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PaperclipPerfector  1mo ago (text post)   25123 thread views

Culture War Roundup for the week of October 27, 2025

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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.

Is Hayes privileged to shoot Gannon?

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:

Here, there was evidence that the victim had a revolver in his possession. The defendant also had told Donna Pierni that the reason the victim was dead was because he was going to kill Marion Scolles and himself. There was, however, no evidence to show when the victim had made these alleged threats to the defendant. See Commonwealth v. Amaral, 389 Mass. 184, 189 (1983)(threat must be of an "immediate and intense offense"). There was also no evidence that the victim had threatened the defendant with a revolver or committed any overt act against Marion Scolles or the defendant constituting an assault or threat sufficient to place the defendant or Scolles in actual and reasonable apprehension of grievous bodily harm or death.

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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