No, there was a shopkeeper in Oklahoma. That is a different one.
Jerome Ersland stood over a stopped, either unconscious or nearly so armed robber, and executed him. Mr. Ersland was a pharmacist in Tulsa, Oklahoma, and he had just been robbed by the armed robber, who IIRC, had accomplices. Ersland had a revolver nearby, and shot the robber with it. The robber moved a short distance away, and collapsed, still in the store. Ersland walked over to him, took some time, and shot the robber a final time in the head, killing him. All caught on camera. Whoops.
The Tulsa District Attorney frowned on that, charged Ersland with murder (1st degree, IIRC) and he was convicted.
Don’t do that. Shoot until the threat is stopped. Consider very carefully, that the people who are going to determine whether the threat was indeed stopped or not, are going to look at all of the actions with an extremely jaundiced eye. They will have the benefit of extended time for reflection, a likely video replay of the events, and they won’t be feeling the stress of someone fighting for their life. Moreover, every bullet fired by a LTC/CHL carrier is going to be scrutinized very carefully. Did the CHL holder need to fire Bullet 5 to stop the threat? Was the shooter recklessly disregarding the potential for innocent bystanders to be shot? And so on.
Only use deadly force to stop an imminent threat of deadly harm or serious bodily injury.
[Disclaimer: I still haven’t figured out how to get these quotes working]
[quote=“msmith537, post:11, topic:914018”]
Then it’s a jail you’ll be a going. Pretty sure emptying a 16 round magazine would be considered “excessive force”.[/quote]
Excessive force is when the police use too much force. For example, shooting someone that was running away from them. I don’t know if civilians can be charged with it.
Also, keep in mind, someone is either dead or not dead. If they’re dead after the first bullet, 15 more isn’t going to make them more dead. If they’re not dead because you shot them in the leg, now they’re angry, in pain and if they’re able to, they’re a lot more likely to come after you. Which is the whole reason behind shooting until the threat is gone.
I don’t understand what you’re talking about here. I don’t know what you mean by " someone could easily take your gun and use it against you after immobilizing you with pepper spray or a fist pummeling"…or, I know what it means, I just don’t know what it has to do with anything.
Also, who said anything about an armed person being required to take a face full of pepper spray or a beat down?
One of us misread or mistyped something (could be me, I wrote that post early in the morning).
A) He was still moving/He was still reaching for his gun/He kept mumbling “I’m gonna kill you motherfucker”/I’m not a doctor, I don’t know that he’s dead etc etc etc.
B)If you’re standing over someone, they don’t likely pose a threat. When people talk about unloading their gun on someone, they’re talking about a situation where, for example, someone breaks into your house and you’re firing at them from a distance, with your adrenaline pumping, things are chaotic, smoke is filing the air. If someone breaks into my house, they’re leaving in a bag (well, not really, I don’t have a gun there at the moment), does it make a difference if they get hit once or 16 times? If they’re a threat to me or my family, I’m not concerned about shooting them in such a way that they might recover.
Reminds me of a meme I saw recently (don’t have a link, pretend this is in meme format):
-If you’d shoot someone that breaks into your house, you value your possessions more than their life.
–If someone breaks into my house, they value my possessions more than their life.
I’m not familiar with the story, but I’d bet if everything was exactly the same except the pharmacist fired all the bullets at once instead of some now and the rest a little later, the legal part would have played out differently.
That’s sort of what I was trying to say in my post. There’s a difference between wandering over to someone mostly dead to finish unloading the magazine vs doing all at once, in the heat of the moment.
Hey, you said expend all the bullets. Now we are going into nuance?
Besides, isn’t that the point of this thread? If they are crawling away and begging for mercy, be sure to execute them because it will be easier for your legal team!
Yes. The law tends to be pretty nuanced.
Agreed. What sunk him was 1) being on camera, and 2) basically administering a coup de grace to the robber. You can’t do that legally. Taking a human life is presumed to be unlawful. You need a legally recognizable reason to do it and be excused. Self defense counts. What Erstad did with that final shot wasn’t self defense.
Erstad hits him in the head in the first couple of shots, and the robber dies? Likely good to go.
The OP said “if you shoot someone in self-defense you are far, far better off from legal liability or criminal punishment if the person is killed rather than wounded.” He didn’t mention anything about the person crawling away. He didn’t mention anything about the wounded person begging for mercy. And the only thing that even resembles it “being easier for your legal team!” is when he mentioned that you’re better off from a legal/criminal standpoint if the person is dead.
Those embellishments you added are a strawman.
Certainly if there are witnesses (including a camera) to you executing a person who is unconscious things will not go well for you in court (nor should they).
