Why isn’t it okay for a civilian to use deadly force to stop other human beings from being killed or greviously wounded?
He deserves the praise. He placed himself in danger to defend some of the most vulnerable members of our society. That warrants celebration.
You’re wrong. It’s 100% okay for someone, anyone, to kill a person who is actively, and effectively, shooting at defenseless people. I don’t care if the shooter is a teenager, a pregnant lady, a nun, or a pregnant nun. If you are openly attempting to kill people in a mass shooting, or other mass death type of event, all bets are off in trying to stop you.
The idea that a person should fucking sit back and wait if they have the means to stop the killing is preposterous.
He did the right thing in a situation where doing the right thing was very difficult, and as a result many people who would otherwise be dead are alive. That should be celebrated.
It’s not some gray area situation where he blasted a guy away for stepping on his property. He unquestionably saved multiple lives through his actions. That’s the definition of heroic.
Exactly. He took on an armed gunman actively shooting people. This took immense bravery, and is something that many trained police officers won’t do (as I noted in the linked thread) without first doing lots of stalling techniques like “setting up a perimeter” and “waiting for reinforcements.”
In addition, Mr. Giamanco didn’t just try—he evidently succeeded in promptly eliminating the threat without endangering anyone else. He deserves a medal, IMHO.
Giamanco also is a CCW holder, a person with a permit to carry a gun, concealed or other wise. You are allowed to carry a gun in a “Gun Free Zone” like a school if you have a CCW permit. He is not going to be in any legal trouble at all. There are Federal laws and State laws that control this, and usually the State laws prevail.
The thing is… there really wasn’t (and likely won’t be, at least in our lifetimes) an alternative.
I’m not any sort of 2A die-hard either; I’d much prefer that we live in a society without guns everywhere, as in the civilized rest of the world.
However, we don’t. This is America. Giamanco wasn’t faced with a “trolley problem” in some abstract ethical debate. He had a few seconds to decide “Oh shit. This guy is about to shoot up the school, and my kids are in it. What do I do?!”
He would have no way to know whether law enforcement could arrive in time, and whether they would be able find and neutralize the mass shooter before they were killed.
He chose the only course of action left to him: intervene or watch more kids, possibly his own, die from inaction.
Lucky for his kids and the other survivors, he had the mental fortitude, equipment, and (presumably) training to successfully intervene without collateral damage.
I don’t see how that could make him anything other than a hero.
If he had chosen to do nothing at all, he wouldn’t exactly be a coward… running away from such a situation would be the natural thing to do for just about anyone. But it would probably have made him a bad parent if something had happened to his kids, and I bet he would never have been able to live with himself after that…
I’d argue he had both the ethical right, and the parental obligation, to do exactly as he did. That he did so, successfully, without causing any other injuries (as far as we know) should be celebrated — just as it should be if an undercover police officer, or a proper uniformed response force, did the same.
It is sad that we live in a society where this is the only realistic avenue left to parents in his situation, but so long as it remains such a society (i.e., where 2A trumps schoolkids’ lives)… he did the only thing he could, and did it well.
The only slightly “grey” area of this is the age of the shooter, and 16 is old enough and his actions lethal enough to make it a minor one. It’s not like the teen was shot for vandalism or something like that.
We tend to over-infantilize young people (when we aren’t demonizing them), but “mass murder is wrong and illegal” is well within the judgement of a 16 year old.
Many older societies considered 16 years old an adult. While we’ve raised the age for good reasons, they didn’t collapse because 16 years old is mature enough to basically function as an independent human being.
Even if gun laws prohibited carrying a gun into a school, do you imagine that anyone would be interested in prosecuting him?
No, but having said that there is still a huge risk in being the only guy alive holding a gun when cops are arriving on the scene to respond to the shooting. This guy could have gotten himself thoroughly killed by confused officers who don’t know what is going on other than “person with a gun is in the school”. In this situation in particular I’m curious how he managed to not get himself shot by the cops.
