It is nearly impossible to cut this fine of a line.
You complained upthread about pragmatism. You know damn well what the culture war peddlers will do with the verdict.
I could get behind defending your own business assuming you took every other measure before firearms i.e. boarding up all openings etc…
Rittenhouse should have went to the scene unarmed and helped business owners in this way. He would have accomplished way more for society and also felt what the marginalized have felt for decades.
I don’t disagree with this and have made clear my stance that gun laws in the US need to be changed. The main reason I even get involved in these threads is to encourage people to advocate for these changes rather than direct their ire on individuals such as Rittenhouse
It is gravely more important in my view that a guilty verdict was reached in the Arbery case and now the quest to find out why they almost weren’t prosecuted at all is imperative
Fair enough, but I would never characterize someone based on what they didn’t say. It would be one thing if I never spoke out against wrongful deaths. But my stance on law enforcement and judicial system should be well known by the thought police around here
I’m not sure what any of this has to do with the question. Did you watch the video of the Lubbock shooting? If so, what do you think of it. Self-Defense? murder? Something else?
I view this as kind of a classic Darwin award scenario. If a guy tells a person who just pulled out a gun to shoot him and then keeps antagonizing that person… Then maybe it’s for the best those genes don’t get another chance to replicate. If it wasn’t for the fact kids were involved, I’d have lol’d at the whole scene
As to whether or not this shooting was justified, my answer would be a resounding no for the simple reason there was never a serious threat of harm and he wasn’t protecting anything. This is also a prime example of irresponsible gun ownership. This is NOT what a gun should be used for and definitely not how it should be used. The shooter is lucky he wasn’t the one shot and killed. Both men were stunningly incompetent at self defense imo
Me personally, I’d wait until he threw it and then drop him
Continuing to make this personal and about me or what I’d do isn’t helping your cause one bit. Whether or not such a person deserves to be shot and killed in this scenario is irrelevant. Even if the shooting was completely unjustified, nothing is going to change the fact that he was the cause of his own death
And that’s the main point I’m trying to get across. You can wring your hands all you want about what is justified, but if you walk up to someone and stomp on their toes expecting them to shove or punch you and instead, they pull out a gun and put a hole in your chest, if I’m your wife or son that loves and depends on you, I’m gonna be pissed and blame YOU for the reason you’re dead
If you don’t like guns work to change the laws because you’ll get nowhere trying to tell people how and when they can use their guns
Sounds like you feel similarly about the role of firearms in protecting property as did a few of my in-laws at Thanksgiving.
When you dig deeper you find out that it isn’t as much about protecting property as it is about belonging to an ethos that fetishizes having the ability to end someone’s life.
You said yourself that you’d wait until after your property was destroyed to kill the perpetrator. Seems like it is more about enacting vengeance and retribution against someone who has committed a wrong. Sort of like a vigilante. Sort of like Kyle.
And that’s not a dunk or anything - lots of people feel this way and as I said it is part of the ethos that is romanticized in the firearm enthusiast community. The wild Wild West “touch my truck and I’ll blow your head off” moxie.
My in-laws were legitimately surprised when I said that I’d walk away from someone who was about to destroy my house or my car rather than kill them. Like I was some kind of circus curiosity that put property behind human life. Was eye-opening to me but I suppose it shouldn’t have been. This is who we have become.
Literally saying the quiet part out loud. At that point, he’s already destroyed your property, so clearly it isn’t about preventing destruction to your property. You just want an excuse to kill someone.
are you thinking of them as molotov and anti-molotov particles that annihilate when they collide?
i’m just wondering if you didn’t have a gun, is there some other method of lethally stopping someone who is destroying your property? where is the line, etc? can you throw a rock? how about a concrete block directly over the head? molotovs? napalm? hit them with your car?
C’mon, don’t be like the people who actually believe I jog and swim with a gun lmao! I’m just trolling the trolls. I wouldn’t kill someone who was mentally unstable unless my life was in imminent danger. And such an individual would have to be mentally unstable because he’s basically committing suicide in that spot. I’d also consider if he felt justified in burning my house down. Does he feel I wronged him somehow? Etc.
But I also think you’re correct that for many, it’s a matter of right and wrong. If I knew a guy was trying to burn my house down just to be an asshole or wrongly taking a grievance out on me, I’d be much more inclined to exercise my rights under the law. You say this is about guns and wanting to kill someone, but let’s take it down a couple notches and use a real life example that happened with a buddy of mine…
The way he tells it, his sister who was 8 months pregnant lived in a large apartment complex with assigned parking. Her neighbor who is a giant dick kept parking in her space causing her to drive around each time searching for a spot at least another 100 yards further away. This really sucked when she had groceries and would have to make several trips. She confronted him several times and also told the management company, but he kept doing it. She was nice at first, but the last time things got heated and the guy slapped her so hard that her earring came off causing her to bleed…
Now if a guy slapped your pregnant sister that hard would you want to have a “talk” with him? If not, then you are a pacifist, which is fine by me. And I can already anticipate people trying to dunk saying, “There’s a big difference between fighting a guy and shooting them dead you moron!”, But I submit that once you accept violence is sometimes justified ,you are now just quibbling over degrees. If you take pacifism to its logical conclusion then violence as a form of retribution or scare tactics should never be the answer. If you are not, then violence up to, and including lethal force is morally justified
This is different than saying guns don’t kill people, people kill people. What I’m saying is that my moral compass allows for violence in certain instances and I think it would be inconsistent of me to quibble over the level with which it is used. Had my buddy been shot and killed, I’d place the blame and cause of his death squarely on him even though I wouldn’t think he deserved it. He made the decision to go over there and beat the piss out of the guy. What I’m saying is violence is violence and if you commit a violent act or threat then you should be prepared for any level of violence in return. That’s the right and wrong of it for me. I haven’t been in a physical altercation since high school. I go out of my way to avoid them. Had I been the guy in the video Melkerson linked I never in a million years would’ve went back in to get a gun. This avoidance is because I don’t want to kill anyone and I don’t want to be killed
That’s my piece. Everyone is now welcome to point out inconsistencies and poke holes in my thinking
