opportunity to retreat but didn't, but that the force used was disproportionate to the threat. Gannon committed a pretty clear case of misdemeanor assault and battery, but that's it. There was no gun involved, no other dangerous weapon, no immediately obvious risk of suffering severe bodily injury. There was certainly the possibility of sever injury or death, to be sure, but that's the slippery slope that people warn about and which point you're proving; to pro-gun people, any physical contact is a potential justification for use of deadly force in response. You can brush off the grocery store sample above as hyperbole, but it's not too far off from what happened here.
Hayes was charged with a felony and he got off with a slap on the risk. You omitted the fact that pre-trial probation means that the above conditions only applied for 90 days following the agreement, at which point the case was dismissed. Prosecutors had a pretty clear-cut case of assault with a deadly weapon and they bent over backwards to ensure that they wouldn't have to try it and that the guy wouldn't even have a record. I'm not necessarily arguing that they should have nailed his ass to the wall, but this is about as light a sentence as you can expect. As for Gannon, if he hadn't gotten shot he'd probably be facing a similar sentence anyway, so I'm not sure what you think they were supposed to do to him. You can argue that he won't have a record, but he did get shot and will likely have some sort of permanent impairment because of it, so it's not like he got off too easy.
I think a lot depends on the context here. If you get attacked in empty alley at night by two unarmed guys, then it seems entirely plausible that they will kick you until you stop moving once you go down. If there are plenty of co-demonstrators around, it seems very likely that they would save you from being kicked to death.
Of course, attacking someone who is openly carrying is also a Darwin awards move, even more if you go to clinch fighting which could be seen as a precursor move for grabbing the gun yourself.
Not if you believe that the armed party was at high risk of killing an innocent person in the near future unless you intervened, and are choosing to risk your own life on a heroic attempt to stop them before they get that far. I would guess that this is what was going in in Gannon's head: he assumed that the only reason someone would bring a gun to such a situation would be that they planned to kill someone, and he fancied himself a hero. This is dumb, bordering on genuine paranoia, but if you take the assumption for granted then tackling the gunman is no "dumber" than any other desperate heroic act by an ordinary man.
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As is reasonable. When someone waves around a weapon, or has announced or otherwise demonstrated an intention to harm you, or is clearly too aggressive to de-escalate, and is physically capable of crippling or killing you, and leaving is not an option because he's already bearing down on you...then yes, of course you have to escalate as far as you have to in order to save yourself. Aside any legal or "moral" concerns, what else are you supposed to do? Gamble on your ability to BJJ your way out? Hope the other guy quits short of bashing your brains out? Bet on the police and paramedics to arrive in time to sew up all the holes the other guy cut into you?
All the Germans getting stabbed, pushed in front of trains or axed in the head by hobby terrorists sure are glad they didn't accidentally kill their assailants. Thank God we're not armed. We sure are morally superior to those savage Americans who just kill people for credibly trying to kill them!
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Other people are pointing out tackling, heads, etc. which I also agree with.
But when open carrying someone beginning to wrestle you or incapacitate you generally ends in them taking your gun and killing you with it. It's why cops always have to kill the guy committing "misdemeanor assault" because it's just the assailant's first step before murdering them.
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Am I alone in seeing this as so egregious to want this guy to go to jail for life or be given the death sentence? Oh you don't like that guy "having" a weapon so you're going to go there and punch him in the face? Well fuck you. I don't want to share a country with this kind of people and I'd be perfectly fine with the state becoming exactly the wet night-mare dream they have in their heads, but for real.
No. I remember this quote all the time lately. Arguing with leftist is impossible because they pretend not to know things. This guy is just pretending that getting tackled to the pavement, and then ground and pounded is just no big deal. He knows. There is no way he doesn't know. This is all performative.
