Gun Control Hell - Kingsley Foreman in Australia

Great Debates
1

I don’t know how in the hell I ran into this site, In Self Defense, but it’s worth a look just because it provides a truly sad example of gun control gone awry, in this case in Australia.

This guy did something that in this country would have been seen as a heroic act (killing an armed robber, who had a gun drawn and was pointing at him, to save himself and a female friend) and was charged with first degree murder. Though he was acquitted, he had to pay for his own legal fees (which are probably astronomical, especially since he is a tow truck driver.) What a crock.

He also has a pretty sweet page about outback towing. Now I remember - I was looking for Toyota Land Cruiser info when I stumbled on that site. That guy’s Land Cruiser is bad-ass, by the way. I’m a Toyota fan.

2

Based in what you say, it sounds like a simple case of self defence. He should have never been charged.

3

Hmmm… well this site suggests that the robber was fleeing. That might have had some bearing on the case.

4

Ah, the rest of the story. If he was fleeing, then there is no threat. That changes everything, doesn’t it. I read the OP and interpreted it in the following way - That they were being threatened by someone who was pointing a real gun. In that case, shooting would be justified (though foolhardy).

5

Not in America. According to a jury in Anchorage, Alaska, you are permitted to shoot burgalars in the back when they run away from you:

6

SteveG1, read the whole story.

For some reason I can’t C & P from the text, but several paragraphs down, he says the robber was turning back twards him. If the robber still had the gun in his hand (and from the text it implies that he has) then that could be construed as a threat.

It was only later revealed that the gun in question was only a replica, something that, contrary to Guy Ritchie and Snatch, is not easily ascertained in the heat of the moment. It is clear that the robber certainly wanted everyone to believe it was a real gun, so he can hardly cry foul when his victims believe him.

Fear Itself: that may only be true in Alaska. Each state’s laws vary, usually just slightly but sometimes signifigantly so.

Generally: what boggles my mind is that the accused was forced to pay for his own legal defense. Doesn’t Australia have it’s own version of our 6th Amendment?

7

DOH! :smack:

Fear Itself: sorry, I should have read the article and not jerked my knee.

Still, it is against the law (as the article clearly shows), the jury just didn’t convict. One question: how can one man, having shot two people, be charged with four counts of manslaughter and criminally negligent homicide?

8

The 6th Amendment only talks of an accused being entitled to “the Assistance of Counsel for his defence”. I read that to mean that an accused is entitled to a lawyer, but that’s it. Is this generally interpreted by US courts to mean that his defence team will be paid for?

At any rate, here in Australia you have access to a few legal services if you can’t pay. There are Community Legal Centres, generally handling smaller cases for free, no matter what your income level is. There is Legal Aid, which provides funding for defences in criminal cases, but will only provide funding if you are too poor to pay for your own defence. Presumably this guy was deemed wealthy enough to pay for his own defence.

9

How does any of this have anything whatsoever to do with gun control?

10

Sure, Dallas Milsore was fleeing and was no longer a threat. But not lets forget, he won’t be robbing people anymore, now will he? He was a dumbass, and sorry, but he so deserved it.

11

I’m not sure where I stand on this one. If the thief was pointing a gun, or what looked like a gun, then blast away. If he was fleeing, he was not a threat. If he turned back, blast away. Again, he might have decided to keep robbing and kill someone else later on. I’ll just admit my ignorance in this case. Considering everything, and admitting I don’t know everything, I have to lean in favor of the home owner.

12

Maybe he was fleeing, and maybe he wasn’t. Wasn’t that part of the trial process, to determine that, based on the evidence?

I’m in the small minority of people who have been personally threatened with a gun (on three occasions), and no situation is as clear-cut as news bites and Dopers that read them like to put it. Crimes are often agitated, violent, fast-moving, and confusing right from the start - let me relate my third time threatened in alternate words - and I’m going to run them on for effect.