Yeah. And besides, 16 was/is old enough in many societies for them to be child soldiers, or be the target of recruitment and ROTC, etc. That we think teenagers are equipped to kill before they can fully drive is, well… something. Probably another debate. But for the purposes of “should he have been killed, and does his age make any difference”… no. If he’s adult enough to act to kill with intent, he’s adult enough to be killed in return.
I wonder this too. Wonder if weapons away, on his knees with hands up, would’ve been enough?
Yep; center of mass is always the best option.
What do you mean by this? (Not that I disagree; I’m just curious).
I live in Bend, where this happened, and as far as I can tell, this is a city & county that’s mostly purple – almost a 50/50 split, actually (slightly more blue now compared to 20 years ago).
Many around here carry, but it’s not like you see people open carry at the grocery stores or such. More recently, many are transplants from California and elsewhere with more stringent gun laws.
I also don’t see a jury convicting him, but not because they’re in Deschutes… just because he did the right thing, IMHO. Would a jury anywhere convict him?
I can’t imagine that Kaylub Giamanco, the guy who took out the child shooter/child-shooter, had any other choice. It was a moral imperative.
Courage doesn’t have anything to do with medals. It’s simple. You run to the gunfire, not away from it.
–Leroy Jethro Gibbs
“NCIS”
And – though I’m not somebody who felt, as some did, deeply ashamed when the US killed Osama Bin Laden for the mere fact that killing is killing and killing is wrong, and that killing by the State is even more wrong – I do find myself pausing … once again … at (the) calling (of) Kaylub Giamanco a hero.
[Neither would I call him either a killer or a murderer or a criminal, to be clear]
There’s a stark, profound, and glaring “arsonist-as-firefighter” dynamic in these stories that I can’t seem to shake. Giamanco isn’t the arsonist, but our society is.
What Giamanco did was somber and solemn and grave and odious, and quite possibly neither something he ‘signed up for’ nor ever wanted to be put in a position to have to do. It’s quite possibly also something that will haunt him for the rest of his life.
Putting the Giamancos of this country (NB: not of this world) on a pedestal gives us just one more totally superfluous reason not to grapple with the (shouldn’t be so) hard reality of how frequently unwitting Americans are thrust into these situations.
I figured even a 50/50 county would make it extremely unlikely to get a conviction.
I doubt that a jury in Alameda County would vote to convict him.
There is another press conference happening now:
https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=vHKVplNPsZw
Current relevant updates:
I guess I just have a hard time seeing even the bluest of blue communities convict him. Of anything more than a wrist-slap on a technicality, at least.
The armed citizen absolutely did the right thing. He prevented further death and carnage.. End of morality discussion.
Now, certain communities cheering what happened in this tragic case, and presenting an armed citizenry as the only solution to school shootings is short-sighted and problematic. Not to mention disgusting.
I must stop here, or I will go against the mod-ordered limits of this thread.
There was a big story ca. 1990 about a man who witnessed a domestic violence incident at a shopping mall parking lot which ended with the perp fatally harming the victim (stabbed or shot, I don’t remember which). He had a gun in his car, and fired it into the perp’s car as he tried to get away, and accidentally killed him instantly. All he’d wanted to do was disable his car, but that’s not what happened.
This man was not happy that the story went viral, as a story would in 1990, but in the end, the only criminal charges he faced were regarding the gun’s possession; IIRC it was a type of firearm that needed to be registered at the courthouse, and he hadn’t done that. The fine was something like $100 and a few hours of community service.
However, people who carry because they’re hoping to stop a bad guy with a gun are precisely the ones you would NOT want doing it IMNSHO. At the Tucson shooting, someone who had a legal weapon almost shot the wrong person! He saw a man with a rifle, and because he wasn’t 100% certain that was the shooter, refrained, and rightfully so because that man had wrestled that gun away from the shooter.