I've opined on this repeatedly. I'm still seeking the right terminology, the right descriptors for the phenomena. I like "Unidirectional Knowledge", but there are aspects of demoralization to it as well, when Yuri Bezmenov is saying you can shower the demoralized individual in limitless true facts, and they will still not be able to perceive the truth. Maybe an element of demoralization is a fear of thinking any unapproved thoughts, a terror of noticing something you aren't supposed to notice, and then being exiled from the tribe. But the bottom line is, they stick to pre-approved talking points they picked up from others, and they never have their own thought about it. That the talking point conflicts with other talking points is a thought they are no longer capable of having. That the talking point might actually justify the other sides actions if applied universally is also not a thought they are capable of having. You don't think about the talking point, you repeat it to ward off the thoughts people are trying to make you have. Thoughts are evil. Famous leftist of yore described this as "mind killing" themselves, and they were very adamant about it.
Regardless of the topography of the phenomena, that's what you are arguing against.
That or a troll.
I suspect that a lot of what you interpret as "pretending not to know things" is "not knowing things" - and that latter in the profound sense, the sense of not really grokking that a physical reality exists independent of the narrative and social games. Living on simulacrum level 3 or even 4. Some of it is also "not knowing things" in the less-profound sense of "not knowing these specific things due to insufficient brainpower/attention to derive them from first principles (NB: Zoomer attention is scarce due to smartphones/social media) and due to a total lack of paths for others to feed the person the correct answers due to censorship".
And, of course, some of it's just a mistake on your part, as you admitted to here (good job there), and some of it (though relatively-little) hits the mark.
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I'm going to respond here, but I'm going to tag @FistfulOfCrows, @Southkraut, @JeSuisCharlie, @self_made_human, @zeke5123a, @ulyssesword, and @The_Nybbler because all of these comments are in the same vein and merit similar responses. I understand the concern that things like punching, tackling, etc. can result in serious injury or even death. My issue is that, regardless of the true degree of risk, it is built into the criminal law that some kinds of attacks are inherently more dangerous than others, regardless of the actual injury inflicted, and penalties for those acts that we view as especially dangerous are increased accordingly. I'm going to use Pennsylvania as an example but it's similar everywhere; suppose you have the same Hayes attack except instead of it ending with Gannon being shot, they roll around for a while and Gannon is either stopped or withdraws, and Hayes doesn't suffer any injuries. Gannon would be charged with simple assault and, assuming no prior record, sentenced from anywhere between 30 days of Restorative Sanctions (fines, community service, restitution, etc.) and 1 year of probation. By the same token, if instead of tackling Hayes Gannon shoved a gun in his face, he'd be charged with aggravated assault causing fear of serious bodily injury, with a dangerous weapon enhancement, and, again assuming no prior record, sentenced to 9–18 months of jail time.
I used examples that didn't involve any injury because the law recognizes that apprehension of injury is sufficient to invoke criminal liability. In turn, the differing severity of penalties reflects a presumed greater level of apprehension that arises from attacks involving dangerous weapons compared with attacks that involving strong arming. The law entitles one to defend oneself using force proportional to the threat. If we say that punching and tackling are threats that warrant the use of lethal force, we are saying that they cause the same kind of apprehension that being shot at or threatened with a knife does. The logical conclusion, then, is that the criminal penalties for punching or tackling someone without causing injury should be similar to those that involve shooting at someone or threatening someone with a knife or gun without injury. Additionally, the idea of sentencing enhancements for using a "deadly weapon" or firearm doesn't make sense, insofar as these enhancements do not also apply to someone who punches or tackles someone. The upshot is that all assaults would now be aggravated assaults, excepting those where the level of contact is so minimal that in most cases they are rarely prosecuted anyway, such as the aforementioned shoving in a grocery store line.