But to the OP yeah, what the people were saying in the link in the OP was you are better off killing someone than injuring them from a legal standpoint (assuming you had just causes to shoot in the first place).
We can then imagine all sorts of scenarios from the person is on the ground and pleading for their life and you shoot them again to just waiting a bit before you call the police so they bleed out.
Morality aside are you better off, from a personal liability/criminal standpoint, to let someone you shot die?
Generally, firing a firearm is considered deadly force, and the question that comes up is whether you were justified in using deadly force. Different states vary a lot on this, but generally you are fine to use deadly force to defend yourself or another person against death, severe bodily harm, kidnapping, and rape. “I thought my life was in danger from this person, therefore I used deadly force to stop him” is almost universally accepted. Where you run into a problem is if you claim that you were shooting to wound the person, then that could be taken as indicating that you didn’t actually feel threatened, and if the situation is not a real threat then you’re not justified in using deadly force.
Also, ‘shooting to wound’ is pretty much entirely Hollywood nonsense that only makes sense if you’re an action hero. A police sniper lining up a careful shot from a rooftop might try to shoot someone very specifically in a spot to disable them, but the sniper is almost certainly not going to defend his actions on the basis of personal self-defense. Trying to wound someone (shooting for an arm or leg or something, which is still highly dangerous) in a typical self defense situation instead of shooting to stop them (aiming for center of mass or the head) makes it more likely that you’ll miss or have an ineffective hit, but doesn’t make it that unlikely that the other person will die or be permanently injured if you do hit. “Shooting to wound” is just not something you should ever do, either shoot to stop the person or don’t involve a firearm at all.
In the example people are using where you shoot until you stop the threat, move closer to the now-non-threatening person who’s on the ground, and carefully shoot them in the head to kill them, you’ve moved well out of self-defense territory. The person is no longer threatening you, and both the fact that you felt safe enough to approach them and aimed a shot directly at their head rather than center mass indicates both that you knew they were not a thread AND that your intent was to kill them rather than stop them hurting you (which generally makes it premeditated murder). This is radically different than ‘I’m in danger, start firing and keep shooting until the mag/cylinder is empty, then stop’, which is generally going to be considered a reasonable action.
Add another wrinkle to it. You have no idea what kind of disease the assailant may be carrying. HIV, Hep B, SARS-CoV2: you just don’t know. Do you carry PPE on your person or nearby, in case you should have to treat a stranger? I don’t.
You have to put the quote tags on their own line.
You did this:
(quote=“msmith537, post:11, topic:914018”)
Then it’s a jail you’ll be a going. Pretty sure emptying a 16 round magazine would be considered “excessive force”.(/quote)
You should have done this:
(quote=“msmith537, post:11, topic:914018”)
Then it’s a jail you’ll be a going. Pretty sure emptying a 16 round magazine would be considered “excessive force”.
(/quote)
As I’ve already noted, I am not a lawyer. But I think that if you’re shooting somebody in self-defense and you pause to reload your gun in the middle of your shooting, you’re creating a much more difficult legal situation for yourself.
You mean hitting enter? Wow. That’s worse than some coding languages.
Certainly not and you (general “you”) are under no obligation to render direct aid to the person you just shot in self defense. That said, can you be really slow about calling 911 for an ambulance?
Actual situation from several years ago Young widow alone with baby, local scumbags trying to break in to steal drugs(Late husband’s (cancer) pain meds) She’s armed with a shot gun and 9mm auto. As it happened, she shot and killed the one who got through the barricaded door. However, if she had fired several shots and missed and he resumed his efforts to gain entry, she could have used the pause to reload rather than continue with a partly empty magazine.
In the late 80s in Philadelphia there was a situation where a nurse was moonlighting when a coworker she didn’t get along with collapsed. She did not have her PPE with her, so she called 911 but did not do CPR. The man survived due to a really fast ambulance response, but there was a huge shitstorm over her refusal to render aid.
It likely varies from state to state, but she was never charged, nor did her professional licensure suffer.
There is no legal requirement for a medical professional to render aid while off-duty. They may be judged on social media and in the press but legally they are fine to walk away.
Are practitioners covered by states’ Good Samaritan laws? That’s another reason an actual medical practitioner might not want to get involved.
I can easily imagine a situation where an assailant, stopped by a doctor’s bullet, turns around and sues the doctor for negligently treating the injuries and (in the eyes of a jury) making them worse.
From a legal standpoint I think you’re best off putting as many bullets into someone as possible before they run away or fall to the ground, and then hope that was enough to kill them. Again, legal standpoint, not moral.