So if someone else came along and stabbed chokehold guy to prevent him from commiting his crime, you’d also be fine with that?
Chokehold guy, AFAICT, committed no crime.
(On the apparent inevitable sub-focus on that NYC case: Surely there was a point where the subject was disabled and application of the force could and should have safely stopped, and chokeholds are known to be risky —but does that mean that the person went in intending to kill or recklessly ignoring the risk thereof? As I said before, simply punching someone’s face can kill them (directly or by their hitting their head on the way down), does that mean everyone who throws a punch has decided to kill?)
That requires a level of nuance that a lot of Americans are simply incapable of these days. The world is divided into Good Guys and Bad Guys, and if you’re a Good Guy, you can do no wrong, and if you’re a Bad Guy, you get what’s coming to you. The notion that someone may need to be held down without being killed is utterly alien to them. Any justification for any level of force is sufficient justification for killing someone, period.
And I say this as a guy who has held violent people until they stopped being violent. On one occasion, that involved holding them until the cops arrived to take them into custody, so it’s not like I’m just talking out my ass here. And yet, I’ve never felt the need to kill anyone, or even punch them.
Even in stand your ground states, a person who uses deadly force is supposed to have a “reasonable” fear that the use of such force is necessary to prevent grievous bodily harm or death. For reasons I don’t entirely fathom, law enforcement and district attorneys often interpret these laws in such a way as to give free reign for individuals to use deadly force as they see fit. i.e. It doesn’t matter whether their fear was reasonble or not. While I believe individuals have a right to defend themselves, the many abuses of stand your ground laws over the years has led me to the conclusion that they should be abolished, or at the very least amended for clarification.
Unless it was knives or hand grenades, then it doesn’t pass muster. It takes very little time for someone to pass out in a chokehold, something on the order of 10 seconds if applied correctly. Choking someone out for three minutes is an execution, not subduing someone or defending oneself.
Ah, well, yes, OK, then it’s alright. Of course. Which is, I believe, what the OP stated to start with and you were trying to prove him right. Well done.
I just want to associate myself with the remarks of Two_Many_Cats2 and Airbeck
I’ve said many times that the grind, the treadmill, the rat race is killing us, AND that the RW strategy is to loft straw man after straw man after straw man, declaring Democrats to be every conceivable kind of existential threat.
It’s a heady brew. Add 400,000,000+ guns in private ownership and bad things really could start to happen.
It’s because those particular DAs and law enforcement have become infected by the same disease / psychosis / evil affecting those people in the stories cited above. Just imagine that the meteorologist who was “standing his ground” by threatening to shoot a six year old girl looking for her missing cat was a police officer or DA instead, and their’s your answer.
That’s still not a death-penalty crime.
Is it possible that the criminal in question spent his life receiving ‘nuanced’ responses to his crimes, and so kept engaging in assault and battery against innocents until he finally came up against, well, a lack of nuance?
I see it as a you-can-use-force-to-stop-him crime, with a don’t-try-to-kill-him-but-if-you-wind-up-killing-him-while-using-a-reasonable-amount-of-force-maybe-we’ll-still-give-you-a-medal rider.
There are some that would say that because she was trespassing, she was breaking the law, and would deserve to be choked to death.
I’m not aware of anyone who would say such a thing. Cite?
I came here to say pretty much the same thing.
Someone upthread said that you shouldn’t punish someone for interrupting a crime, even if that interruption results in the criminal’s death.
Then someone more recently said that you should give them a medal if they wind up killing someone while stopping them from committing a crime.
I’d have to double check to see if they were the same person.
It wasn’t limited to littering or causing a scene, and trespass is a much more serious crime. Seems that person would give a medal to someone who choked out a 6 year old girl to keep them from trespassing.
I am not sure if this is true, I think instead that we have a media reporting bias. I mean, according the media, only attractive blonde girl kids get abducted, never black boys.
In 1953 Cash wrote Folsom Prison blues.
In the Old West, a defense was that the dead man “needed killin’”.
Exactly.
Just like one “mass shooting” which consisted on a car load of gang-bangers shooting up other gang bangers is the most common sort- but never gets the kind of media coverage that some dude killing the same number for apparently no reason does.
wiki-
In the long term, violent crime in the United States has been in decline since colonial times. The homicide rate has been estimated to be over 30 per 100,000 people in 1700, dropping to under 20 by 1800, and to under 10 by 1900.[7]
After World War II, crime rates increased in the United States, peaking from the 1970s to the early-1990s. Violent crime nearly quadrupled between 1960 and its peak in 1991. Property crime more than doubled over the same period. Since the 1990s, however, contrary to common misconception,[8] crime in the United States has declined steadily, and has significantly declined by the late 1990s and also in the early 2000s.
Or look at the chart in this PDF:
Last couple of decades, homicide in the USA is at a low point.
So, it is not American exceptionalism, it is the Media feeding us what we want to see, or at least what they think we want to read/see/hear.
Did they really? They said “you shouldn’t punish” them? You could’ve made a true statement or a false one; which one did you opt for?
What that song has to do with this subject mystifies me, and you may want to modify that second part to “In Old West movies and tv shows”.
Isn’t that what the kid did? I mean, the (5 second) report I heard was he was alive when taken off the subway, and died later in the hospital.