“Suddenly your frame of reference of just going home and going inside is broken by a large man looming over you with a handgun pointed at you. He starts yelling at you to give him this and give him that and telling you he’s going to kill you if you don’t and you’re fumbling and can’t get your watch off and your rings are stuck and he’s getting more and more agitated and he walks away to look for something and comes back and makes more demands and he hears a car coming and runs around the car to duck and hide and then comes back and finally he yells and sneers at you and runs away, THEN drives past in his car pointing the gun out his passenger-side window at you and threatening you and all the while you think this is it…”

You see, if I try to narrate how my third event, second holdup occurred, it’s fast-moving and there were at least 2 times I thought he was going to go and leave me alone, then he came back and made more demands.

As soon as he left the third time, I was fairly sure if he came back who knows what he might do, as he didn’t get much from me and was getting very angry. It’s all nice and neat to sit here on the SDMB and cast a person who dares to try to defend themselves as a crazed gun-owner, but that’s a pretty stupid thing to do that speaks from ignorance and prejudice. In my case, I leaned over and flipped open my glove box to get my 9mm, because I didn’t know what would happen if he came back a third time, and I figured this was it.

Only to discover I’d taken it out to clean it after a trip to the range. So instead I grabbed a piece of rebar I kept under my front seat, but then dropped it, realizing that unlike on TV, small woman with rebar versus large male with gun was not a balanced equation.

The best part of it all? The cop that dressed me down when I gave my account, telling me that if I had even shot in the air as a warning shot, he would have arrested me for “public discharge of a firearm”, and that I should “leave the self defense to the professionals”. Mercifully, I was not patted on the head like a good girl and sent on my way. :rolleyes: I asked him very angrily where he and the other so-called “professionals” were when I was sexually assaulted years back, and he said basically “can’t be everywhere”.

So one can then say “well, if the situation really is so dramatic and fast-moving and confusing as you say, does it make sense to have two people armed and dangerous?”, to which my response is “at what point does one give up all hope of taking charge of their life, and acting to defend themselves, rather than rely on the smiling policeman to be there for them”? Why is there this constant desire of people to resign the defense of their own lives to the two entities we have the least incentive to trust - the State, and the criminal? (and I don’t mean that there is distrust of the intentions of the State, but the ability of the State to be there and always able to respond). Do we resign ourselves to relying that “someone else will do it for us”, or instead on the goodwill and human decency of the scum pointing the gun at us, and just hope that today is the day you won’t get raped by a diseased piece of scum, or taken somewhere, killed, stuffed in a trash bag, and dumped in a tip?

In the case this thread is about, the person may very well have been at-fault. The criminal may have been pathetic, may have been non-violent acting, may have been clearly and unambiguously fleeing the scene. In that case, I don’t think many can justify shooting them (although shooting harmlessly in the air to make sure they know you’re armed and to discourage their return would be justified). But when you have a gun stuck in your face, or someone you love is threatened, a person should be excused for making the wrong decision.

And of course, that’s what the trial is for - but trials can be punishment enough, in that they can easily bankrupt a person and ruin their lives as well. I’ve seen it happen. There has to be some point where Society says this: “it was not the tow truck driver who created the situation - it was the criminal. Let us never forget that fact and keep it from being brushed aside. We acknowledge that criminals reap what they sow.”

And as a final point - replica gun makes no difference. I’m fairly familiar with firearms, and I can’t tell a replica from a real gun until I handle it. If you believe it’s a gun, and the criminal uses it as a gun, then it’s a gun.

13

The Miranda Warning was based upon this ruling, which quotes both the 5th and 6th Amendments.

IANAL or criminal, so my experience with criminal defense attorneys and the public defender’s office is limited to TV and the few instances reported by fellow Dopers here on SDMB. But I get the impression that anyone who can afford it gets their own attorney, and only the poor rely upon the public defender’s services.

14

You can actually hear the guy (Kingsley Foreman) talk about the whole experience on a radio show in this audio link. He talks about, among other things, the very strict firearms laws in Australia.

