Congratulations: while you were busy turning and building up speed, your knife-wielding assailant - who was already charging at full speed - has closed the gap and plunged his knife into your lung. You’re going to die.
OK…why are you still in this thread?
He was just firing a warning shot. Into his CHEST.
I think it’s a fairly reasonable assumption that when it’s dark, your confused and perhaps feeling threatened or nervous while holding a loaded gun (probably on a hair trigger), your first instinct is to fire it at someone in a ski mask coming at you.
Maybe he was hopped up on bath salts, or was running forward to say, “Hey dad, it’s just me! I was just breaking looking for some Vicod–BANG!”
Either way, paranoia tends to grip mind and trigger much more than a clear head.
I have had some training in defense against edged weapons. The magic number always given is 21. If the assailant is within 21 feet you are in grave danger. I have seen it demonstrated over and over that someone with a knife will be able to stab you before you get your gun out of the holster if they are within 21 feet.
I was just about to post the same thing.
cashew, go be dismissive somewhere else.
Well, he hit his target and not an innocent bystander so it sounds like a responsible shot to me.
Sure. Especially if you’re still fumbling with the tape measure.
What the fuck?
Of course things are different because it was his own son. The fellow in the linked story was a human being, and we’re wired to care more about persons who are closely related to us than others. It’s disingenuous to pretend that’s even surprising, much less wrong.
Perhaps the lone cashew is Wolverine or Superman, neither of whom have much to fear from a knife.
I was thinking that myself. I wouldn’t know 21 feet from 22 feet to save my ass.
Comes from the Tueller Drill. And the 1983 magazine article where Dennis Tueller brings it to public attention for the first time. As Loach points out, it’s really hard for a shooter to react fast enough to stop a determined knife-wielding assailant at close range. Especially if the shooter only has a handgun. Consequently, if the person with the knife is within 20 feet or so (I think we can keep the tape measure in the toolbox.), s/he constitutes an imminent threat of deadly harm.
What a tragic accident. Frankly, even if the dad knew it was his child, I’m not sure he shouldn’t have still shot him. The kid should be able to recognize—assuming it’s lit enough and they’re close enough—that it’s his dad that he’s charging with a knife. Why shouldn’t dad be able to infer that his kid recognizes that it’s him, is still trying to stick him despite that, and shoot the kid to try and prevent getting stabbed? Pretty sure if I recognized my son coming at me with a knife, I’d freeze enough that I’d have gotten stuck though. Who can rapidly decide to shoot their own flesh and blood?
Like in most self-defense cases, the specific facts are going to determine fault and, if applicable, negligence. We’re not likely to get the specific facts from a news article. Horrible story.
I’ve been following this story for a few days now. It’s pretty terrible. The father has been crying and throwing up and is virtually inconsolable.
It turns out the father adopted the boy and his sister four years ago when their father was being sent off to prison and they were about to go to an orphanage. The dad and his wife also have three other children.
IIRC, the man had bruises on his head too, which suggest that he may have been physically attacked but the spokespeople wouldn’t address that issue.
A terrible tragedy all around for everyone involved. None of those people’s lives will be the same for a very long time, if ever.
I wouldn’t know from personal experience. But I used to hang out on a message board for RPGers. Quite a few of them have experience fighting with (non-lethal) medieval weapons. One guy was describing how definding yourself with only a bow against someone charging at you with a sword can be really unnerving.
Well, not just that. I talked to an adherent of a minority religion at one point, and he maintained that if you are willing to use a certain degree of force or punishment against someone, you must also be willing to use it against your own children, in similar circumstances, or you are immoral. Many people in the conversation expressed horror, and said that it’s normal and natural to think one’s OWN child was misbehaving for some fixable reason, and that they would go easy on their own child. But the religious person steadfastly – and, I think, righteously – maintained that if you are not willing to see it done to your own child, you must not do it to someone else’s child. Some people interpreted this as savagery toward his own children, but I think he was advocating mercy toward everyone’s children – or at least even-handedness.
In this case, I assume the father now wishes he’d done anything other than pull the trigger, even if he’d gotten stabbed. But whoever the masked person turned out to be, he was surely somebody’s son (or daughter), and someone would be wishing for a different outcome today.
I know it’s a hard world, and I feel sorry for this guy. But there are consequences to killing, even in self-defense.
Yeah, I’m pretty sure the man in this instance understands that, but you could suggest someone go preach to him about the morality of defending your own life against an unknown armed intruder, if you like.
I understand this argument, and I think it’s internally consistent. I still think it’s wrong. No, scratch that; I still disagree with it. Here’s why.
I’m willing to kill someone in protection of myself. But not my own child, because my child’s life is more valuable to me than my own life is. If my son had lived to grow up, he’d be in his early twenties now, old enough for such a situation to be plausible (though hopefully he’d have more sense than the dead kid in the news story). I can easily imagine making the decision to use deadly force against the masked figure approaching me with a knife with evidently felonious intent, and I think I’d be just as devastated as the father in the story, even though (assuming the facts given us are correct) I do not believe he did anything wrong.
Well, that’s merely because you’re thinking in the wrong units. Instead, picture a villain not at 21 ft. away from you, but at 1 sr. away (stab radius).
Its simple. If he stabs you its 21 feet. If you shoot him its 22.
Sailboat’s “adherent” friend seems to be following the Kantian categorical imperative, while Skald would find support among sociobiologists (“I’d lay down my life for two brothers, or eight cousins…”, or whatever it is).
I am going to construct a tape measure based on that unit of measurement.
It’s a really sad congruence of events. I feel like I really want to throw the blame on someone but I can’t find anyone blameworthy. At least not yet. We have only the current news story to go on, and it doesn’t have much detail. I hope later some facts will come to the surface so we can make sense of this mess.
After work last night, I paced off seven yards (21 feet) from a dead tree. After a few practice throws, I was able to stick my EDC knife five consecutive throws with little difficulty.