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PaperclipPerfector  7d ago (text post)   31421 thread views

Culture War Roundup for the week of January 5, 2026

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I fail to see how this is a useful analogy for a case where the suspect is already in possession of a deadly weapon, prior to restraint.

I think grouping cars, which most Americans have, in with deadly weapons for this purpose, while technically correct, is a good example of the non-central fallacy. "In order to make a living in this country, you need [thing]. If you have [thing], then police are entitled to kill you if you try to escape arrest" is rather Catch-22-adjacent.

I think grouping cars, which most Americans have, in with deadly weapons for this purpose, while technically correct, is a good example of the non-central fallacy. "In order to make a living in this country, you need [thing]. If you have [thing], then police are entitled to kill you if you try to escape arrest" is rather Catch-22-adjacent.

The most dangerous thing the average person does in any day in America is get on the road and trust other people to do a good job driving. Adding an additional element of some miscreant going 90 MPH in a 30 and blowing multiple lights/stop signs so they can avoid a petty traffic, misdemeanor, or warrant is not something I would encourage the legal system to incentivize.

And also, when did this trend of people just basically saying civil disobedience = no consequences thing happen? You can protest the law peacefully and boringly with a sign and a lame chant. Going out and stopping cops from arresting rapists because you think rape is good doesnt mean you get a free pass just because you cast a frame. In civil disobedience you serve your time, then convince the public and win a later victory as part of the sacrifice of substantial portions of your life.

Otherwise, everyone could claim to do this and face nothing. Maybe Timmy McVeigh's complaints about the Feds were legit. Why dont we just let him out on his own recognizance for a few decades and then arrest him when he is 99 and we have, as a society, finally determined his cause was bunk.

I think grouping cars, which most Americans have, in with deadly weapons for this purpose, while technically correct, is a good example of the non-central fallacy.

This is pretty silly. The thing that makes a deadly weapon a deadly weapon is "will it kill you if used against you". In the case of cars, they aren't considered deadly weapons until they are being used in a potentially deadly manner, which makes perfect sense. ArjinFerman could have better phrased it as "already in use of a deadly weapon", but the fundamental fact remains: her car could have killed the guy had this gone slightly differently.

What do you make of knives? They're pretty uncontroversially deadly weapons, also have non violent uses and I would guess more Americans have at least one than cars.

I think the differenciator for deadly weapon shouldn't be whether there is a non violent use for it, but more what the likely intent is if someone attacks you with that object. If someone attacks you with a knife, or a car, you can surmise the intent is deadly, or at least the attacker has little regard whether his attack will cause death. Unlike a taser, or some blunt weapons (like a baton; a hammer I would probably consider lethal).

If a cop walks up to you as you are holding a knife for whatever reason, grabs your hand and yanks it to have the knife at his own throat, I also do not think that this should generate a right for the cop to then kill you in self-defence if you try to pull the hand away (in a way that might slice the cop's throat in the process). Actually this seems like another good example for my viewpoint.

Example legal wording from a cursory search:

The relevant provision of the sentencing guidelines provides:

(1) An offender has possessed a deadly weapon if any of the following were on the offender’s person or within his immediate physical control:

(i) Any firearm, whether loaded or unloaded, or

(ii) Any dangerous weapon [including a knife], or

(iii) Any device, implement, or instrumentality designed as a weapon or capable of producing death or serious bodily injury where the court determines that the defendant intended to use the weapon to threaten or injure another individual.

Setting aside the question of the appropriate response to a fleeing suspect, this (and a lot of comments here) seem to be glossing the fact that fleeing the cops in a motor vehicle is a choice, just as much as fleeing the cops with a gun is. You can always attempt to flee on foot if you decide to flee.

Responding to you and @ArjinFerman simultaneously, the premise here is that more than one choice has been made: yes, the person the cops were trying to arrest chose to try to flee with a motor vehicle (resp. with the wire/handcuffs), but the cops previously chose to position themselves in the way of the car such that fleeing would entail driving the car at them, resp. chose to attach the wire. One can take the contrived example further - what if the cop holds a gun to their own head and says, "I will kill myself if you escape"? What if they do this using some scifi commitment device that forces them to follow through on this promise? (Is creating exploding collars for that and marketing them to police the next big startup idea?) What if the cop's on a PIP and will get fired if he makes another mistake and is known to be depressed, so the person who is getting arrested knows that the cop will likely kill himself if he gets away?

yes, the person the cops were trying to arrest chose to try to flee with a motor vehicle (resp. with the wire/handcuffs), but the cops previously chose to position themselves in the way of the car such that fleeing would entail driving the car at them, resp. chose to attach the wire.

