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Wrong door shootings.

JoeMorgue said:
99% of the time we're not talking "stand your ground."

The original vague legal concept behind things like the Castle Defense and Stand Your Ground was (mostly) a simple right to self defense NOT being predated on having to try and escape FIRST and I'm mostly okay with that IN THEORY.

I've long argued against the "Hide under your bed like a good little victim, call the police, and wait for them to make the big scary bad man go away" mentality, not the least of which is because the police have no legal responsibility to actually do that. I reject, wholesale, any legal philosophy that requires the victims of crimes to be passive.

If someone is in my house I have a right to make them leave my house. How much damage inflicted on their person before they leave my house is up to them.

And no this doesn't give people carte blanch to ignore simple concepts like reasonable and appropriate force and de-escalation.
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Isn't there something in driving that you have a responsibility to try to avoid an incident? That if something is in the way on the road (including a pedestrian), your responsibility to to try to avoid them? Even if it means going in the ditch to do so. Therefore, if you just hit someone standing in the road, you can't claim that it was their fault for being there and that you don't have to try to avoid them.

That's basically what you are suggesting.

I think this is the problem that many have with SYG and CD laws - it's not that the concept is wrong, it's the application. At what point are you defending your castle? And on what ground are you standing? SYG has gottten to the point where people think you can just claim that you are a-scared of the mean-looking black kid on your front porch and shoot them pre-emptively (or a white woman pulling into your driveway? I agree, there is much more to that). Whether people are correct in that it applies to those cases does not mean much to the people who got shot. Sure, there is a fine line somewhere between standing your ground and not standing your ground, but neither of these cases are any where near that line.

They've turned into Jimbo in South Park. It's ok as long as you say, "Look out, Ned, it's coming right for us!!!"
 
Nessie said:
What an odd claim, shooting at someone and then claiming they did not mean to do them any harm.
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This is something that keeps popping up in the narrative around justifying murder in the name of "self defense but defined far beyond the point of sanity."

More and more people want to separate the intentional act of killing and the, frankly, "do you want to be a murderer?"

We've seen in some version in every one of the major cases of this type we've heavily discussed.

"Did you intend the action of pointing the gun at the person and pulling the trigger?"
"Yes."
"And you are aware that shooting people has a high chance of killing them, to the point that it's intellectually honest to say that if you shoot someone you want them to die?"
"Yes."
"So you intended to kill the person?"
"Yes, but that's not the same thing as me WANTING them to die."

Which is so insane I don't even know where to begin.
 
Nessie said:
https://www.theguardian.com/us-news..._medium&utm_source=Twitter#Echobox=1681995688

"A man whose girlfriend was shot dead after they pulled into the wrong driveway in upstate New York said their “high hopes and plans” were shattered in a single, brutal moment.
“I wanted to spend the rest of my life with her,” Blake Walsh, 19, told NBC of his girlfriend, Kaylin Gillis. “My world was taken from me.”
An attorney for the man charged with murdering Gillis, 20, argued that Kevin Monahan, 65, didn’t mean to harm anyone when he fired a gun from his porch."

What an odd claim, shooting at someone and then claiming they did not mean to do them any harm.
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What never heard of friendly fire?
 
pgwenthold said:
Isn't there something in driving that you have a responsibility to try to avoid an incident? That if something is in the way on the road (including a pedestrian), your responsibility to to try to avoid them? Even if it means going in the ditch to do so. Therefore, if you just hit someone standing in the road, you can't claim that it was their fault for being there and that you don't have to try to avoid them.
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There's a concept in legality called the "Last Clear Chance Doctrine" which basically means (and this a broad legal concept where the actual functional legal application is wide ranging, very scenario specific, and fiendishly complicated, ya dig?) even if the overall "situation" isn't your fault, if you had a clear opportunity to avoid making the situation worse you still have a legal obligation to do so. "Not my fault" is moral factor, often times even a very large one, not a moral blank check.

The classic and most common example is usually in traffic law. If someone fails to yield a right of way they cause the dangerous situation that does / could lead to an accident and that is a big factor sure, but doesn't mean everything the driver in the "right of way" does is valid. If the person who had the right of way still had a chance to avoid the accident between when right of way was "broken' and when the accident happens, it's still on them to do so.

It's why if someone cuts you off at a yield sign but you could have gotten out of the way but didn't and choose to hit him, "but he started it" is not a valid legal defense.

Long story short it's a legal doctrine that says "Even if you're the wronged party you still have a moral and therefore legal obligation to not make things worse then they needed to be. We recognize that as an aggrieved party you are probably reacting quickly to a situation you were not prepared for and for whom another party initially caused and allowances are made for that because that's fair and reasonable, but it's not a blank check.

That's basically what you are suggesting.
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Eeee... yeah somewhat. But I do think there is a valid distinction in here.