If you think this should be the case, then you're entitled to your opinion, and I'm not here to argue the appropriate grading of crimes. What I would point out is that, if this is indeed your opinion, then the problem stretches far beyond one case in Massachusetts to thousands of cases annually in all 50 states and Federal jurisdiction. Simple assaults are among the most common cases prosecuted in the US, and if every case of punching or tackling, or whatever else you can say Mr. Hayes suffered placed the victim in apprehension of imminent death or serious bodily injury then the common practice of sentencing perpetrators to probation and community service is one of the grossest injustices imaginable.
On the other hand, if you do wish to preserve the practical distinction between aggravated assault and simple assault, then you have to recognize that there are few bright-line rules that govern when a victim is licensed to use deadly force. The privilege to use lethal force against an intruder in one's home without an independent showing of necessity is one, but even it is a creature of statute that only dates to the 1980s. While not a strict rule, an armed assailant is usually presumed to be sufficient grounds to use deadly force. But beyond that, it's hard, and I'm not going to fault a prosecutor for deciding to charge a shooting when there is no applicable bright line standard that says he shouldn't. It ultimately comes down to a question of reasonableness, and I can't think of a better way to determine that question than to present the evidence to a cross-section of the community and ask them. If you can't convince a single member of a 12-member panel that you're actions were reasonable given the circumstances, then it's a good indication that they weren't.
I think you are making a bad distinction. What someone would be charged with is somewhat orthogonal to whether a person has reasonable fear of material harm to limb or life.
And honestly crim law is a mess in that the same action can result in wildly different outcomes (eg Persons A and B can shoot C and D respectively. C could live but D dies. It isn’t obvious that A deserves a lesser sentence compared to B). Why demand consistency between self defense claims and how someone would be charged?
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I think you're missing the critical element here: the court's judgements are made after the fact, when the incident is resolved and all the consequences are clear. And in particular, the relevant point is not the distinction between simple and aggravated assault, but whether the attack resulted in injury or death. In that context it makes perfect sense to only charge the attacker for what actually occurred. If there's no injury, then that'll be assault (of one flavor or the other), but if precisely the same actions resulted in death, as you acknowledge is possible, then much more serious murder/manslaughter charges come into play.
But the victim of an attack doesn't have the benefit of hindsight. The probability of those outcomes depends on the nature of the assault, but it's certainly nonzero for punching or tackling. And past that, how could the victim possibly know their attacker means to leave things there and not cave their skull in once they're beaten? I mean, probably not, but what faith should the victim of a violent assault have in the good intentions of their attacker?
So it's wrong to say that Hayes was merely assaulted and it was thus inappropriate for him to respond with deadly force: it was impossible for him to know whether he was being merely assaulted or if the attack would result in his injury or death, whether by accident or intention.
But that is what the self defense rules try to adjudicate, and I still feel the outcome here is wildly unfair. I suppose the sticking point for me is that I think that by virtue of choosing to engage in criminal violence, the attacker has (morally) forfeited their right to have their intentions judged charitably by their victim. That is: once it's established that the attacker was in fact unjustified in their attack, self defense should be judged with the presumption that the attacker was trying to kill their victim.
I'm struggling to see the downside to this rule: if you don't want to get shot for assaulting someone, you can just not assault them. If you choose to anyway, why should society value your wellbeing over your victim's, however disproportionate the ratio? If you think it's unfair to get shot over a simple punch, you can, again, just not punch anyone, and thereby avoid the unfairness. I wouldn't support the death penalty for such violence after the fact, but self defense is different in that it can prevent the criminal harm from occurring at all, which has a much stronger moral case than the normal deterrence/retribution/incapacitation justifications for punishment.
(Well, I suppose I could see an exception for minors and perhaps the impaired, provided the victim is aware of that state.)
