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I can't get on board with setting the scene as "intent to use a deadly weapon (a car)". I use a car all the time, without any intent to use it is as a deadly weapon or for it to have any function as such. Sure, it is probably reasonable that if I murder someone with a car, it can be classified as murder with a deadly weapon, just as a baseball bat also seems like a deadly weapon if I swing it at someone's head. But I can bring a car or a baseball bat to my kid's school, and I have a lot of doubt that Good brought her car to the scene in order to take advantage of the car's potential function as a deadly weapon (i.e., to harm or to threaten). Mostly, it seems like they wanted to use the car's large mass to impede the path of the ICE vehicle, and also that the car was their transportation.
Let's say someone hits somebody with a car at a school. Should the lede really be that "The driver brought a deadly weapon (their car) to an elementary school?"
Using a car as transportation is not something I'd say qualifies as intending to use a deadly weapon.
Using a car's physical mass, and the threat of that physical mass to intentionally obstruct others? That is definitely crossing into weaponization territory.
Also what happens when Good's obstruction is determined to be illegal? If she is on foot the authorities can use their bodies to arrest and restrain her. If she is in a vehicle they need her to cooperate and leave the vehicle. If she decides instead to flee in that vehicle she has now created a hazardous car chase scenario. Even if she had not nearly run someone over and no one had shot her, she still did the wrong thing by driving away.
I doubt she was thinking through any of these things, but thats exactly the problem she escalated the danger of the situation for others by adding her vehicle to it. The fact that she was ultimately the one to get killed feels a little harsh to me, but if anyone was going to die that day for what happened I'd have most preferred it to be Good.
What about just using a car's physical mass, and NOT the threat of it, to intentionally obstruct others? Moving your car back and forth to block someone else's car is just using the physical mass, not threatening.
And if someone gets in the way of that physical mass while you are moving it?
At that point you are probably weaponizing the car, yes. My complaint is describing her as initially having been at the scene with the intent of weaponizing her car.
When you are repeatedly blocking/unblocking a street by moving your car back and forth across it, you are continually running the risk of somebody getting in your way -- for most values of 'somebody', the consequences of this risk will rest more on them than on you due to the physics of the matter; this can change quickly if they have brought their own weapons though. That's kind of the whole thing about weapons and self-defense -- it's all fun and games when you are the only one with a weapon.
I think of moving your car back and forth across the street as putting your car in other people's way, with the obstruction being not just physical but also that the other driver (ICE, in this case) can't reasonably choose to just ram your car. (Though this would have been a better outcome than what actually occurred.) Although I suppose you could also enforce your blockade by attempting to ram cars that try to go around your blockade, in which case your car would indeed by weaponized, that does not seem to be what was happening in this case.
When the ICE officers were on foot around the car yelling at the driver, I'm willing to say that the driver was weaponizing the car, treating it as an equalizer that would allow them to drive away even if the on-foot ICE officers didn't want them to.
The point being that even when your focus is on blocking other people in cars, there will also be pedestrians around who might wander into the hazard zone of your antics -- it's quite a lot like waving a knife or gun around in public. Even if you aren't planning to shoot anybody, you are being reckless with a (potential) weapon.
Waving a knife or gun around in public is not inherently dangerous the way that moving a car back and forth is; the gun and knife really present no danger at all beyond their function as weapon. Sure, a knife has physical properties that could make waving it or even holding it quite dangerous in a sufficiently crowded space, but it is also the case that restaurant kitchens, for example, exist. Although I am going the direction here of saying that waving around a weapon is less physically dangerous than driving a car, it suggests to me a lack of equivalence. At a protest or political event, I would completely agree that a gun has zero functionality except as violence or threat of violence, but a car clearly has lots of functionality. A car perhaps becomes much more of an inherent weapon/threat at a primarily pedestrian event, but this was a car moving back and forth on a street to block the way of another car.
Frankly, a car has lots of danger to pedestrians and other drivers even when used only as transportation. Think of heavy traffic. In a traffic jam, if I refuse to let someone in, I am effectively blockading them with a potentially deadly piece of mass. My threat is that they cannot run into me with their car without creating paperwork and financial consequences. I am using a similar threat if I aggressively force my way into their lane, as is someone who cuts me off. Some of this is happening at pretty low, non-fatal speeds, but some of it is pretty dangerous - none of it is brandishing a deadly weapon.
If we look at the Charlottesville protests, I think it is fairly obvious that the person who ran people over did not "bring a deadly weapon to the protest and then assault people with it." They were driving their car (a transportation device) away from the protest and found themselves crossing the pedestrian mall on an unfortunately crowded one-way street in which they encountered opposing protestors from what had been a heated event; bad things happened. (I used to live in Charlottesville and know the location of the incident well; I don't think it would have happened had the driver not had the bad luck to turn onto a street that was guaranteed to have these conditions.) Probably, in the case of both Charlottesville and Minnesota, the drivers had major errors in believing their cars to insulate them from interaction with pedestrians.
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