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Notes -
It wasn't a paperwork violation - it was a competence violation.
"All good Samaritans must know the difference between lethal and less-lethal violence and make an honest attempt to act on that knowledge" is sufficient to condemn Penny (unless you are the kind of right-winger who favours summary execution of street crazies)
This is the kind of misapplication of scientism and legalism that is divorced from the real world. This is the same line of thinking as "just shoot the bad guy in the leg!"
Immediate personal combat is pretty much a zero-to-100 situation. If a body decides to stay and fight instead of flee, cognition hyperfocuses on the swift application of violence until the thread is wholly neutralized. There are no half measures. You see this even in professionals where many cops - experienced ones, often - will mag dump into a suspect, only stopping to assess the situation when they've finished all of their rounds. Trying to calibrate an in-time response is asking a human being to perform a level of parallel cognition that is simply impossible. You are asking them to slow down time. You are asking them to read the minds of others. You are asking them to simultaneously put personal safety concerns aside in order while also adhering to codified law they probably are not personally familiar with.
Can a punch be either lethal or less-lethal? What's that dependent on?
What if you are, in fact, a professional, using professionally sanctioned techniques to subdue but, because of unknowable physical and pharmacological conditions, the restrained person dies? (I am talking about the George Floyd case here).
Again "know the difference between lethal and less-lethal violence and make an honest attempt to act on that knowledge" has so many failure modes built into it that it reads to me as "You can defend yourself, but only if you don't, you know, defend too hard." What's too hard? I agree that it's "whatever the jury says" - which is going to be influenced by a bunch of circumstantial factors like race, gender, occupation, cultural history etc. And this is because there isn't a good standard here. And this is because we have a weird societal deference to the crazy and homeless (see recent main thread on homelessness).
This is an unfair hyperbole.
I am the kind of right-winger who doesn't want to wait until the street crazy has the knife to my neck before responding. That's why my initial question involved a circumstance in which violent gestures were already present. If I feel like someone could, in a matter of seconds, represent a clear physical threat to me or others, my first instinct is going to be to get the hell out of there. But, failing that, I need to know what my options are. If the other party isn't mentally capable of perceiving reality, then I really need to know what actions I can take to defend myself (or others) because that person, by definition, cannot be reasoned with, cannot be expected to respond in "normal" ways and, in fact, may have a perception of the situation utterly divorced from the reality around them.
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