The age of the active shooter was irrelevant to the situation. He was well into an age group that understands right from wrong. Not only that, had he lived, it is highly likely he would have been charged as an adult.
It would help if we could define right and bad. If you said, “Sometimes it’s morally right to do a bad thing,” then I’d agree with you. Does bad mean immoral or just a crummy situation?
ISTM that you still are not framing the debate fairly.
The suspected needed to stopped, and although the female teacher was struggling with him, it’s not guaranteed that he couldn’t have overpowered the teacher and resumed killing people.
The shooting of the suspect would not be justifiable just because he had killed other people (regardless of the age of the victims) if the suspect were no longer a threat to others. For example, had three strong adults overpowered him, took away his gun and it could reasonably be assured that he could not kill anyone else in the moment, then it would not be justifiable to shoot him.
Hence, the framing of your question here is incorrect. The suspect did not give up the right to exist (to use your words) because he had already killed people, he gave it up because he still posed a danger to others as seen by a “reasonable person.”
Do you agree or disagree with this logic, and if you disagree, then why not?
I disagree, personally, mostly because I don’t think his further intentions are knowable (would he have killed others), nor the might-have-beens (could he have been stopped another way). In other words, I can’t get a handle on the “reasonable person” perspective, in part because of my own issues around minors and guns. At the same time and for the same reasons, I can’t be confident in my disagreement or expect others to share it.
As for the minority issue, I still think that matters, but again, more for how we talk about and analyse the situation after the fact than because I think it should have been a factor in the moment.
I think people keep misreading me as if I were second-guessing Giamanco. I haven’t. I don’t think he could have made a better choice in the moment. But what he did was awful, too, even though it was clearly the best option to stop the threat and thus save others. I don’t see why people won’t see that: he did a terrible thing which was also a heroic thing. That’s part of what makes it heroic: I certainly couldn’t have done that, and had I been on the scene more would have died due to my inaction / ineffectual actions.
I don’t understand the second half of the this sentence. Do you mean that the might-have-beens are also unknowable?
So much of life is conducted without knowing the other person’s internal thought process. I don’t see that as a reasonable standard for making decisions. If someone is actively shooting at you, it’s also unknowable if they will continue to shoot. Does this mean that you are never allowed self defense? That’s not reasonable.
Of course no one could have read his mind, but I think most people would reasonably assume that someone who had murdered several people, including children, are most likely to continue until they are stopped. That doesn’t mean that that the suspect needs to be killed, but he needs to be put in a position where he cannot shoot more people.
There is a question if the female teacher struggling with the suspect was sufficient or not. None of us were there and I don’t know how useful second guessing that would be.
What you are not addressing is the question if the suspect were not stopped, there was a real possibility that he could have continued to kill more people.
I am sure things were happening pretty fast, but Giamanco said that he fired once, dropping the suspect, who then tried to pick up his shotgun which is when Giacomo shot him two more times, killing him, because he was “afraid of him shooting anybody else”.
I am saying that I don’t have enough information about the scene to know what is reasonable. Was the murderer mid-rampage? Was he done? I don’t know. I don’t see where my opining on information I don’t have is helpful.
The people who were on the scene made an assessment. They seem like reasonable people. What can I add?
It’s other people who were not on the scene, who have only second-hand information, and who then make quite positive statements that worry me.
Hell, let me step in and say this phrasing rubs me the wrong way.
IMO, inflicting deadly violence is not “giving up your right to live”. It’s assuming the risk of a fatal outcome. Which includes that afterward The Law may rule you in forfeit of that right.
Address this to @Dr.Drake , they were the one who used it.
I actually agree with JRDelirious. My phrasing was an attempt to characterize the position I see in some of the other posters.
This is absolutely right.
I don’t think anyone in this discussion is exactly disagreeing with you here. They are focusing more on the “it was a heroic thing” than they are on “he did a terrible thing”. And I differentiate between the outcome was terrible (a 16-year-old was killed) and he intentionally did something terrible. He did what he thought was necessary to keep the situation from becoming worse.
Of course his further intentions are knowable.
Are they knowable with perfect 100% certainty? No, of course not. Literally nothing is. We could be on the Truman Show, or brains in jars. That’s an epistemological question, though.
Practically, we make predictions about what others will do all of the time and we act on those predictions. His further intentions were as knowable as anyone’s intentions can be.
My hangup is the argument that using deadly force against the shooter was morally wrong even if it was the least wrong option. I agree it was a terrible thing. The whole situation is tragic no matter which way you look at it.
Who has been arguing that?
I’m not sure. I kept seeing post about shades of gray but I’m not seeing any shades here. Maybe it’s just the course of the conversation, but if someone just flat out said what Giamanco did morally good but the situation was bad we could have probably avoided 300+ posts. Are we in agreement that Giamanco and the teacher’s actions were moral even if the results were unpleasant?
Given the information that I have: the teacher’s actions were moral and what she did was good. Giamanco’s actions were moral even though what he did was a wrong thing. I wouldn’t say “unpleasant”, “Unpleasant” sounds like you’re talking about something on the level of having to stand in a long line at the post office.
Fair enough. I guess I’m more a consequentialist while others are more pluralist. Ah, well. Variety is the spice of life.
@puzzlegal has:
But then we have this argument:
So, is it right? Wrong? Least bad? Moral? Not moral? Immoral?
People aren’t using the same terminology.
I agree with this.
I don’t see why saving the lives of people is immoral and / or bad / if that is the only choice.
I don’t celebrate it. I’m not happy that a 16-year-old died, but he killed child in cold blood, and it seems he needed to be stopped before he killed more.
I think at this point this is more about our own personal definition of - moral, wrong, right, immoral, terrible, bad, and good.
I think possibly a large part of the controversy in this thread is due to the perception that killing the gunman was a form of summary capital punishment. There is an idea extant that our modern perception of any form of capital punishment as wrong is a result of the abandonment of the idea that there is a God or an afterlife. As Google Search phrased it, “Without an afterlife, killing becomes an irreversible and absolute destruction of a person’s entire existence”.