What you're missing here, and the reason I limited my examples to cases where there is no injury, is that the actual injury is only one component of the crime. A strong arm attack can be aggarvated assault in the right circumstances, including if the injuries are severe enough. But the other component is apprehension of imminent harm, and we grade simple assault lower in this respect because of a recognition the the amount of harm anticipated by the intended target of a missed punch is lower than that of the intended target of a missed shot. If you're arguing that lethal force is necessary in cases of unarmed attacks (and with no special circumstances) where the victim is not injured on the theory that you don't know what is going to happen and the attack could result in serious injury or death, you're saying that the amount of apprehension the victim of such an attack suffers is comparable to that of someone who was shot at but not hit.
Obviously the apprehension is greater in the latter case. It's also greater if one is shot at with an anti-materiel rifle than with a pistol. My argument is that all three cases clearly exceed the threshold that (morally) justifies lethal self defense: that it is plausible that your (criminal) assailant will kill or seriously injure you, given your (lack of) knowledge of the situation and their intentions. Allowing yourself to be tackled to the concrete is very likely also allowing your head to be repeatedly slammed into the concrete, if that's your attacker's intentions, and you ought to have the right to assume that is your attacker's intentions, given their demonstrated criminal disregard for your wellbeing.
As for where the line actually is? I agree with u/self_made_human that a slap does not meet this threshold. A light shove or shoulder check doesn't. Any attack that neither carries any meaningful risk of serious injury or death nor puts your attacker in a substantially better position to seriously injure or kill you if they wanted doesn't meet the standard. If the attack has ended (and it's reasonable for you to realize that it has), there also ends your right to self defense. If the assailant is defending themself from your criminal violence, you have no right to self defense.
It's reasonable for the court to distinguish between these levels of apprehension of injury, provided the assailant is alive to be judged, just as it is reasonable for them to distinguish between premeditated and unpremeditated murder: that does not imply that unpremeditated (attempted) murder doesn't justify lethal self defense, nor does it imply that simple assault can't meet that standard either.
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I would agree. It is grossly unjust.
When Decarlos Brown was released for the 14th time I actually think that somebody thought they were making the world a kinder, more empathetic, and higher trust place. However what they were actually doing was rolling the dice with someone's life for a 14th time. Sooner or later the dice were going to come up either "Daniel Penny" or "Iryna Zarutska".
Don't all racists?
What are you trying to say?
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(FYI, it's spelled ulyssessword, with the second double-s)
That's an unreasonable level of foresight to base your actions on. Suppose that Gannon grabbed his skull and smashed it into the curb. Could Hayes have legally stopped it beforehand?
I'm actually okay with a light sentence if Gannon withdraws early. The court can know (with the benefit of hindsight) that it wasn't a serious attack, and treat it accordingly.
Hayes didn't have that hindsight. How is he supposed to tell the difference between your scenario and mine? I asked downthread if Hayes should have waited until he was dead or unconscious before defending himself, and I'll ask again here.
As another scenario, imagine that this shooting went the same until 4:27, but the officer fumbled his draw and the axe-wielder calmly stopped and explained that he had recovered a murder weapon (right here in his hand!) and urgently wanted help at the nearby crime scene.
There wouldn't have been a crime at all, and yet it was still a good shoot. Since I have no problem with (extremely stupid) non-crime justifying lethal force, you can guess what my stance on minor crime justifying it is.
Yes, depending a bit on the specifics. Gannon meets the threshold.
As I said above, the court has hindsight. It can know the attacker's state of mind based on the actions they took afterwards. If they took a couple swings then left, they weren't serious about the attack and can justly receive a minor punishment.
Aggravated assault make up about 25% of all assaults. The victim has access to some evidence that can distinguish between a ending-at-purely-simple assault and a soon-to-be-aggravated assault, but that baseline 25% makes me awfully apprehensive. Getting tackled and beaten on would very easily be enough evidence to tip me over to the "aggravated" side.
