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Notes -
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.
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'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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