Many of these “children” also commit major felonies, such as rape, armed robbery and murder.
Many drivers have been killed or seriously injured when one of the little darlings drops a heavy object off a bridge, onto a car below.
Throwing shit at a moving vehicle is always dangerous, specially shit that can smear and impair your vision. We aren’t talking about kids egging you while you stand at a bus stop or throwing eggs at your house, plenty of accidents have happened over much smaller distractions. Shooting the kid is a bit drastic but if i was driving around with my kid in the car and some punk decided to use me as target practice he would have several broken bones.
I’m intrigued by this discussion. I think there is a deep feeling that this kind of egging should be punished by violence and I think it has a lot to do with the idea that even a successful adult safely enclosed in his car or SUV is vulnerable to a punk throwing an egg at you for no reason. People seem to have a visceral reaction to this kind of random, pointless act of vandalism/assault, however minor it may seem, for absolutely no reason. People get really upset at the idea of being a random target for violence or mischief.
I have my car hit by eggs, and had other stuff thrown at it (both paked and while driving) and while I’d like to say that I turned the other cheek, chalked it up to youthful indiscretion, and stoically washed the egg off the windows, in reality I wanted to dismember the fuckers.
I didn’t actually do it, of course, but it’s easy for me to see how someone with less self-control and fear of the law could. But that person then needs to deal with the fact that he is a murderer, and face the full punishment of the law.
Scenario: kid in a convenience store pockets some gum, five finger discount, and walks out. Cashier chases him down the block with a 12-gauge, corners him in an alley, and blows his face off.
Justice is served, right? Kid deserved it; he did something stupid and got shot. Cause and effect.
Your example of the bisection-by-train is a little different than execution-for-egging, isn’t it? The first assassin is an object bound by the laws of physics, while your yolk-covered revenge killer is presumably a human being, bound by society’s laws, and obligated to keep his murderous passions in check.
(I fully admit that my first thoughts upon being egged would likely be just as murderous, but, you know… part of being a decent citizen is learning not to instinctively kill everyone who pisses you off. Myself, I do this one day at a time.)
It ought to be 100% legal to egg any car whose car alarm has been going off for more than thirty seconds without the owner running towards it to turn it off.
It ought to be legal to egg any Hummer vehicle at any time, as long as it is stationary.
It ought to be legal to egg any car that starts warning you that you’re too close to it when you’re just walking by.
In all cases, it would only apply to cars that aren’t moving.
It’s kinda like road rage.
Should you be killed for getting involved in a road-rage incident? No. Are you and idiot for getting yourself involved in something that could easily get you killed? Yes.
Should you be killed for sleeping with someone else’s wife? No. Am I surprised you got killed for getting caught sleeping with the wife of a mafia hit man? No.
We’re not talking about (well I’m not talking about) vigilante justice where we kill some kid who steals a pack of gum. We’re talking about engaging in activities where you know you could get killed.
Who cares if it’s right or wrong? You stick your finger in a cobra’s mouth you’re gonna get bit.
When I lived in Sacramento and then later in Washington DC I got really sick of the extra little “tax” I had to pay to live there. The “tax” was allowing my car to be broken into on a regular basis (don’t bother calling the cops even if you do have a picture on your cell phone). Should I be able to kill the punks who think of this as a part-time job? No. Should I care if every single one of them took a bullet to the brain for choosing that has their career path? No.
I’m not thinking in terms of what should I, the SUV owner do. I’m thinking in terms of what should I, the person who likes to egg cars or jump out of planes or wrestle crocodiles and swim on top of sting rays expect.
So you’re saying force should rise to meet resistance? Not only are people obligated to put up with “kids will be kids,” but they’re in danger if they do more than shake their fist and holler “You damn kids…” ?
Again, I’m not saying that justice was served in this instance. Certainly, the shooter should face the full penalty of the law, especially if he pursued the egger. But it seems to me that kids who pull this crap are doing so because they want to see how far they can go.
One of the high-school [deleted]s I described in my OP ended up running afoul of a very large guy with a brush cut, probably miltary or former military, because not many people had brush cuts back then. Now, technically, Brush Cut could have been charged with assault, because he touched the kid. Not with his fist, but he did touch him. But what else can you do? Someone who thinks he’s bringing balance to the Force, or whatever he was thinking, by breaking car antennas, is not going to listen. You have to demonstrate.
Brandishing a weapon is, last I heard, a crime in certain places. Of course, egging a vehicle is a crime also. Killing one of the vandals vandalizing your property is, without a doubt, not only an extreme over-reaction but also a crime.
In Ohio, I suspect that just brandishing a weapon is a crime. Think they have strict gun laws up there. Shooting a kid for egging a car is just not justifiable in a moral sense. Legally, I think it’s a problem even in the most liberal use of force states. The shooter can’t even claim he was resisting a felony, and that’s about the lowest standard out there…
Levdrakon, don’t think I’m trying to excuse the kids’ behavior. They were idiots, and my eyes remain as dry as yours over the one’s brat’s untimely end, as far as that goes.