Mainly in I agree that problem is exactly that people are doing the self defense equivalent of "Seeing a guy standing in the road so I just floor and turn my wipers on and don't even try to brake or swerve." The problem exactly IS that people are (or pretending to) apply self defense with no concept of "Looking at the situation and reacting appropriately and with even the minimal amount of forethought and observation."

Also legally speaking "blame" is not a pie that if the other side eats to much you get to eat less. The other side being wrong isn't EXACTLY the same thing as you being right in some perfect 1:1 ratio.
 
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JoeMorgue said:
Next Door is the most insane social media platform and it's not even close.
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A few weeks ago there was someone on complaining that a group of kids had played "knock and run" - ONCE on her. It got so that people were contacting local schools to try and track down these hooligans. It was shameful. "The state of the world now, kids have no respect, parents should be ashamed, schools need to do better, back in my day, don't they know the upset this could cause someone, how it could make someone afraid." Note this was a single instance of them pressing the doorbell and running away. I mention this here because when you think about it this is why the 84 shot the innocent kid who was knocking on a door... Apparently, people are put in fear of their life if you use their doorbell!

(If I didn't avoid posting on there I would have pointed out the stories I have of playing knock and run, or my mother playing knock and run or indeed my grandmother playing knock and run. Generations of hardened criminals!)
 
JoeMorgue said:
This is something that keeps popping up in the narrative around justifying murder in the name of "self defense but defined far beyond the point of sanity."

More and more people want to separate the intentional act of killing and the, frankly, "do you want to be a murderer?"

We've seen in some version in every one of the major cases of this type we've heavily discussed.

"Did you intend the action of pointing the gun at the person and pulling the trigger?"
"Yes."
"And you are aware that shooting people has a high chance of killing them, to the point that it's intellectually honest to say that if you shoot someone you want them to die?"
"Yes."
"So you intended to kill the person?"
"Yes, but that's not the same thing as me WANTING them to die."

Which is so insane I don't even know where to begin.
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I dunno, I get the thinking. "I wanted him to stop attacking me, if he survived that's fine with me and the only tool.in my box is a nasty one" is a valid standpoint. If the Mass Shooting thread is any indicator, most gunshot victims do in fact survive.

Better argument is if you buy a gun and only a gun, to use as defense, that's when you made the decision that nothing short of killing power would do it for you. It should be a standard that if you have not spent, I dunno, maybe 3x as much time and money on non-lethal defense measures as you did on guns, you should be assumed to have had deliberate lethal intent and factor that into any charges.

ETA: and you can absolutely intend to do things you do not want to do
 
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I related this story here once before. Late one evening we heard a loud knocking on the front door of the two-family house we lived in. I went to the front door -- I admit, the thought of incidents such as the ones we're discussing flashed across my mind -- but I opened the door. It was one of the coldest nights of the winter, probably around 10° (Farenheit) and I found a young woman at our doorstep. She was dressed just in a blouse and jeans and she was shivering uncontrollably from the cold.

As it turned out, she had gotten into an argument with her boyfriend, he had kicked her out of his car, first pulling her coat off. Our house was one of the few with a light on so she chose our door to knock on. She asked could we call her mother to pick her up (her phone was still in the car), and allow her to stay in the hallway until her mother arrived. My wife insisted she come inside while she waited and have a cup of tea.

People who have someone come to their door late at night so they shoot them, reminds me of something we used to say when we were kids: "Man, you been watching too much TV!" ;)
 
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Nessie said:
I lived and worked in Boston for a summer as a security guard in 1986 and then stayed with relatives in Connecticut and spend 3 weeks in NY. I was present four times when firearms were drawn or discharged, once on Boston Common as drug dealers were arrested, twice at work and once waiting in a cinema queue in NY. I was not allowed to leave my relatives house to walk to the shops due to twitchy neighbours after some armed home invasions. They had a handgun and shot gun in the house.
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Be careful about assuming your experience to be typical.

I don't live in Boston or New York, but I've lived in Illinois for 54 years and have never been present when a gun drawn or discharged other than for target shooting or hunting.

My wife spent thirteen years in Chicago and was never present when a gun was drawn or discharged. She also worked security (unarmed) and never encountered a gun, but that was downstate.

My dad had a few shotguns that saw next to no use. He inherited them and i think we went skeet shooting once or twice. Dad wasn't a gun guy.

I've known a lot of hunters. Mostly deer and duck. But they don't sit around polishing and playing with their guns. They would talk (in some cases obsessively) about hunting, but I never heard them talk about the guns they used.

When I was growing up, I had a friend whose dad was into guns and military surplus. (He had a WWII canon in the garage he used to shoot off fireworks on the 4th of July.) I know he had several guns, but I never saw any of them. I did see the workstation where he reloaded shotgun shells. I don't recall him talking about it much. I think the only time he got them out was to go to the firing range or shoot skeet. He didn't hunt. (He did have a "If guns are outlawed, only outlaws will have guns" bumper sticker.

My point is that the majority of people I've ever known did not own guns to my knowledge. Those that did didn't seem to make it a big part of their life. And most of us go through our days without encountering guns or gun violence except on the news.

