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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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A retired Las Vegas police officer walked free after fatally shooting a retired computer network engineer during a dispute over who had the right of way in a Walmart parking lot. Both men got out of their vehicles. Both were armed. The ex-officer said the retired engineer pointed a gun at him first.

This is a helpful demonstration of why I've pretty much completely soured on the idea of people carrying weapons for self-defense. Adding weapons to the mix is almost inherently escalatory, and the cases of genuine self-defense seem to be massively outnumbered by instances of simian chest-beating that got out of hand or someone pulling a gun to win an argument. I'm not sure I believe the survivor's claim, but who acted first in this instance is almost irrelevant. Both of these people decided they needed to bring lethal force as backup to the world's stupidest argument.

edit: I don't really care if you own an M1 Abrams for home defense or an M61 for plinking, but actively carrying seems to be overwhelmingly downside for just about everyone.

Are you sure this isn't just toxoplasma, where johnny the cop stabber being shot during an attempted armed robbery arouses no controversy, and only borderline cases become noted?

Usually the mechanism behind toxoplasma is that only borderline cases go viral. This isn't a tweet, though, it's a news article in one of the world's top newspapers, whose quoted thesis is that literal first sentence, "It’s easier than ever to kill someone in America and get away with it."

Even given the collapse in journalism, wouldn't you expect someone pushing that thesis to collect the most persuasive cases, not the most ambiguous? If Florida Methed-Up Chainsaw Man was something like the Rittenhouse shootings that had already gone viral nationally, that might make it an unavoidable choice of example to discuss, but right now the top Google hits for "Druzolowski" "de leon springs" are two Orlando TV stations, then after the WSJ article and a Daytona Beach TV station we get down to the dregs of a "Florida Man Friday" podcast episode.

I think the balance of the evidence is that genuine cases of murder or mutual combat being written off as self defense basically don't happen. Journalists trying to pick examples of self defense that should be illegal and picking floridamen shouting threats while trespassing is an indicator that claimed self defense killings are mostly good shoots.

There's probably some mutual combat that gets written off, but "two low-lifes get into a fight with blunt weapons only and one of them dies and the charges get dropped" probably barely even makes the paper. With a firearm, probably essentially never.

Doesn't this describe a fair amount of "gang violence"? We generally (for worse, IMO) look the other way about that, through some combination of what you described and ignoring it for political reasons, be it "we don't care about [redacted]" or "it'd have a disparate impact to prosecute those crimes".

I think most non-lethal gang violence just doesn't come to the attention of the police at all, or if it does, not with any useful information. And even the lethal stuff the killing most often goes unsolved.

That's exactly why homicides are used as a metric and proxy. They get reported via some route in almost every case.

Sure, but even the homicide clearance rate is abysmal. 56% cleared, but only 25% cleared by arrest. Some of those were probably "self defense" -- that is, one gang member attacked another for being in the wrong place or some other stupid reason, and lost the fight lethally. But whether they were or they weren't, nobody's talking, so a claim of self-defense doesn't even get raised.

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