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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.
I'm pro second amendment and pro self defense, but the one thing that makes me pause is the attitude evinced by a lot of pro-SYG arguments that any physical attack justifies lethal retaliation. I strongly believe that we, the men of today's America, don't do enough mutual combat, and that mutual combat exceptions to law should be expanded rather than retracted.
The historical norm was that boys and men got into fights. No normal male got to adulthood without getting into a scrap, and this might be punished lightly by parents or other authority figures, but the law ignored it unless it reached an extreme. It was understood as a normative value that there was a difference between punching and deadly force or the use of a firearm, and that boys should get into a few scraps in their lives. Instead today we have an attitude that ever getting into a physical fight is rare, and where it does happen it is acceptable to persecute any party to the fight.
In old cowboy movies, which set the moral tone for America from the 20s to the 70s, it was standard that two cowboys would get into a fistfight while wearing guns on their hips, and the one that went for his gun first was the bad guy, who would be prosecuted for murder if he killed the guy punching him. This is corroborated in well researched books and first hand historical accounts as the standard in the old west. A SYG standard that allows you to kill someone for punching is antithetical to the cowboy code.
Instead we've replaced traditional ethics with a feminized world where all physical contact is treated as a deadly threat, where boundaries are set such that all fighting is illegal and both morally and physically dangerous because of that boundary. We're raising our boys to act like scared old women.
Boys getting into fights in school has seen an unprecedented decline in the past thirty years
This is an entire human experience, universal to males in the past, now rare. Symptom or cause of the feminization of society, you decide, I lean towards both. Zero tolerance policies towards violence have been a disaster.
There's always somebody in these conversations who talks about weird edge cases. You could get pushed and fall over and crack your skull open, you could get killed by one punch because there was some blood clot in your brain waiting to burst onto the scene. I ask these people: how did our ancestors ever manage to live? They must have been dying left and right from unlucky punches. That doesn't seem to be the case, it's an almost unattested to phenomenon before modernity.
The rare possibility of physical violence is a good thing for social regulation. So much of obnoxious behavior we see today is the result of its lack. Over expansive definitions of self defense that effectively make any form of physical violence a justification for homicide will make this worse, not better.
This was a very ritualized combat. It was between peers. The greatest age/strength difference was between a young braggart/fool and a tough grizzled man -- anyone throwing a punch at e.g. an elderly gimpy bartender was a bad guy, unless it was an accident for comic relief. It was obvious a fistfight was going to start, and very often the men would remove their gunbelts first. I seriously doubt it was that formal in the real Old West, but the movie version doesn't resemble what gun rights advocates call something worthy of lethal self defense today. None of the stories in the article resemble that; they all involved the offender having a lethal weapon, and in the only case it wasn't a gun, the defender was elderly. The protest guy also doesn't resemble that.
I think few gun rights advocates think you should be able to engage in mutual unarmed combat and then lawfully pull a gun and shoot the other guy because you're losing. But while self-defense opponents like to bring up that scenario, first of all they don't want the mutual unarmed combat to be lawful at all. And second, I think it's pretty rare. Less rare with a knife (because as @BreakerofHorsesandMen noted, a lot of people aren't very honorable), but it's the gun cases which tend to make the news. The cases brought up here are all easily distinguishable from that.
I'm not discussing any particular case here, I'm not interested in playing games with fact patterns. What concerns me is the cultural message sent. I think we need to enable and encourage more physical confrontation with less fear of legal consequences as a result. We need to encourage more scenarios where punching someone is legally justified. We can't do that if we also say, any punch is a deadly assault proportional to a gunshot. Those two theories are incompatible.
What I'm pointing to is a general attitude we're inculcating in our society, in our young men, that physical violence is completely outlawed and impossible. Quotes from throughout this thread, posters untagged I'm (ironically) not trying to start something with anyone:
And the problem with inculcating this kind of "punching someone is a deadly assault, is never the answer, it is totally verboten on pain of being shot legally" is that it enables all manner of obnoxious behavior that can't be solved otherwise.
There's a lot of talk throughout this thread by pro-gun folks that it's important for citizens to be able to defend themselves from deadly assaults. I agree. I also think that citizens need to be able to defend themselves from obnoxious behavior, not with a gun, but with a fist. A world in which I can slug someone for harassing me in the street is a world with less harassment in the streets, a world in which I can't slug someone for any reason unless they punch me first is one with more harassment in the streets.
This seems like it should be totally justified to me. If we say that a punch is a deadly assault, and that if the punched fall down they're justified in opening fire, is one where running up to someone and being obnoxious is legalized.
Then you're basically just blowing smoke.
Discouraging self-defense by gun does not get you to "more scenarios where punching someone is legally justified". You can tell because those who discourage self-defense don't want punching anyone to be legally justified; instead, what they want is for people to submit to being attacked and then call the police (who will typically do little to nothing). This does not get you nearer to your desired state.
Encouraging self-defense by gun doesn't interfere with getting to "more scenarios where punching someone is legally justified" either. Unless the law can't be made to support the complexities I referred to in my previous post. Which is quite possible -- but in that case, we're forced to choose between "law-abiding people must accept victimization by physically-tougher criminals" and "one can defend oneself with lethal force against criminals".
I'm not sure we are. Currently, I'm already victimized by both the physically tougher and the physically weaker miscreants, until they cross the line where I can shoot them I don't really have any right to defend myself from obnoxious behavior.
I should be clear: I'm all for self defense, I have a permit to carry (though I rarely carry), and I strongly believe in SYG against deadly threats. The only argument I'm having here is whether a punch or other light physical assault is automatically a deadly threat which justifies deadly self defense. The answer is no, and it's not just no, it's no and saying yes deeply undermines the fundamental basis of human civilization.
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