What does the shooter being under adult age (or not) have anything to do with it? The moment he starts a school shooting, he is an active threat. A 16-year old gunman needs to be stopped with lethal force just like a 36-year old.
Now if it were a six-year old with a pistol, maybe that calls for a different approach, but a 16-year old is physically as capable as an adult.
This falls under the “Greater Danger Theory” which states it is more dangerous not to act than to act with risks involved.
I didn’t see anything in the article that matches this description of events?
Regardless, if an active shooter is on his way into a school (and based on your link he shot at multiple people, including one in their car who called 911) and you shoot at him but you either miss or injure but do not incapacitate him, you absolutely should follow him inside if you are capable of it; if he’s not incapacitated and still armed, he’s still capable of murdering dozens of children even if you grazed him.
True - defense of others is far more noble than self defense. Everyone has a right to defend themselves, and it is pretty much expected that they will do so; but you don’t necessarily have a duty to defend someone else who cannot defend themselves. Doing so goes above and beyond and is a noble thing to do.
This should not be confused with someone who seeks to harm others under the guise of defending people. But that’s not what this guy did.
If I may explore a hypothetical (without hijacking the thread - mods, let me know if this is off-topic): I wonder what the law would say if instead of being killed inside the school, the gunman had fled the scene in his car and been pursued for several miles by the civilian and then shot dead far away from the school. Would that be considered more premeditated murder than justified homicide?
Moderating:
Yes, that is off-topic.
The fact that this kid was so broken in whatever way that he decided to go shoot up an elementary school is a bad thing. The fact that no one was willing or able to successfully intervene in this kid’s life to stop him from going down this road was a bad thing. The fact that he got as far as killing four people was a bad thing.
Once all of those things had happened, the fact that he was killed before he could continue his rampage was a good thing.
Not as good as if all of those prior things had never happened the way that they did. But in a world where all of that had already happened, shooting the shooter was undoubtedly a good thing.
To me the biggest difference between what happened in this instance and vigilantism is that the shooter was killed in the act of trying to kill additional others. Vigilantism is, to me, more a matter of hunting down the person of interest and executing them (without the benefit of a proper trial) sometime after the end of the actual event.
I think it’s also a matter of the time sensitive nature of the situation. This guy saw an immediate threat to the life of children and he reacted. That’s not vigilantism. Tracking down the killer after the fact would be. But so would finding out about someone planning a crime in a few days and rather than going to the authorities showing up at the planned time to stop them.
Fair point. Intervening to stop a threat vs. meting out your own standard of punishment.
If under a different circumstance the shooter had been disarmed and disabled, so no longer a threat, then it would be unjustified to finish him off.
Apparently Kaylub Giamanco (the one who stopped the mass shooting) followed John Griffin (the sixteen-year-old who killed three students and a teacher) into the elementary school because he saw John Griffin carrying a long gun. Note that this was the same school attended by two of Kaylub Giamanco’s children. (I’m providing the names so as to avoid confusion about who is who.)
To me, all this means is that some children in some situations absolutely deserve to die.
I disagree. This is in no way vigilante justice. The second shooter was not trying to get justice for the dead children. He was trying to stop an active shooter situation. Period.
The only complicated part to this would be if he had inadvertently injured or killed innocent people himself while trying to stop the active shooter. But this small risk pales in comparison to the presence of a shooter actively trying to kill others, including children.
There was also a risk that the second shooter would be confused for the first one and invite a deadly police response before he could identify himself or lay down his firearm. But this risk is mostly to the second shooter.
I would like to see anyone who objects to this incident on grounds of “it involved killing a gunman who was a minor” propose a more acceptable solution. Politely asking the gunman to lay down weapons wasn’t going to work.
Trying to stop an active shooter situation at a school attended by his own children.
If someone was trying to kill my kid I’d shoot him in a heartbeat. He had to do it, and will probably live with it for the rest of his life.
I can’t imagine the trauma caused by the deaths of these children, any of them. I’m not without empathy for the 16-year-old or the parents.
I think there is a lot to be said about vigilante justice and revenge killings and desensitizing people to violence against minors, I just don’t think this case has anything to do with those things.
Can we define vigilante justice here?
Do you have any firearm training, and if so, were you encouraged to aim for the purpose of inflighting non-lethal wounds? Firing on another human being in a high stress situation is a lot different than punching holes in paper targets. And of course shooting someone in the abdomen or even the hip can still kill them. It’s still lethal force.
Exactly. Nor does “shooting to wound, not to kill.”
Note that the actual goal when engaging a shooter is to incapacitate so that they cannot keep shooting people. And a wounded shooter can certainly keep shooting people.
This does not mean “finishing someone off” once they are incapacitated, though. That would likely constitute a crime.
I remember that Texas school shooting with dozens of armed law enforcement officers who stood around while many children died.
I thought my response here was too far off-topic, so I thought I would start this linked thread:
These are very interesting responses, and I can see that my feelings on the matter are definitely outside of the norm.
Re: vigilante justice, to me, that’s when a member of the public takes it upon themselves to enforce their notions of the law. This situation has a couple of differences: it’s urgent and emergent rather than and after-the-fact deliberation, and the intent was to stop the harm, not to administer justice. On the other side, it’s the civilian involvement. So again, perhaps I should leave “vigilante” out of it.
I’m still trying to think what my actual problems are with the situation and I think they are that
A civilian killed the shooter. I don’t think that’s okay, even though I do agree that stopping the carnage was critical and I don’t know whether there was another way (either by law enforcement, by not killing anyone else, or both). I can’t blame Kaylub Giamanco, because I do find his actions reasonable, but I nevertheless have a problem with it.
Mr. Giamanco is being uncritically praised by officials and in the press for killing someone. I think there are ways to acknowledge his bravery and decisiveness without celebrating what he has done, and the coverage comes off as celebratory.