The whole incident is yet more evidence for those in another thread urging gun carrying in college campuses.
Some of us feel that all Americans should be compulsorily armed with firearms on all occasions.
After all, that militia reasoning references a time when militia was compulsory.
Thank you. It’s always good to put faces to the names.
From RCW 9A.36.011: Assault in the first degree.
For the definition of assault, I’ll rely on Blacks’ Law Dictionary, which defines it, among other ways, as “the act of putting another person in reasonable fear or apprehension of of an immediate battery by means of an act amounting to an attempt or threat to commit a battery.” Shooting someone is a battery and drawing a gun on someone like it seems the shooter in our case did amounts to an assault in the second degree on the person he points the gun at. That’s a class B felony in Washington and a felony in most states.
You are right that drawing and brandishing are different. I’m sorry if I used the terms sloppily above. However I used them, I stand by my general analysis. I don’t know the facts here but I’m far from convinced that the shooter had any reason to draw his gun or later to shoot the people trying to stop him. The OP’s statement of the facts is vague and inconclusive. It just doesn’t sound very promising for the defense.
The logical next step by someone who seizes a gun from the owner, may well be to use it on the owner, within seconds or split-seconds.
I’m *not *suggesting that is the legal situation.
I *am *suggesting this is the practical situation.
The point as it applies to armed citizens is that they need to think a [del]bit[/del] *lot * about how many other 3rd parties are not going to understand their intent when they draw and will assault them for what the 3rd parties believe to be legit reasons. And just how fast that will all transpire.
This whole thing reminds me of a room full of mousetraps set with pingpong balls. One of these days we’re going to have a spectacular chain reaction shooting outbreak.
It now appears, based on various folks’ looks at the vids, that the original scuffle did *not * rise to the level where, per WA law, the armed citizen was justified to draw his weapon with intent to intervene in the scuffle. And so everything that follows from that was illegal. Sucks to be Mr. armed citizen.
Let’s assume for a moment, arguendo, that the original scuffle clearly *did *rise to the level where under WA law the armed citizen was legal to intervene. And attempted to do so and was in turn assaulted by a third party who (reasonably) misunderstood the various players’ intents. So armed citizen shoots 3rd party in this secondary scuffle with them. What now, legally? Damned good question IMO.
Both of these scenarios have played out and will continue to play out as long as we have armed citizens with any interest in intervening in events they start out as a witness to. Plus of course all the gray areas: somebody attacks a member of your party. Somebody attacks someone you know who happens to be nearby. Somebody attacks somebody who looks waay overmatched. etc.
It’ll be “interesting” to see how the popularity of concealed carry changes over the next few years and what the consequences are.
Again I must ask: do we know that he pointed his gun at anyone? It appears to matter a great deal to the claim that his behavior was an assault.
Late add: It’s these sorts of scenarios that give me pause about the benefit/harm ratio of widespread concealed carry. If everybody only ever used their own gun to shoot their own mugger it’d be a different set of tradeoffs. But we’re sort of forced to take the bad uses (drunks in parking lots) and marginal uses (like this case) along with the good uses (robberies or murders foiled).
I am not a lawyer, but as someone who had to carry for a short time period due to my involvement in a case where I was a witness and was receiving death threats and vandalism I was consulted by the local police department when they encouraged me to carry.
First it really depends on several facts that are very unclear at this point in time.
With the reminder that I am not a lawyer and that my understanding was from a briefing from law enforcement which are also not lawyers.
No, I don’t. I have admitted as many times as I can that I don’t have the facts for a thorough analysis. The video might as well show me cats playing with string for all I can discern.
Empirically, what we are learning with stand your ground laws is that the marginal and bad uses of concealed guns seem to outweigh the reduction in murders from whatever the good uses are. The net effect of the stand your ground law in Florida was that homicides increased. This confirmed an earlier study’s findings. Florida's Stand Your Ground Law Linked to Homicide Increase | TIME
N=1, uncontrolled study, blah, blah, blah, but this is not the data that the NRA was looking for – unless their real goal is to increase fear of crime to drive more people to buy guns. I’m actually not that big a conspiracy theorist. I think that the NRA sincerely believes that increasing guns will decrease crime but that when crime is increasing, to the NRA, easier access to guns is still the solution. In their worldview, there is no crime problem that guns either haven’t solved or won’t solve.
Which of these is a more reasonable conclusion?
The first conclusion seems imminently reasonable to me: we’ve had a rash of mass shootings in our country, including on campuses, and if someone’s suddenly pulling a gun out, especially if tempers are flaring, I’d suspect they had deadly intent.