Sometimes these threads make it sound like we have to dodge stray bullets whenever we step outside.
 
TomB said:
Sometimes these threads make it sound like we have to dodge stray bullets whenever we step outside.
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Well because compared to the rest of the world we do.

We can (and will for no good reason) quibble over exactly how worried we're "allowed" to be about it but Americans are the only people who have to factor "Will X get me shot?" as ANY part of our day to day laugh.

Don't downplay this. Don't pull some Diet Coke version of the conservative "Well you're being dramatic so there's no actual problem" card.
 
TomB said:
Be careful about assuming your experience to be typical.

I don't live in Boston or New York, but I've lived in Illinois for 54 years and have never been present when a gun drawn or discharged other than for target shooting or hunting.

My wife spent thirteen years in Chicago and was never present when a gun was drawn or discharged. She also worked security (unarmed) and never encountered a gun, but that was downstate.

My dad had a few shotguns that saw next to no use. He inherited them and i think we went skeet shooting once or twice. Dad wasn't a gun guy.

I've known a lot of hunters. Mostly deer and duck. But they don't sit around polishing and playing with their guns. They would talk (in some cases obsessively) about hunting, but I never heard them talk about the guns they used.

When I was growing up, I had a friend whose dad was into guns and military surplus. (He had a WWII canon in the garage he used to shoot off fireworks on the 4th of July.) I know he had several guns, but I never saw any of them. I did see the workstation where he reloaded shotgun shells. I don't recall him talking about it much. I think the only time he got them out was to go to the firing range or shoot skeet. He didn't hunt. (He did have a "If guns are outlawed, only outlaws will have guns" bumper sticker.

My point is that the majority of people I've ever known did not own guns to my knowledge. Those that did didn't seem to make it a big part of their life. And most of us go through our days without encountering guns or gun violence except on the news.

Sometimes these threads make it sound like we have to dodge stray bullets whenever we step outside.
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I know I was exceptionally unlucky, but, the USA is the only western country where what I experienced could happen.
 
JoeMorgue said:
Well because compared to the rest of the world we do.

We can (and will for no good reason) quibble over exactly how worried we're "allowed" to be about it but Americans are the only people who have to factor "Will X get me shot?" as ANY part of our day to day laugh.
Don't downplay this. Don't pull some Diet Coke version of the conservative "Well you're being dramatic so there's no actual problem" card.
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A quibble... but hardly the only people:

https://www.worldatlas.com/articles/murder-rates-by-country.html
 
Thermal said:
Is it common for UK people to know someone who has farmland and gives casual shooting permissions?
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I'm in Australia, not the UK, but for the ten years that I lived on a rural property (not technically farmland because we didn't grow anything in particular) there were a couple of licensed shooters that we gave permissions for. From time to time they came in to shoot feral goats, pigs, foxes and rabbits. Occasionally we'd get a nice leg of goat or some wild boar sausages in return.
 
arthwollipot said:
I'm in Australia, not the UK, but for the ten years that I lived on a rural property (not technically farmland because we didn't grow anything in particular) there were a couple of licensed shooters that we gave permissions for. From time to time they came in to shoot feral goats, pigs, foxes and rabbits. Occasionally we'd get a nice leg of goat or some wild boar sausages in return.
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For a few years when I was growing up (in the 60's! :blush:), I lived in some central western NSW towns where wheat-'n'-sheep farming was king. Every farmer had a brace of various vermin and hunting guns, and the kids (boys and girls) learned to shoot from a young age.

The biggest problem with guns was some teenage kids trying to step through or over wire fencing while carrying a rabbit rifle or somesuch, and accidentally shooting themselves in the foot or arm, or occasionally the head, because of lax gun safety. Or tripping over a stone or log, or even just miss-stepping into a grass-covered ditch. In the years I was out there, a couple of teenagers managed to accidentally kill themselves or a mate this way.

This sort of thing got local headlines about "How can this be allowed to happen!!" It led to improved gun safety and training laws. There's still plenty of guns out there, and they get used. Just that they are not there for "personal protection".
 
Thermal said:
Man, I would love to disarm our patrolmen. The only times I've ever had a gun pointed at me was by our brave law enforcement officers, and overwhelmingly when I was completely docile and posed no threat at all.

But they actually do regularly run up against suspects who are armed and dangerous. I mean, we'd have piles of dead cops if they weren't armed. So it's a weird balancing act. I really don't like those barells pointed at me, but I know that if police were unarmed, our criminal element would solidly have less reason to give themselves up peacefully.
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There's no way I would advocate for US police officers to be unarmed, at least not until levels of firearm ownership were similar to those of the UK, including the criminals.
 
jeremyp said:
There's no way I would advocate for US police officers to be unarmed, at least not until levels of firearm ownership were similar to those of the UK, including the criminals.
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Police being (usually) unarmed is the outlier, even countries with strict gun controls like the UK still have armed police.
 
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