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I'm not sure how shooting a disarmed person in the back who is being restrained will ever be seen as "self-defense". A Tragedy, absolutely. An accident, sure I can grant that. But accidents that lead to death is manslaughter and the ICE agent should be tried for that. Mutual combat is far fetched.
I wrote about similar situations in one of my recent posts.
If you haven't been in a scuffle like this it is hard to convey.
Even if you do something (like disarm the guy), it takes awhile for everyone to be aware of that, even in a controlled environment. In a messy situation like this? Fuck no.
It looks bad, but if you had omniscient level understanding of everyone's moment to moment information and thought process you'd likely see that the thinking here was not the problem.
These things just aren't like the movies or how people think they are, which is one of the reasons why after the Good situation a lot of were like "no, stop doing this, no training and skill is enough, keep doing things like this and more unavoidable bad outcomes will happen. When not if."
A proper investigation would settle many of these disagreements of fact. Whether everyone now performing motivated reasoning for or against ICE will accept the results of such an investigation is unknown. But the last I heard, DHS has decided to investigate themselves and assigned the investigation to an org who has no training or experience in doing such a task and also doesn't have the equipment. That's troubling.
Lots of investigation and litigation did little to change any minds in the Rittenhouse case, even though it was immediately obvious it was one of the clearest self defense cases ever.
The Good case requires no investigation - all the necessary information was immediately available, it's obvious the shoot was fine. Further information only provided additional evidence Good was an idiot and may provide some rhetorical flourish.
This case is a tragedy, but again additional information isn't needed, it just might soften the view for some people who don't understand what is going on.
Most of the criticism is coming from people who don't have any understanding of how this works, in the context of a social milieu and lying media that lets this ignorance get passed around long enough to be fact.
Take a look at the Good case - you have a ton of armchair quarterbacking going frame by frame trying to find an excuse to blame Ice. People do not operate at those decision speeds. It's just attempts to retroactively justify outrage.
You can say that my clarity is false and you don't agree on the facts, but then we are just looking at a two screen world - any investigate is meaningless for truth seeking, it's just about rhetoric and propaganda.
If you're claiming it requires no investigation in order to change minds that can't be changed, I have no argument. Investigations are conducted in matters such as this because we are a nation of civilized people governed by rules and laws. That's what we conservatives are trying to conserve (among other things).
One of the growing conclusions that the anti-woke are coming to is that the left doesn't believe in rules and laws and is tired of having that used against them.
Noem calls this guy a domestic terrorist and everyone loses their mind. Everyone on their mother on the left call it an assassination or an execution? Silence.
If you play pure power politics don't be surprised if the other side starts doing that to.
I don't like it but you can't cooperative with defect bot.
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He was in the process of being restrained, but he was not actually restrained. If he had a gun, which he did for the majority of the altercation, then he could have drawn it.
If you didn't know he had been disarmed and you had mistaken reason to believe he was/had drawing/drawn a weapon, then yes you can shoot in self-defense. Shooting him in the back is irrelevant, because once you decide he is an imminent threat, you don't wait for him to turnaround and get the first shot. You shoot and you keep shooting to decisively eliminate the threat. Self-defense has to do with the perceived threat. You are in no real danger if someone draws a replica gun on you and threatens to shoot, but you can still act in self-defense if you don't know that it's a replica. The question is how reasonable was the perception of threat, and that is unfortunately a kind of squishy concept where law enforcement is usually given the benefit of the doubt.
For me, the Pretti shooting is an edge-case, even moreso than the Good shooting. I think the officer who shot first needs to be reprimanded in some fashion, but exactly how depends on details that cannot be gleaned from the videos. Firstly, it has to do with how much danger the officer thought he was in at that moment, not whether his evaluation of the danger was correct. Secondly, presuming his evaluation of the danger was incorrect, does that error rise to the level of criminal negligence? These questions are not easily answered by watching the videos.
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