Like I said, this is not a valid analogy. The reason they'd be wrong in the "attaching the wire" scenario is because they had the chance to restrain the suspect and chose to forgo it in favor of putting themselves in danger, not because they put themselves in harm's way in an attempt to restrain them. The latter is a completely normal part of police work. If it was somehow wrong, the police wouldn't be allowed to attempt to restrain any armed suspect.

Those contrivances all rely on the police being able (or willing) to do something that is extraordinary. Standing in front of a stopped vehicle is not extraordinary. It is something that an ordinary non-police person is allowed to do, for brief periods of time. It seems unremarkable that what an ordinary person is legally entitled to do, police should be legally entitled to do as well. Whether it is a good idea? Highly contingent, which is why I think broad policies either prescribing or proscribing are unwise.

Surely intent matters. Standing in front of a vehicle with evident intent to stop it from driving away, or even with intent to do a thing that you expect would make the driver want to drive away (think those people non-consensually starting to clean your windshield at traffic lights, or panhandling), I think, should be treated differently from just finding yourself there for unrelated reasons. I do not think a windshield hobo with a weapons license in that situation should get to shoot the driver in self-defense if the driver starts driving, either.

Intent does matter, which is why it matters whether it's someone who has the legal right to keep me there versus someone who does not. If two large men with guns come to my (home) door and ask to "have a chat," I'd be justified in stabbing them to escape if they're randos, but not if they're cops.

Supposing instead of any of these Rube Goldberg machines the person fleeing just decides to point a gun at the police and tell them he will shoot if they get any closer. Shouldn't the cops back off?

The answer to this question is prudential but at some point if you are going to enforce the law at all you have to escalate against resisters. This is true in principle regardless of edge cases.

That's presumably different, because in your setup the police did not set things up in such a way that you physically need to point a gun at them to attempt to escape [do something that is not normally taken to be punishable by death].

All right, supposing the police have someone cornered and his only plausible way out is to point the gun (he doesn't know movie karate that would allow him to defeat half a dozen cops unarmed). How is this different from the police having someone cornered and their only way out is to point a vehicle at a police officer? Shouldn't the duty to retreat be roughly analogous in both situations?

I don't think the distinction is hard to make. In the car case, the actual action (drive car forward) is instrumental to normal execution of the not-punished-by-death goal (escape), and the police freely chose to make a threat to their own safety a side effect of it; in the gun case, "point a gun at someone" is not part of any normal "escape" flow. Police standing in front of your car won't even prevent you from escaping normally, since you can easily run them over; the arrest-enhancing effect of blocking the path is entirely mediated through the circumstance that now it will be legal for police to kill you if you try to escape.

I think "normal" is doing a lot of heavy lifting here, and I don't think that's good. Firstly, (as discussed elsewhere) what's normal is for people who drive cars in the general direction of the police to get shot by the police if the police feel menaced by it. Secondly, what's normal has no direct bearing on what's good - if cops were normally threatened by gun-pointing escapees, that would be not resolve the question of whether or not shooting them is good or bad.

the arrest-enhancing effect of blocking the path is entirely mediated through the circumstance that now it will be legal for police to kill you if you try to escape.

This is untrue, anyone in a car with police officers blocking the way can attempt to dismount and flee on foot.

The general sentiment here seems to be that it's unfair that if you attempt to flee in a car you because could die, whereas normally you wouldn't die attempting to flee from the cops otherwise. But that's not necessarily true: if you flee from the cops on foot, and they pursue you, and you don't surrender, you could die. And in fact sometimes when this happens people get upset about the unarmed techniques that the police use to restrain people. And there's less outrage than deaths, almost certainly, because the rare Taser death or suspect-falls-off-of-a-building death aren't as much of a scissor statement.

Note that I am not arguing that the police should shoot at every car that maneuvers around them; for example, the police might be well advised, prudentially, to flee a car rather than engaging in a shootout in a crowded location, or a car could be traveling in such a way as to pose no objective threat to the car. And I agree that, generally speaking, cops should not step in front of a car that is already nearby and moving towards them to generate a pretext to shoot. But I do think asking the question "did the suspect do something that could reasonably endanger the life and safety of another person?" is a good question to start any inquiry about a law enforcement or self-defense shooting and the answer to that question is probably "yes" if you are pointing a car at someone, same as a gun.

in the gun case, "point a gun at someone" is not part of any normal "escape" flow.

How isn't it? The most obvious, reliable way of escaping the police would be to shoot them, then leave.

The "non-central fallacy" is a pretty dubious construct to start with, but in any case: no it's not. You can apply the same reasoning to the convoluted contraption from his scenario: handcuffs are not a deadly weapon, and neither is a wire, but they become one when the wire is wrapped around your neck. A car, by itself, is not a deadly weapon, but a car driving at someone is. There's a reason why they became so popular with Muslim terrorists.

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