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Culture War Roundup for the week of September 9, 2024

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If you read my recent post on the South Side, you'd remember that I mentioned a spare of shootings in 2021 and 2022. I didn't get into it then, but almost everyone they arrested pled self defense. These were all groups of black kids who got into altercations outside of nightclubs, and their claims of self defense were much stronger than this guy's. Sometimes they were the result of scuffles similar to the one described here. By your logic, these shooters weren't threats to public safety, but a legitimate response to dangerous situations.

  • -10

"Threat to public safety" is what you're going for now? A man is at some sort of political rally when a guy from the opposing side runs across the street to tackle him. First guy shoots him while they're both on the ground, and that makes him the "threat to public safety"? Pull the other one, it's got bells on; he's not the one who started the physical altercation.

You aren’t responding to anyone’s specific claims. Would an objective person reasonably fear serious bodily injury when a guy runs through traffic to tackle them? That’s such aggressive odd behavior to start with that I would say in the seconds afterwards (especially given there is a delay of a second or two to draw your gun and shoot) a reasonable person would fear serious bodily injury.

Bringing up unrelated cases with zero background (outside of telling us the shooters are black) just seems like an attempt to say “you wouldn’t support the black kids so you can’t support this guy without being a bigot.” Maybe I would support the black kids. Maybe I also don’t think you are reasonable about what reasonable.

their claims of self defense were much stronger than this guy's.

Can you expand on that? I'm having a hard time imagining how someone leaving a bar at closing time would have a better self-defense case than someone exercising their constitutionally-protected right to free speech. At minimum, their judgment would be in question after a night of heavy drinking.

One example: A guy and two women attempted to enter a bar but were denied admission because the guy had an expired ID. As they were walking away the man was approached by a man who had been in a relationship with one of the women several years earlier. The other man started yelling at the first man and cornered him in a doorway. The first man claims that the other man threatened to kill him and it looked like he was carrying a concealed weapon in his sweatshirt. So the first man shot him with a licensed gun that he was carrying legally. It seems like a fairly anodyne story when told that way, but when the news starts out with a story like "23-year-old Javonte Diggs was arrested outside the Pause nightclub after an apparent dispute with 22-year-old Martavius Allen", the online right doesn't start making the guy a martyr of self-defense and concealed carry.

I wouldn't rate that as stronger, but maybe I'm missing some relevant aspects. Specifically:

  • Fighting words and threats are less of a justification for force than tackling and grappling
  • "looking like" he had a gun is a weak standard to base your actions on
  • A lack of video evidence makes everything wishy-washy (granted, that does favor the defense in criminal trials).

How do you judge the strength of a case? It's clearly not the same as I do if you're using that example.