My apologies for the misspelling but I'm glad you found the post! I get what you're saying with the first argument, but the same could be said about someone who shoots and misses. Suppose the perpetrator only intended to scare the victim and used a gun he loaded with blanks, and an inspection of the gun proves it was loaded with blanks and the perpetrator told several people beforehand that he was going to scare the victim. The victim was not, at any point, in danger of being injured. We can prove this with hindsight. I think we both agree that the victim would have been privileged to use lethal force, but assuming he did not, do we only charge the perpetrator with simple assault since we know, with hindsight, that the victim wasn't in any danger?
There's a specific carveout for guns, but otherwise yes. If it had been a prop knife, an inflatable sledgehammer, or other imitation non-gun weapon, then it would be a simple assault and nothing more.
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I think you're well aware that you could be on video being punched several times in the face by a guy who looks like Nikolai Valuev, and taking a lethal self-defense claim to a jury in Massachusetts would STILL be a crapshoot. Anyway, the prosecutor isn't presenting the evidence to a cross-section of the community and asking them. The prosecutor is bringing the evidence to a cross section of the community and telling them. That is, the prosecutor who has brought this case has already decided that it was not self defense and is arguing before the jury that it was not. The jury is not advising the prosecutor on a point he is not sure about.
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My god, you do have theory of mind! I apologize. Yes. Yes. Yes.
I could go on.
Yes, the entire reason most people think more aggressors need to be shot (preferably dead) is because the Justice System keeps just dumping them back on our streets to terrorize and eventually murder us.
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Of course I agree with you, but then again I suppose we're on the same side of the Culture War.
And then I imagine that on the other side, they say much the same about us. How we all just imagine ourselves as Clint Eastwood. How we valorize and glorify unnecessary violence. How our policies promote and provoke suffering. How we all just parrot the same lines to signal our tribal allegiance. How we're not thinking for ourselves, how we cannot conceive of the better world that's possible if and when people just look past their indoctrination and seriously devote themselves to being better. How we just refuse to see evidence that contradicts our entrenched beliefs.
They could say that. But that would all be orthogonal to what I'm pointing out.
Look, any world view with enough sophistication will detach from reality. There will probably be contradictions on the margins. Weird word games you can play as gotcha's. One I heard lately was "If God is everywhere, is God also in hell?" Sometimes it cracks me up that the universal escape for any contradiction is "It's a mystery of faith."
But all that is a separate issue from a world view that nakedly contradicts itself from moment to moment. Police are moving back a BLM protest, and knock down a frail old man fracturing his skull? The left shouts about how that was an illegal use of lethal force! BLM protestor charges across the street and ground and pounds a counter protestor? Come on, what's the big deal? Sometimes you just have to take a beating. There is no ideology or world view tying this together except, "Fuck you, that's why". But they can't admit to that, so instead the news programs people with arguments as soldiers, and then they go out and do it for free.
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I can think of a number of cases where "both sides sound similar, so both sides don't care about the truth" is just blatantly false. Go find one of our local Holocaust deniers who are capable of speaking with a completely straight face, for instance. Or a creationist.
"The other side thinks the same thing about us!" is just a case of typical-minding and being a quokka. Because you are sincere doesn't mean that the other side is, and there's no shortcut that lets you make generalizations about all the cases where two sides sound the same. Sometimes the other guy really is out to get you.
Creationism has too many epicycles where a low-IQ conspiracy theory would suffice to just write off as 'doesn't care about truth'.
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Given how easy it is for a bad fall to cripple or end someone, and how unless you actively practice a relevant martial art you are now effectively at the mercy of your attacker, I would argue that once someone has been knocked to the ground they are squarely inside the "in reasonable fear for your life" box.
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I've seen too many head injuries from physical trauma to think that a tackle followed by someone mounting me isn't an unacceptable risk of serious injury. One bad fall, you can strike your noggin and just die, and even a concussion is not pleasant nor harmless.
It's not like even doing it recreationally/professionally in full-contact sports doesn't cause serious harm, and that's with trained athletes in great physical condition.
