Last week there was a shooting at the University of Washington. The circumstances were there was a demonstration going on. During the demonstration an assault was taking place. A demonstrator who was carrying a concealed pistol, took it out, presumably to stop the assault. Another demonstrator saw the pistol and immediately grabbed the man and tried to wrestle the gun away. The man thought he was being assaulted and shot the other man.
Assuming the pistol was legally owned and the man had a permit. Was there anything illegal going on?
Remember how the Second Amendment types said the best defense against violence was to carry your own weapon? Hmmm… Interesting illustration.
IANAL, not sure what the law is… but logic suggests - the person was legally licensed to carry. He in good faith pulls the gun to defend someone else. I see no violation in that.
The second person in good faith thought they were intervening in a possible crime in progress. In good faith. I don’t see a violation in that.
The first person then finds he had to defend himself against the second person. He believes he is being illegally assaulted. He defends himself. I see no crime in that.
I find this somewhat similar to the situation - a person hears “Stop, thief!” and sees two men run toward him. He trips and tackles the second one and holds him down, only to find the guy was chasing the first guy, the thief. Nobody is really in the wrong.
The only provisos - depends what was said and when. If the second guy said he was stopping a shooting (not just trying to take away the gun with no explanation) that might matter.
Is a concealed carry permit legal on University grounds? Any conditions?
(I’ve always admired the restraint of Americans, as shown by Hollywood, where plain-clothes police run around brandishing guns in firefight situations and never get shot by their own or by concerned citizens…)
I have no idea if your presentation of the facts is correct and it doesn’t leave enough to analyze with any certainty.
Generally, you can use reasonable force to defend yourself from threats. The question is whether a gun is reasonable force under the circumstances. Since a gun is a lethal weapon, firing it is applying lethal force.
Pulling a gun out at someone can be seen as the attempt to use lethal force. My first question is whether the shooter was justified in using lethal force when he drew the pistol. In Washington, lethal force is justified, in relevant part, when “when there is reasonable ground to apprehend a design on the part of the person slain to commit a felony or to do some great personal injury to the slayer or to any such person [in the slayer’s presence], and there is imminent danger of such design being accomplished.” RCW 9A.16.050: Homicide—By other person—When justifiable.
So, was the “assault” the gun owner was trying to prevent “a felony” or did it present “imminent danger of great personal injury”? You didn’t give us enough facts to determine. Simple assault is generally a misdemeanor and you don’t suggest any facts that seem to present an imminent threat of great person injury. News accounts don’t suggest that the shooter was trying to prevent such a felony or danger to great personal injury.
If the assault didn’t justify the use of lethal force, waiving the gun around is an assault with a deadly weapon. That’s generally a felony. It also put other people in reasonable fear that he intended to unlawfully use deadly force. Other people in his vicinity had the right to protect themselves from his felony commission and his attempt to unlawfully use deadly force. This meant other people around him would have the right to defend themselves from him with reasonable force. Reasonable force under the circumstances when someone is threatening you or your companions with a gun would typically include lethal force. It sounds like the person or people who attacked him may have been right to do so to prevent him from being a danger.
I don’t think we can really know without knowing what person A (the gun-wielder) was thinking. Deadly force is an allowed response only in some circumstances. If A thought B was going to wrest the gun from him and shoot him, then I’d be pretty sure A would be allowed to shoot B. If A thought B was only going to take the gun and there would be no real injury, then perhaps not. This is complicated by the belief A had about injury to the original person being assaulted. And of course it all depends on Washington law.
ETA: Or what Tired and Cranky said much better
Since we don’t know the facts of the case with any certainty, this is better off in GD than GQ.
Colibri
General Questions Moderator
Absolutely. The gun owner is guilty of numerous infractions, but a WA-based lawyer would be needed to provide all the details. The basic scenario as described illustrates a perfect example of a stupid gun carrier. Firearms are not legally used for the “threat” of violence anywhere I am aware of. The person doing the assaulting would probably be dead after being shot if the gun owner was acting properly, again assuming the assaulter was doing some serious bodily harm. Then the gun owner would have a different, but more easily defended set of legal problems on his hands.
Not necessarily. We don’t know (from the OP’s description) what exactly the gun-owner had done or had intended to do before the 3rd person attempted to take away his gun. he may well have only had it half-drawn and was about to intervene in the assault. Not just “threatening”.
Losing control of your own weapon is usually a prelude to bad things. I can’t speak to any state’s laws, much less WA’s, but most gun carriers would react to any attempt to wrest their gun away as the first stage of a deadly assault against them. And respond accordingly with the deadly force in their hand while they still had it.
Police are certainly subject to some different specifics than are civilians, but that’s certainly their attitude.
I’m having trouble following your post. Are you under the impression that the gun owner was wrong because he was “brandishing” his pistol, threatening the assaulter but not actually shooting him?
Do you mean the assault he was witnessing or when the victim assaulted him?
Since the question has been moved it looks to me like he had no initial reason to brandish the gun but the shooting was justified.