The second conclusion is ridiculous. Sure, if you’re in a dark alley and someone’s trying to mug you and you brandish your gun and they try to pull it away, it makes sense that they’re gonna try to use it on you. But at a crowded rally, when there are dozens of witnesses, and you’ve just brandished your gun? Hell no they’re not getting ready to turn it on you.
“Detached reflection cannot be demanded in the presence of an uplifted knife.”
Sure. Which is why the dude who uplifts said knife has extra reflective responsibilities.
In Washington, I have no idea how they’ll score this. It’s a blue state, so it wouldn’t surprise me if they arrest / charge him. In my state (Utah), the above statement should be understood to mean something like: we don’t expect the gun owners to make nuanced calculations in the heat of the struggle about the probability of the person trying to seize their weapon using it on them. In other words, for gun owners in much of the country, there’s no need to distinguish between 1) and 2) (from your post above). The simple knowledge that someone is trying to steal your weapon is all you need to justify deadly force. That statement is probably not applicable in solidly blue states.
LSLGuy’s words of caution are worth bearing in mind though: if you decide to draw your weapon, you have no way of knowing if a cop / CCW permitee is going to see that action as a threat and respond with deadly force before you get a chance to explain your justification.
That last part is interesting. What if the gun owner had been seen by another gun owner and shot as soon as he drew? Is that okay?
As for 1 and 2 in my post above, those are judgments needing to be made by completely different people (the bystander and the gun owner, respectively), so I’m not sure why you’d talk about the need for the gun owner to distinguish between them.
Do you think in Utah that if a gunman tries to rob a liquor store, he can claim self defense if he kills a clerk trying to take away his gun?
As near as I can tell, that’s roughly what happened in this case.
The issue largely comes down to whether the shooter could reasonably claim he was defending others when he drew his gun. If not, he doesn’t have the right to wave the gun around or threaten others with it. Doing so (probably) means he was committing a felony with a gun. Thus, other people were reasonably entitled to protect everyone else in their vicinity from him. He doesn’t have the right to self defense to stop others who are stopping him from committing a felony - assault with a deadly weapon or worse.
You aren’t letting the lack of facts stop you from drawing conclusions, such as:
That’s right. I qualified my statement with “as near as I can tell.” In part, I’m deferring to Loach’s trained judgment that he saw no reason for the shooter to take out the gun. This has moved to great debates and I’m willing to speculate more freely about the facts. I explained my position. I’m responding to someone who seems to suggest that anyone subject to an attempt to take his gun away can shoot the taker. It’s obviously not that clear.
I’m bowing out because I think I have contributed all I can.
“okay” is a bit vague. It’s probably not something that will get one criminally-convicted in Utah, depending somewhat on the circumstances. One has a better chance of being sued civilly, again depending on circumstances. Regardless of the legal consequences, it would be an unfortunate tragedy if one “good guy” shot another “good guy” because he mistook the first “good guy” for a bad guy. It’s a risk that CCW permittees and plainsclothes police officers should be acutely aware of, and that we hope other people with guns (like uniformed officers) are at least somewhat aware of.
Sorry, you’re right, I misread 1). The gun owners shouldn’t need to make snap judgements about the intentions of the person wrestling their gun away. The fact that they’re trying to wrestle their gun away ought to be enough to justify lethal self-defense.
Armed robbery of a liquor store would be a “forcible felony” in Utah, which would negate one’s claims of self-defense. In this case, the question of whether the gun owner was committing an unlawful “forcible felony” (aggravated assault is also one) or if he was actually committing a lawful and justified act of “defense of another” largely hinge on the circumstances that the OP described as “… an assault was taking place. A demonstrator who was carrying a concealed pistol, took it out, presumably to stop the assault.” In Utah, that would be enough to make it justified “defense of another”. In Washington, I don’t know.
ETA: If another protester, perhaps unaware of the original assault that cause the gun owner to draw his weapon, happened to notice the guy with a drawn gun and drew his own weapon and shot the “brandisher” it’s also unlikely he’d be convicted of a crime in Utah. He has the same right to “defense of another” (or self, depending on where the drawn gun was pointed) as the original gun owner does. In short: if the gun-grabber had prevailed in seizing the weapon, he probably would not have been convicted of a crime either (assuming that he returned the weapon after things calmed down and it became clear that the gun owner wasn’t trying to become the next shooting spree star).
I guess another point is if you are carrying a gun, do you want to get into a non-gun altercation with another person (i.e. to stop an assault.) This could still result in say, a grappling match, the other person discovering the gun and taking it out of a pocket or holster, which could be easier than wrestling it out of your grip.
Washington seems to have banned concealed carry on college and university campuses without prior clearance from university police or “other officers designated by the university president.” I initially assumed that carrying a firearm in a prohibited place would automatically negate a claim of self-defense, but I can’t find anything to back that up.