My point was that your causal chain of do something stupid–>get killed is missing an important link, and that’s the actions of the one with the gun. That person (unlike a speeding train or a cobra or a riled-up alligator) makes a conscious choice in how to respond. The death of the kid was not an inevitable result of throwing eggs, the way a good splattering is fairly guaranteed when you jump into the path of a freight train.
I don’t think it’s a good idea to start blithely shrugging off summary execution as a reasonable response to vandalism, as though it were the inescapable natural order of things. If the facts of the story bear out, and the guy chased the kids down and shot at them, it can’t reasonably be argued (although I will nonetheless not be surprised to hear him argue it) that he was in fear for his life. As Ravenman suggested, if the guy killed someone for throwing eggs, he was probably an (armed) powderkeg waiting to go off, and the prospect of people like that among us scares me a lot more than a couple of dipshit teenagers with an egg carton.
I have never heard of a person dying from having a car egged. I have heard of people dying from being hunted down like dogs. This guy hunted them down to kill them. No way to excuse him.
Kids do stupid things sometimes. It is not a reason to execute them. gee maybe the eggs were spoiled and they gave him samonella and it killed him. Yes,you can concoct excuses for absolute overboard behavior. They dont wash .It was an act of savage anger and revenge.
So evidently the answer to the OP is: yes. If you throw an egg at a car, there are people who feel that your summary execution is entirely justifiable, even if you’re only 14 years old. Because if you’re old enough to attend middle school and still don’t understand that a thrown egg can kill, you’re patently subhuman and utterly irredeemable. So don’t expect any sympathy when you’re gunned down in revenge. You’ve thrown eggs! Any fool would intuitively know that such an act is tantamount to attempted murder. This is why so many death row inmates also have a history of egg-related crimes. In many ways, an egg is the perfect weapon.
I bet any money that kid’s family are saying right now: “How could we have gone so wrong, to raise a child who would dream of throwing eggs? Truly, he was dead to us already. We’d written him off long ago; his life was over the moment he touched his first carton. Thank god some brave soul ended his reign of terror. Our long nightmare is over at last.”
Ditto for all you kids who run with scissors. Remember, those things can stab innocent bystanders, so don’t expect anyone to grieve when some indignant citizen blows your head off.
Yeah! Let the little buggers get away with egg-throwing, and next thing you know, they’ll escalate to tomatoes. And baby, that’s heavy ordnance.
Seriously, what’s gotten into the folks who think that kids deserve to be shot to death for egging a car?
Once in my delinquent youth, I amused myself one winter day by throwing snowballs high into the air over an adjacent street, to see if I could lead an approaching car just right. One aerial shot caught a car perfectly, square on the roof. The driver stopped and chased me, but I escaped.
I suppose I’m lucky he didn’t have a gun.
Throwing rocks at cars got these silly kids up to five years in prison. One of the women whose car was hit had a baby in the back seat. Still funny kid games?
These two adorable kids were each charged with one count of felony malicious mischief and three counts of felony assault for throwing rocks.
Sure, first it’s innocent snowballs. No fun. Let’s use eggs, or maybe start putting rocks in the snowballs, or maybe just go ahead and use rocks.
From Toronto:
Is shooting someone for throwing an egg at your car justified? No, not really. But from what I can tell perusing the web, whether it’s an egg or a rock it’s a form of assault and when you go around assaulting people don’t cry to me if one of your victims is armed.
Are you in the habit of completely missing the point, levdrakon?
If the point is you shouldn’t shoot people for egging your car I get it. The driver of the SUV apparently gets it too because he abandoned his vehicle and will most likely be apprehended sooner than later and end up in prison.
The other point would be if you insist on egging people’s cars maybe you should save up your allowance and get a bullet-proof vest.
Let’s not leap to the conclusion that the SUV driver will automatically go to prison if apprehended. What jury would convict them? A clearer case of self-defense could not be imagined. Don’t lose sight of the real issue here: Those kids had eggs. One adult with a gun against three children with eggs? it’s a wonder that the driver even got off a single shot, especially when you consider the enormous death toll that eggs have racked up over the years. I’m sure all of us have, or know someone who has, a relative whose life was mercilessly cut short by egg-throwing children. This is exactly the sort of situation that America’s forefathers had in mind when they drafted the Second Amendment. Honestly, do any of us really want to live in a world where decent people can’t use deadly force against 14-year old egg fiends?
What if the egg had really been an atomic bomb?
All sarcasm aside, do any of us really want to live in a world where there’s nothing you can do about vandals/bullies/jerks except shake your fist and say “You damn kids…”?
No one should pay with their life for throwing an egg, or any other act of jerkishness. But as I asked in the OP, what consequences canthere be? Is it really okay that there should be no consequences at all?
Whilst executing the youth was to my mind disproportionate I have no sympathy with the victim. He engaged in a course of criminal conduct presumably for his own entertainment at the expense (and to the endangerment of) of others.
I’d have been more comfortable had the driver simply given the youth a good beating; killing him was going too far.
Hopefully however the victim’s death will serve as an example to others like him that tormenting people can have repercussions.