Something like getting slapped in the face? I won't condone lethal force. But something like a serious punch to the face from an adult male or tackle and an attempt to batter me into submission is something I would excuse, even if I prefer less lethal options. Those who don't want to be shot in such a scenario should ideally not be committing such acts.
I can appreciate that the risk of being tackled, or punched, or kicked, or whatever is greater than the general public appreciates. But can you tell me with a straight face that it's comparable to being shot or stabbed? Because that's the current standard. You can argue that the standard should be changed, and that's fine, but by that same token the penalties for punching someone without killing them should be comparable to those for shooting at someone without killing them.
Yes. Having some familiarity with the common outcomes of all three; If you give me the choice between getting my skull cracked open, getting shot or stabbed, or getting set on fire. I am going to choose the option of getting shot or stabbed every single time, it's not even up for debate.
That was not the question which @Rov_Scam asked, which was if you would rather be tackled or shot.
One outcome of tackling is a fractured skull, but it is not particularly likely. One outcome of getting shot is to get a bullet through a vital organ or major artery. My gut feeling would place p(fractured skull|tackled)=0.1, and p(life threatening gunshot wound|shot)>0.1.
Depends on what you're getting shot with. A non-trivial percentage of the decline in homicides over time in America has been street-level criminals switching over to weapons shooting smaller bullets from .45's, magnum revolvers, and sawn-off shotguns.
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No, the question for self defense is not whether you are perfectly proportional with your defense but whether you have a reasonable belief your attacker may seriously harm or potentially kill you. Once you do that, you ca. use lethal force while the threat remains.
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The mere threat of being shot or stabbed is enough to permit self defense, you don't have to wait until you're bleeding out to fight back. He actually was tackled, not just threatened with bodily contact.
Actually tackling someone is at least as threatening as aggressively brandishing a knife or gun, and both might justify lethal self defense. If Gannon had been shot as he was approaching, then I'd be a lot more sympathetic to your argument.
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If you are carrying a handgun or a knife openly and someone tackles you, you are at risk of being shot or stabbed.
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Can't find that in Massachusetts law anywhere. I did find a case where throwing a radio at a cop is considered deadly force.
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Comparable? Everything is comparable, even apples and oranges (they're both fruit). I don't claim that being punched is as risky as being shot or stabbed. But being punched can, depending on a variety of factors, cause permanent injury or death.
Since I think being slapped is so low risk it doesn't count for me (for almost every reasonable scenario), I'm clearly considering thresholds. Sneezing can kill you, and sneezing on someone can kill them too. I would rather that we didn't go around shooting people on the bus for not having a hanky at hand.
Note that I specifically suggested that actuarial evidence or a proper risk analysis be used to set the standards. In this particular instance, the facts (as presented here) would make me imagine that I would be in sufficient fear of permanent injury or death to not worry very hard about how I get out of it. I extend the same courtesy here, to people getting jumped by someone with clearly belligerent intent. Being tackled or shoved to the ground is rather different to being yelled at or having the finger flipped at you.
I also expect that the establishment of a norm that starting physical violence without cause might end in being shot would have a chilling effect. I can't recall the last time I attacked anyone in the past few decades, so I can live with the risk.
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Gannon ran across the street and literally tackled Hayes to the ground. And was still on top of him when Hayes shot him. That's not a "grocery store sample" or anything like it.
And it's still not to the level where one can take claims that an objective person would have been in reasonable apprehension of death or serious bodily harm at face value.Why not let a jury decide?
Pardon my French, but this is stupid as shit. Like do I have to actually wait for the fractures to open up in my skull before it becomes self-defense? Have you ever been in a fight outside of a video game? You know it's not like fists deal stun damage and guns deal health damage, right?
As Rittenhouse prosecutor Thomas Binger said, "sometimes you have to take a beating". If this absolutely enrages you, you know what side of the culture you're on.
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Well then, call me unreasonable.
