He had to be immediately stopped. Innocent lives counted on it. And bullets are a good way to immediately stop someone. Death of him - for stopping him - is incidental.
Interesting but not topical to this event
What if the guy has a bunch of knives and an explosive suicide vest and you take him on with a narwhal tusk?
(Suppose the vest had been real. Is anyone going to come and say the bystanders should have let things be because they and everybody around would have been killed in the resulting explosion? The cops did not hesitate to fill the attacker full of holes, either, one should note.)
The preservation of life SHOULD be the first goal. In this case, this was accomplished by disabling the spree shooter as fast as possible, because he was in the process of murdering numerous children. In that situation, the most effective way of stopping the slaughter is to employ potentially lethal force, which is why the application of such force is not considered disproportionate.
Response to non-topical situation above
Even if the vest had been real, I don’t understand why that would mean he shouldn’t be stopped? I remember a terrorist attack that happened in Israel where I was a kid, where a man with a suicide vest tried to get into a mall or shopping center, and a security guard who realized he was a terrorist tackled him to the ground. The terrorist managed to detonate his explosive, but the only (or maybe one of the only) other people killed was the security guard, because his bulk essentially contained the explosion.
Lethal force may be the “most effective way” -
But as you say, the preservation of life should be the first goal
So lethal force may not be the only way
Of course it wasn’t the only option. They could have tried to wrestle him to the ground and take his weapon, they could have tried talking to him, or maybe they might have thought some other way to to stop the attack. It’s easy for us to contemplate this as we might a math problem while sitting in the safety of our own homes with all the time in the world. These people had very little time to act, children had already been murdered, and they were faced with an immediate threat, so their actions were reasonable.
Sure. I think we might differ on whose life should be prioritized and what is reasonable though.
Moderating:
@DPRK, @Babale, let’s please keep this thread to the specifics of this event, avoiding what ifs (like Velocity’s Above) or other unrelated events. That’s better suited for a more general debate rather than the specifics of this one. No warnings, but we’re trying to keep this thread restricted to the specific questions the OP has asked - mostly what about the human element to this particular event, where the exact age and situation of the shooter(s) is key.
I wouldn’t think we differ on whose life we prioritise,
Maybe we do though on how much value the life of the teen shooter has
While it’s a tragedy that someone lost their life at such a young age, in an active shooter situation, the shooter’s life is the lowest to prioritize.
I’ve even heard of shooters, robbers, and the like being deterred with a faceful of bug spray, especially the kind that shoots 10 or 12 feet, or a fire extinguisher.
Put yourself in that room for a moment. The teen shooter has a gun. If you try to wrestle him or grapple with him, he could put a few bullets into your body within seconds.
I’d like to come back to this point. I would not think any differently about this man’s actions if he were a completely disinterested bystander. The fact that his own children were in danger was no doubt very motivating, but he would have been just as justified in his actions if that was not the case. As a moral case, his actions saved the lives of an unknown number of people, many of whom were children.
Heck, I might think a disinterested observer more brave for stepping up without the vested interest of having children in the school.
I don’t consider it either inherently wrong or vigilante justice.
To me–and feel free to agree or disagree–every member of a society has a moral duty to stop someone who’s clearly causing great harm or death to innocent people. Maybe all you can do is call the cops or hide in a safe place and witness the event to recount it later. But if you have the ability to disarm them or ram them with your buddy’s car or shoot them in the face, you’re morally obligated to.
Heroism isn’t required. You don’t need to rush somebody who has a weapon and wrestle them to the ground. And if you just can’t, then you just can’t–no blame, no shame.
So to Texas it up, the 16-year-old needed killin’, and there was no wrongdoing by the person who did so. And to head it off now, if the shooter were a 6-year-old popping off rounds at his teachers and schoolmates, the 6-year-old would have had to die, too, unless some other way to stop him could be very quickly found.
God almighty. Okay, maybe new info will come out that assigns some degree of culpability to the dad. Barring that, I tend to give a very healthy benefit of the doubt to someone who found himself in a supremely chaotic, dangerous, stressful high stakes situation not of his making, especially one that required a split second decision.
The whole situation is a tragedy on a number of fronts. But I don’t see the dad’s action as the “least bad evil,” or whatever some have described it. Again, assuming no new info, the dad’s actions were necessary and laudable. It’s okay, of course, to feel bad about all the deaths, including the teenager’s. That does not require us to react to the facts as we currently know them as some have in this thread.