An attempted carjacking Saturday night left a 13-year-old dead after a security officer shot him; another boy, 12, is in custody
An attempted carjacking Saturday night left a 13-year-old dead after a security officer shot him; another boy, 12, is in custody
No, but intentionally making somebody think you have a weapon and are threatening them with it is inherently risky, since people panic and may try to defend themselves (and this isn’t exactly unreasonable either, a car might not be worth lives, sure, but cooperating with a criminal threatening you with a weapon isn’t necessarily going to prevent them from using it anyway depending on their motivations and what they perceive you to be doing, and people threatened in such a manner can’t reasonably be expected to act rationally anyway).
If you are prone to panic, the last thing you should have is a gun.
Pretty much any person in existence is going to panic at least to some degree if you surprise them with a weapon. In any case, I wasn’t getting into the weeds about gun control with that, Im generally in favor of gun control myself, though with a few caveats, but what I was more trying to get at is that it isn’t unreasonable for someone threatening someone with a weapon to end up dead, not because I personally think they should be killed (I don’t), but because when you go out of your way to do something that is by nature going to provoke one heck of a fight or flight response in people, some people are going to fight, and in fights people sometimes die. A gun makes that more likely of course, but it can still happen regardless (such as if other weapons, like a heavy object that can be used as a club, or a car for that matter, are available, or if the attacker does have a weapon but the victim mamages to take it, or just from getting punched in the wrong place). Obviously the intended victim can go too far, like if they continue to attack a fleeing assailant, but in general, the responsibility for someone getting killed in that kind of scenario is primarily on the person who caused that scenario, the attacker. Hence why we often consider someone guilty of murder if they commit a violent crime and someone gets killed as a result, even if that person didn’t themselves do the killing.
I see a fuck ton of mental gymnastics here.
You are in a thread about a US Marshal, not acting as a US Marshal, shooting dead a 13 year old who didn’t even actually have a gun.
Please. Dive into the weeds. This child needed help, not a bullet.
America needs gun control. Direly.
If he was acting in a way as to trick someone into thinking he had a gun, then you can hardly blame the other party for not realizing that he did not actually have one. And for that matter, even with gun control, a US marshal is exactly the kind of person one would expect to still be decently likely to have one.
I agree that America needs gun control, the reason why I haven’t been talking about it as much here is that I think that in this specific instance in particular, it probably would not have helped, and so isnt as good a case for arguing it, as, say, those times when some idiot decides that shooting someone for using their driveway to turn around is somehow justified. I am not doing this as some kind of mental gymnastics to justify private gun ownership. I do not own a gun, nor do I feel particularly comfortable around them. I just don’t feel that the issue is especially relevant to what happened in this case, assuming the reporting of the incident or my quick reading of it have not missed some important details.
I get it.
You drop novels on why you should murder an unarmed 13 year old.
You disgust me.
I like the cut of your jib.
Cringe, but you don’t know how much that means right now.