What is that level? Would Hayes have to be dead before he had a "reasonable apprehension of death or serious bodily harm", or merely unconscious? I don't see much room for escalation after rushing across the street, tackling someone to the ground, and continuing to fight with them.
because it's bare-faced lawfare to charge people with a crime despite them acting good. Also, because there shouldn't be a reasonable chance of conviction.
Locally, there's a (possibly apocryphal) story of a man charged with unsafe storage of a firearm. Thieves broke into his house when he was away on vacation, stole his guns, and proceeded to commit crimes with them. The police thought that he did not secure the guns well enough to prevent access (obviously, since they weren't secure enough to prevent the criminals from accessing them), and charged him with unsafe storage.
He had to go to court to argue that a locked, properly installed safe is appropriate for storage, and jackhammering it out of the basement before bringing it to a welding shop to open could defeat reasonable precautions.
Do you support the (possibly hypothetical) police that saw a hole in the concrete slab, but decided to charge him anyways? Why not let a jury decide?
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Yes it obviously is. Now what?
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Maybe your argument would hold water if we still lived in the society of the 1940s, where men at least appeared to be under the impression that they could engage in sporting fisticuffs without having their head purposely smashed into the concrete.
We don’t live in that world anymore.
I was taught by my elders in the way they believed a man should fight. Sportingly, punches and wrestling, knees and elbows frowned upon, let the opponent back up to his feet as many times as necessary until he accepts defeat. No lawyers after the fact, no thoughts of revenge for the loser, move on with your lives.
That was laughably bad advice once I hit the real world.
Roundabout way of saying that I am an objective person and I take Mr. Hayes’ claims of reasonable apprehension of death or serious bodily harm at face value.
I'm fairly sure in both the 1940s and now, if men wish to engage in sporting fisticuffs, there's a protocol for doing it. You might walk up to them and insult them, and when the verbal argument gets heated you suggest taking it outside. Or the bartender or the bouncer makes the suggestion. Maybe there's some pushing and shoving first. You don't run across the street and clobber them.
Bar fights as described by people who like to get in them are not protocol heavy interactions.
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Anecdotally, I don’t think this actually stands anymore. I’ve seen a number of situations where people have been ungracious losers (pulling knives), or ungracious winners (kicking on the ground). I used to enjoy getting into fights outside bars when I was younger, but the vibe changed somewhere down the line.
In fairness, I wasn’t a young man in the 40s, although I was in the 20th century, marking me as an old. But I also grew up in a backwards place that was tight-knit and unblessed by diversity at the time.
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Not even close..
[previous discussion]
Let me ask you a question. Consider the following scenario: The facts in the Hayes case are the same, except instead of crossing the street, Gannon stays on his side of the street and brandishes a gun in a manner obviously intended to intimidate. Is Hayes privileged to shoot Gannon? If Hayes doesn't shoot Gannon, what crimes, if any, should Gannon be charged with?
Massachusetts doesn't have a specific brandishing statute (to my surprise!), but mostly wraps it up in the assault-with-weapon-without-battery statute. That, too, needs more than the mere presence and visibility of a firearm, and I'd argue too much more. But there's still a lot short of actually pulling the trigger that can trigger the law.
Depends. Do you mean "brandishing" in the colloquial sense of showing a firearm, or in strict legal sense of having seriously threatened the victim? In addition to the CorneredCat essay I've linked before and I'll link again, as a matter of law, in Massachusetts:
There may be cases where the colloquial brandishing is sufficient to count; I'd certainly argue the moral case where someone points a gun directly at someone, and the law might agree with me (and would in most states; in Mass it's kinda a clusterfuck). But the mere presence and visibility of the firearm is not on its own sufficient. Meanwhile, there is a narrow band where an aggressor can have "engaged in 'objectively menacing' conduct with the intent to put the victim in fear of immediate bodily harm" without a reasonable person seeing that as fear of imminent grievous bodily harm as required for self-defense law to apply... but it'd be really hard to do with a gun.
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