The talk show host compares him (unfairly, in my opinion) to ‘Australia’s Bernie Goetz.’ The situations seemed similar, but they weren’t really: Goetz shot FOUR guys who had tried to mug him on the subway, and IIRC, as they were all fleeing from him. Foreman shot ONE guy in what what seemed to have been a heated and confusing moment (while Goetz, I think, was quite collected about it.) Also Foreman actually tried to help the guy who he’d shot. I think there’s quite a difference.

Not that I’m against Bernie Goetz or saying what he did was evil. I just think the cases are different.

15

UP: * It’s all nice and neat to sit here on the SDMB and cast a person who dares to try to defend themselves as a crazed gun-owner*

Who here is doing anything of the sort? The worst thing I’ve seen anybody say about Mr. Foreman in this thread is that he may not have been justified in his actions.

UP: So one can then say “well, if the situation really is so dramatic and fast-moving and confusing as you say, does it make sense to have two people armed and dangerous?”, to which my response is “at what point does one give up all hope of taking charge of their life, and acting to defend themselves, rather than rely on the smiling policeman to be there for them”?

I’m not in favor of banning handguns, but I don’t think your response really answers your question. I understand and sympathize with your natural wish to feel as though you’re “taking charge of your life” and “acting to defend yourself”. But that doesn’t constitute evidence that the average person really would be safer in such a bewildering situation if, as you say, there were two armed and dangerous people instead of one. Maybe they really would, or at least some of them would; but your gut desire to feel “in control” of the situation, by itself, isn’t a valid guide for setting policy.

Gorsnak: How does any of this have anything whatsoever to do with gun control?

Ditto me. I thought that “gun control” was about what sort of firearms a person is allowed to have, what regulates their sale and ownership, etc. What we seem to be talking about here, on the other hand, is the Australian equivalent of laws relating to criminal assault and self-defense. AFAICT the essential issues would be just the same if Mr. Foreman had fatally wounded the robber with a cleaver or a cast-iron frying pan.

The question is simply whether Mr. Foreman’s attack was justifiable self-defense. There’s nothing specific to firearms involved. (That is, excluding the lesser charge of Mr. Foreman’s illegally transporting his pistol from his home to another location, which nobody here seems to be bothering about.)

16

It’s rhetorical (I think?) text characterizing what inevitably happens in gun control threads over the last 4+ years here. No one in this thread was doing that.

Your point is valid, but I do not believe it changes things, and I feel it might not entirely be on-target. The Right to defend oneself is one which is an “inconvenient” Right, in that the individual exercising it is not going to make the same reasoned decision as a committee ex post facto, a so-called “professional” placed in the same situation, or even another average person placed in the same situation. It’s a Right that is tied to individual freedom and choice, and in any exercise of such a powerful and awesome right, there is risk.

In other words, you may be correct in that statistics can show that the average person in the same situation may make the wrong choice. But I argue that the average person should still have that right to make that wrong decision. However, I’m not blind at all to the fact that a large number of people out there are likely not good candidates to ever own or handle a firearm, regardless of their criminal record. An awesome right perhaps demands very awesome responsibilities - or, in a better way of putting it, demands ability-testing (not “need-testing”). Personally, I disagree with the current firearms laws on several fronts, but also do not know how to resolve my “solutions” with what I feel is a fundamental right to put up an equivalent, effective (at least in terms of equalization potential), and possible personal defense.

(I’m just talking out loud a bit, not saying you don’t realize or necessarily agree or disagree…)

To step back to my original post, I think what I’m mostly trying to say is that just because a soundbite, or even the results of a trial find one thing, when the situation happened there may have been many, many things which were really not clear-cut at all. And I think there should at least be a presumption that the victim of the crime has the moral and legal authority to resist, even if they get things wrong occasionally.

And it’s a terrible “wrong” when the wrong choice leads to a dead human being. But the whole incident in the OP would never have occurred if the criminal would have simply made the choice not to take a replica gun and threaten someone with it.