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Culture War Roundup for the week of January 19, 2026

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Obviously the details are quite different,

Yes they are!

but I have trouble imagining generic bright lines that don't lean heavily on verboten characteristics: "of course the white woman wasn't trying to be a spree killer."

The best place to stop her if she was a spree killer would not have been to stand in front of her vehicle. Ross did only fire after she had hit him (slightly, because she was not aiming her car for him). If she had aimed for him, he would have been under her SUV before he had fired her first shot.

A person sitting in a car, even a bloody SUV, is not a similar level of danger as a armed suspect entering a school. You do not need to rely on protected characteristics to tell the difference. Some suspects are an imminent danger to the public and it is reasonable to require cops to risk their lives to stop them if it decreases the expected value of innocents dying. Some are not.

If Goods had already injured someone with a gunshot, then entered and locked a classroom, and shots had then be heard from the classroom, I certainly would have wanted Ross to breach that classroom and shoot her if she threatens him, not assume that as a liberal middle-class middle-age woman, she was likely only firing blanks from a prop gun and not trying to hurt anyone.

I suppose my interest here is that the two are at opposite ends of the "justified use of lethal force" scale: there is probably broad, but not universal agreement that the Good case is at least a regrettable case ("justified" is almost certainly more split), and that the Uvalde case is almost unconscionable in its lack of use of force (although this jury declined to convict in this specific case).

I was hoping to use this to better pin down clear boundaries for the acceptable range of force, but I don't see clear choices there still.