For anyone interested hereis a video of the shooting.
Assuming legal concealed carry:
Being a concealed carry permit holder does not make you a superhero or crime fighter. You are allowed to use your weapon to defend yourself or others under certain circumstances. If the original assault led him to the reasonable belief that someone was in imminent threat of losing their life or serious bodily injury then he would be justified. If it was just a simple assault then he is not. Without knowing all the details I can’t know for sure. My gut instinct is that the assault didn’t justify bringing out a hand gun but that’s just a guess based on the wording of the OP.
Of course that is not the best quality video but I think you are correct that there was no initial reason to take out the gun. From what I can see there was a scuffle but not anything rising to a felony or anyone in danger of serious harm. If that’s the case I don’t understand how the shooting would be justified? If he had the gun brandished for an unlawful purpose how is the shooting justified?
I assume this is what the OP is referencing:
Thanks for the video and the link. I’m not clear on Washington’s laws around deadly force. In Utah, the shooter would probably not be convicted, and it wouldn’t surprise me if he were not even charged.
Utah has a law against “Threatening with or using dangerous weapon in fight or quarrel” but it contains a specific exemption for someone who “reasonably believing the action to be necessary” and “with purpose to prevent another’s use of unlawful force” either “draws” “exhibits” or “threatens the use of” a firearm.
The “assault” described in the OP or “scuffle” described by Loach probably qualifies as that “unlawful force”.
As others have said, if it was just simple assault, then the man brandishing the pistol would be in the wrong. He could have simply tried to break up the scuffle. Generally, only when threat of death or serious bodily injury is present can lethal force be applied.
In Utah at least, one can “draw” “exhibit” or “threaten the use of” a firearm in response to “unlawful force” (not deadly force), but if one actually fires the weapon, that’s deadly force and can only be used when reasonably believed necessary to stop “death” “serious bodily injury” or one of the listed “forcible felonies”.
If the shooter had no reason to brandish the gun, his shooting was not justified. If he had no right to brandish the gun, that is to use lethal force, he was committing the felony of assaulting people with a deadly weapon. You can’t use a gun to commit a felony. I assume in Washington, like in most civilized places, you can’t use a gun to defend yourself when you are committing a felony. Perhaps in the Old West this would have been okay.
If the shooter was not justified in brandishing the gun, his attackers were lawfully defending themselves from him because he was committing a felony and he was threatening them with great personal injury.
If he waived the gun around and didn’t comply with demands that he stop, he was just expanding the number of people to whom he was a threat. Even if other people were trying to kill him, they weren’t committing a crime. They had a right to self defense. Their right to self-defense must be reasonable under the circumstances but he was threatening to kill a person with a gun. A reasonable witness to the shooter’s threats of lethal violence is to use any means necessary to stop him. That might include killing the shooter. It would be perfectly legal. It sounds like the people who tried to stop him were what we used to call heroes. He is what I would consider a coward, again, assuming your facts are true.
If he had no reason to draw his gun, once he drew it, it was too late for him to be law-abiding. His best course of action then was to recognize the error of his ways, put the gun down, and surrender. Once he dropped the gun, people would (probably) no longer face a threat of imminent danger. They would no longer be entitled to use lethal force against him. They could still use non-lethal force to detain him. (RCW 9A.16.020: Use of force—When lawful.). When people tried to stop him, his best course of action was to comply and ensure that their only lawful response was to let him live. There was no moment when his best legal course of action was to fire at anyone.
[QUOTE=OldGuy]
If A thought B was going to wrest the gun from him and shoot him, then I’d be pretty sure A would be allowed to shoot B. If A thought B was only going to take the gun and there would be no real injury, then perhaps not. This is complicated by the belief A had about injury to the original person being assaulted. And of course it all depends on Washington law.
ETA: Or what Tired and Cranky said much better
[/QUOTE]
I didn’t say that or anything like it. I don’t have enough facts to analyze this either but if A was committing a felony, A doesn’t have the right to shoot B. B might have the right to defend himself from A and A may have no legal recourse. Any violent action A takes is likely just more felonies on top of the one he started with.
Seems that there are two things that have much weight here:
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How deadly was the assault that the gunman felt he had to stop? Was it violent enough to pose true imminent risk of death or severe injury?
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The gunman cannot tell whether someone who grabs his gun, is merely trying to prevent him from firing, or is actually trying to seize the weapon for use (like how cops can treat someone as a deadly threat if they try to grab the cop’s gun, because the suspect very likely would then immediately shoot the cop with the cop’s gun)
So if an unarmed person tries to take a gun away from an armed person, that’s a deadly assault??
Brandishing, in Washington, is a misdemeanor.
Reading Washington’s assault statutes, I don’t see one that covers threatening someone with a weapon.
Drawing a gun isn’t the same thing as brandishing it. Do we know he was brandishing it? I watched the video, but couldn’t make out what was happening.
That’s the way it typically gets treated by the armed person.