Sounds kind of like the George Zimmerman / Trayvon Martin confrontation.
As for myself, I don’t intend to ever get into a non-gun altercation while carrying. My first effort will be to avoid any physical confrontation, but I suspect any physical confrontation thrust upon me will likely become a gun fight.
Unfortunately, most people who see someone (other than a peace officer) aiming waving a gun are likely to either run away or try to wrestle it away.
This whole scenario is like a nightmare bar exam scenario. There are several legal issues at play:
The general rule that lethal force may be employed if one reasonably believes it is necessary to prevent death or serious bodily injury to himself or others.
An initial aggressor may not rely on lethal self defense unless he unambiguously withdraws himself from his initial act of aggression.
A person can reasonably believe that he is defending himself or others, yet cause another to reasonably believe that the first person is an unlawful aggressor.
There are simply not enough facts from the OP or the video to decide this.
ETA: a few intermediate posts made the same point I while I was typing & revising. I see HurricaneDitka says he at least has internalized the punchline: don’t draw except in defense of yourself, and don’t draw until you’ve decided to fire.
OTOH, If I’m a bystander standing within a few feet of a person who suddenly pulls a gun for no reason I can ascertain, I know that my best move to improve my safety is to attack full-on before this guy I know nothing about aims my way. Outside 20 feet maybe my better move is to run. The one thing I know for certain is that just standing there waiting to see what happens next is how spree killers notch up such impressive scores.
So now I’m the one with the snap judgment to make.
This is the crux of the whole societal dilemma. Unlike in Wild West movies you can’t tell by the hat color who is Good and who is Bad.
In my view in this particular case as best we understand it it’s maybe a justifiable shooting by Mr. armed citizen against the guy who tried to disarm him. And equally, had the disarmer succeeded then shot the gun owner that too would have been equally justifiable. Once the gun was exposed in the middle of a crowd everybody nearby was in a fight for some outcome of a life/death experience.
The CCW carrier (unless he’s just a bully/jerk, and we have no evidence of that in this case) is generally thinking along the lines of “I’m doing what I need to do to protect myself from such threats as may appear.” The unarmed bystander is thinking exactly the same thing with exactly the same moral and legal standing.
Drawing a weapon puts everyone within range in an incremental degree of danger. Danger they’re entitled to protect themselves against. None of us can know that everyone around us is seeing the same threats we do and is having the same responses. When a firearm is introduced into a scenario the stakes go way up and also the instability goes way up.
As a non-CCW gun owner who carried back in my military days I get both sides. But until gun carriers can absorb the lesson that, once drawn, they *are *a threat to everyone around them we’re going to keep having incidents like this.
Yup, and the “run away” option is vastly preferred to the “try to wrestle it away”, particularly if there’s some potential for misunderstanding the situation (e.g. is that an undercover cop who’s holding a most-wanted criminal at gun-point or is that a dirtbag robbing a liquor store?).
This depends somewhat on the circumstances of the takeaway. For example, in the scuffle, did the disarmer manage to render the CCWer unconscious? Is he lying face down on the pavement by the time he can get the gun under control and bring it to bear? If he then shoots the face-down non-moving “threat” in the back, he’s probably in for a world of trouble.
On the other extreme, if in the heat of the scuffle, he manages to get the weapon pointed at the “threat”'s torso and pulls the trigger, he’s probably justified. From his reasonable belief, he may have just put down a spree-shooter-in-the-making.
There are all sorts of possibilities in between those two extremes too, with accompanying levels of justification.
There are circumstances I might draw in defense of another as well, but I try to be aware of the dangerous situation I would put myself into by doing so.
As a counter-point I want to offer this recent store of a “good guy with a gun” saving a cop’s life: http://www.cnn.com/2017/01/12/us/arizona-good-samaritan-kills-man-beating-trooper/
Agree completely.
Maybe it’s thought about more than it’s talked about, but in the vast number of “CCW:good or bad idea?” threads we’ve had I’ve seen very few absolutist CCW defenders make clear their recognition that once they draw they’re part of the problem for everybody else, not part of the solution.
Solo at home? There is nobody else. Out with your spouse for a wilderness hike? There’s probably nobody else. At the grocery store? Plenty of somebody elses. Many in close proximity. And the CCW holder just became a huge perceived threat to every one of them. People can and should act on their perceptions. After all, the CCW did.
It’s been discussed, to varying degrees of detail, in every CCW course I’ve ever sat in on. It’s also one of several “what-if” scenarios that comes up in discussions among CCW permitees, both online and in-person from time to time. Still, more education and awareness on the issue is never a bad thing, which is why I think this thread is awesome.
Sure, but as you say, detached reflection is not required of the man standing by the gunman.
Good to know; thanks.
Yup, and if he decided that in the particular circumstances he found himself in, his best option for survival was to attack the gunman and try to seize his weapon, I’m unlikely to condemn him for it. It’s not a choice I’d make except in the direst of circumstances, but frankly, I hope to never find myself unarmed while standing next to a gunman, and have arranged my life such that it is unlikely to happen.
I might encourage anyone considering such an action, to pause for the briefest of moments and try to evaluate the circumstances. Try to ascertain the gunman’s motives. Is he yelling “stop! police!” and pointing it at a man running away? Or did he just step into your movie theater or French class and open fire on people seemingly at random? I’m fairly confident that this little exercise would serve most people who find themselves in such situation very well, although I admit there are some ambiguous edge cases that it can be difficult to understand the motives of the person holding the gun quickly enough to make life-saving decisions.
I guess it’s very easy for all the pro-gun people to put themselves in the shoes of the guy who whipped out his gun, and then got attacked, and shot a guy in supposed self-defense.
It’s apparently a lot harder for you all to put yourself in the shoes of someone standing by who sees some random guy whip out a gun.
Nope, it’s always the guy with the gun who’s the hero defending himself from the unarmed thug.
Who’s saying the guy with the gun was 100% in the right and the man who was shot was in the wrong? I’m honestly confused. 
Wasn’t my post #53, just 23 minutes before yours, doing exactly this?
ETA: gun owners are neither always heroes nor are the always villains.
Could you point to a single poster who has done this? Almost everyone has struggled with the idea that the person shot could legally be in the right, yet still be legally shot. It is an unfortunate incident no matter your thoughts on guns or concealed carry.
Well, it could be a situation where drawing the weapon was a technical violation of the law, but nonetheless the third party was not in objective reasonable fear of harm to himself or a third party.
Do we know what the shooter did when he drew his weapon? Did he point it at one of the people engaged in a scuffle? Did he have it in his hand, but kept close at his side?
This whole thing will be so fact specific, with so many likely conflicting stories by the witnesses, that it will be difficult to get a conviction.
Or, it may not be. He may be seizing the gun not to use it himself, but to prevent the owner from using it.
I’m not sure about the wisdom of a law which provides a defence for killing someone because you think he might be about to kill you. And, if that were the law applicable here, the have-a-go hero who pulled a gun to stop what he believed to be an assault in progress could himself have been lawfully shot by someone else who saw him pull his gun, but didn’t see the putative assault in progress, or didn’t think it amount to justification for pulling a gun.
Oh, unfortunate, innit? I mean, the awesome responsibility of being a gun carrier, and occasionally having to shoot an innocent person and all. Still, small price to pay, right?