It doesn’t matter that he’s not moving. It matters if you can convince a jury that he knew that he was no longer a threat to himself or anyone else in a matter of seconds.
I mean, if bob can’t agree with you after an hour, you’re not going to get a dozen people to think that this guy new better in a matter of seconds.
What a jury actually decides is a different question from how a jury should decide or what the law should be.
I think in this case pretty much every jury, as far as the last shot is concerned, is gonna shrug and say FAFO. If that’s a miscarriage of justice, I think it’s a tiny one.
I do agree with your point in general and I can imagine other scenarios where I’d would rule as you would. But in this case, with that video, I’m not gonna convict him of anything for that last shot.
You asked how this was justified, not how a jury should decide or what the law should be.
I’d imagine if you ran this scenario 1,000 times over, we’d be able to determine that it would had been better if the patron had never drawn his weapon because this situation is ripe to get worse as a result of what he did. But as it played out, he shouldn’t be convicted or charged - and he obviously won’t
My preferred response accounting for risk: let the dude rob the place. That’s only because it gives myself and the other patrons the best chance of survival though. If, after surviving the shootout, I was offered the chance to go back and run it again my preferred way, I wouldn’t do it. I’ll take a 100% chance of the robber’s death to increase my own chances of survival by a pretty small percentage and I think that’s fair.
Having said that, my preferred society is one where it’s not legal for random citizens to carry and use guns on other people, even for self defense. But if we’re going to allow that I would give someone the leeway to intend to kill up until things are calm enough to reassess. Maybe this guy got a chance to reassess anyway and fired that final bullet to get his murdering fantasies out, but I would also believe if he was still not sure if the guy was alive or incapacitated or had any will to fight left in him and seized the opportunity to make sure.
An execution is cold-blooded. This was not. If this sequence of events took 30 seconds or a minute, sure, I would agree with you. But it’s like 9.5 seconds from the bad guy being the only person in the room holding a gun to the end of the fight. 9.5 seconds with 8 gunshots ringing in your ears, where you sprinted across the room, where you had to decide whether or not to reach down and grab the gun the robber dropped. It’s just not reasonable to expect the dude to be continuously reassessing the threat level while he’s fighting for his life.
There’s no moral universe where the robber’s life is worth less than whatever he stole. I don’t know what, if anything, I could vote to convict the vigilante of but that was an execution.
How do you feel about using a non-gun weapon to confront and kill a robber?
What if the robber has a knife and you have a baseball bat?
The kind of people that just carry around a firearm for self defense while eating at a diner definitely do not think like this. The mindset of the Good Guy With A Gun here is that the robber forfeited his life when he tried to steal other people’s property.
What if the robber has a baseball bat and I have an army of five-year-olds?
Their mindset if FAFO.
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The robber’s technique is particularly dangerous here. It’s a movie cliche, but “keep your hands where I can see them” is a thing so the people you are holding a gun on don’t have a chance to grab their own weapon.
In this robbery, the robber storms in and apparently demands that everyone root around in their pockets, jackets, etc. to pull out their money for him to steal. Good Guy With A Gun here spends 10 seconds rooting around in his jacket finding his gun and the robber has no clue about the impending danger because the shooter is just doing what the robber asked him to do.
If you run this scenario 1000 times there are definitely many situations where the GGWAG doesn’t just take out the shooter (which is bad enough). If the robber notices the guy in his peripheral vision pulling a gun then they are both unloading in duress in a crowded room with people in the line of fire on both sides. It’s bad enough to shoot someone in the back several times over some money, but it really could have been much worse here.
My guess is that in America the shooter is going to be fine unless he tells the police that he wasn’t scared and just wanted to shoot the robber for fun. Imagine the cops have this guy in an interrogation room and the guy says “I feared for my life, that’s why I shot him”. Do we really thing THE COPS are going to push back against this narrative? They will mostly be annoyed with the guy for stealing their line.
an obv fyp, but it had to be done
FAFO seems applicable here.
A moral universe surely values life at more than what was stolen, but the robber threatened the lives of multiple people and instigated the threat. I think it is pretty clear that he values life at a much lower level than the guy who shot him.
I know this is Texas but I can’t imagine someone robbing restaurants while armed making it very far with the robberies before he ends up shooting someone or getting shot himself in any state. Concealed carry in California has gone up quite a bit and I’d imagine that they aren’t all CCW licensed.
I feel a lot of kinship with the posters on this site, but as a non-American, I’m a bit taken aback at the casual acceptance of spontaneous execution that’s shown up in here. Your gun lobby has done some heavy lifting in the past to get you all there.
My thoughts as well. I am not defending that shooting. I just know based on the laws in Texas he didn’t do anything wrong. The only questionable part is shooting him from behind but if you see a freeze frame of when he drew the gun, the robber still had others in front of him and you can use a gun to defend others who are under threat in Texas.
I rather these two ended up in a fist fight where the risk of death was much lower.
