What I wanted to talk about was not guns, but humans. I think we can all agree that the 16-year-old shooter did horrific things.
But then, a member of the public (not law enforcement) killed the shooter. Shot a 16-year-old dead, vigilante justice without due process of law. I can see an upside (prevented the further killing of schoolchildren and school personnel), but also a major downside (themselves murdering a child). It’s complicated.
What isn’t complicated is the press coverage I’ve seen so far, which seems to be universally praising the guy who killed the 16-year-old murderer.
I don’t want to frame the debate to rule out the gun issue, but I’m most interested in the human element. We’ve had police kill children before, sometimes in error, but I feel like having private citizens do so crosses another line.
It’s the old Good Guy With A Gun stops the Bad Guy With A Gun scenario that 2A lovers believe so strongly in. And in this case the Bad Guy was a teenager (or a child, depending on how you want to look at it).
I, for one, am not a huge 2A crazy person. However, if I happened to be armed and I was in a situation where a teenager was shooting at other children, I wouldn’t hesitate to shoot him. I wouldn’t shoot to kill, though; I’d aim for the hip or abdomen or something, with a view towards injuring, not killing. However, two things would have to be unambiguous: 1) that he is actively and for realzies killing children; and b) I had a clear shot.
Of course, I don’t own a gun, much less carry one around town.
I mean, in many countries the police could nail you for being armed with a weapon in public for no good reason and for possession of an illegal firearm, but not for murder for stopping a murder by shooting the killer.
Being shot in the hip (assuming you can aim that well under great stress) leaves the shooter capable of shooting back.
The whole aim of shooting center of mass is the greatest chance of incapacitating the shooter. Even well trained shooters marksmanship can fail under the stress of a real life gunfight, center of mass is a relatively large target.
Please supply context for those of us who haven’t followed this closely: What exactly was the situation here? If the guy was armed and actively shooting people, then it’s IMO completely fine to shoot him, regardless of his age. If he was trying to surrender, it’s not. Were there any witnesses to the actual shooting?
And it really does make a difference to me that this “defence of others” involves killing a child. I mean, I understand that the killer’s killer (a more neutral term?) didn’t have time to stop and card him. I put this in Great Debates because I don’t think there’s an easy, obvious answer; I’m struggling to articulate the exact problem. I suppose the difference between “self defence” and “vigilante murder” is one of the issues.
The article I linked above has some of the story. At the end of the article, “Oregon Gov. Tina Kotek said… ‘To the community member who heroically intervened to stop further loss of life: Your actions carry a heavy emotional burden, and I just want you to know that my thoughts are with you as well.’”
Part of the other thing that bothers me is the instant praise by the authorities for the vigilante action. Again, I’m not clear that the vigilante action was wrong, but as a country we’ve had problems with it in the past, so I’m wary of it.
16 years old isn’t a “child” in that sense. He’s a teenager more than old enough to know what he’s doing when he shoots people, we’re not talking about a toddler who has a gun and thinks it’s a toy.
OK, in most jurisdictions “defence of others” does not require that one have a special relationship with the other, merely a reasonable belief that it was necessary to defend the third party:
“Murderer” and “child” are perhaps a bit more emotionally laden terms, and I’ll try to be a bit more precise, but I really do think there are legitimate perspectives where both are correct here. You don’t become an adult just because you kill people.
Something has been bothering me about the coverage, and maybe this is the place for it:
The coverage I’ve seen has mostly said things like ‘three children, an adult, and the shooter dead.’ There are four children dead. The shooter was also a child.
A significantly older child than the ones they killed, yes. But still a child.
Going entirely by what I’ve read so far, shooting the shooter seems entirely justified: not to be celebrated, but the best of several bad things to do in that specific situation. But that doesn’t make the dead sixteen year old an adult, or put them in some abstract ageless category. If they said ‘three elementary school children, an adult, and the teenage shooter dead’, that wouldn’t bother me at all. But, at least mostly, they don’t.
I suppose there’s a also difference in emergency situations, vs. some of the vigilante terrorism of the past which might have been reactive but wasn’t in medias res.
It seems that the reporting has to navigate the communication of identifying the victims and the perpetrator in this instance by referring to him as the shooter. It seems that they could obviously do a lot better.
It took me a full reading of the articles to distinguish who exactly was killed/involved.
He is/was one of the youngest mass school shooters in the history of this ongoing perpetual chaos.
He didn’t murder a child. He killed an active shooter. That’s not murder.
There are certainly downsides, and the risk that he accidentally hits a child in the crossfire is one, or that he identifies the wrong kid and kills an innocent by mistake, are both serious problems with the “good guy with a gun” narrative. But the fact that he killed this particular kid at this particular time, preventing him from killing even more kids which he was actively in the process of attempting, is undoubtedly a good thing.
He saved multiple lives. If your kid was the next one in line when this “vigilante” shot the active shooter, you would be grateful. Anyone would be.
I can find no fault on the part of the guy shooting to defend the lives of children.
I really doubt he had time to gauge whether he was shooting a 16-year old or an adult, and whether it would have made a difference. The only thing that mattered in that moment was stopping the killing.
This isn’t vigilante justice. That would be if he killed him after the shooting, out of revenge.
That a sixteen year old also died is tragic but I don’t really know what you can expect in a situation like that. Civilians aren’t exactly trained in combat deescalation.
It was probably the least bad thing. It may well have been necessary. It may have been done by a good person, and if so it doesn’t turn them into a bad person to have done it.
None of that makes it a good thing. It’s still a terrible thing. The fact that sometimes terrible things are necessary doesn’t make them good.