Yep. My feelings exactly.
There’s video on youtube of the “21 foot rule” - the minimum distance a cop should allow a knife-holding person to approach without having his weapon ready to fire.
In it, a person who knows street fighting has a rubber knife and trhe guy in the cop uniform has a rubber pistol in a hip holster with te strap snapped down.
At 6’ (common for a normal conversation, the guy is able to slice the cop up and down before he can get the strap un-snapped. At about 15’, if the guy was drunk, the cop would win, but the quick little guy still wins.
Not until 21’ was the cop able to raise his weapon and fire before the assailant arrived.
If I can see the intruder without going into the kitchen, I am NOT getting close enough for a guy with a weapon in his belt (can’t see his back?) to threaten me.
Close up, the guy who brings the knife to the gunfight just may win.
No justification - no visible knife like in the other thread, and this guy is IMO not threatening violence, from the OP’s description of the situation. Joe can leave the room and call 911 just fine without imminent threat of violence, or any concern for his cat’s safety and whereabouts.
And I don’t give a shit about whether it’s Joe’s home or not. Castle doctrine is bullshit.
I daresay I shouldn’t be surprised as a gun-hating Brit, but having read a number of gun threads and been exposed to US culture for more than a decade via this board, I am still shocked at the clear majority saying this is justified. This isn’t a situation (as posited) where Joe has to make a move for his weapon, he already has the gun trained on the intruder, so the scenarios mentioned by usedtobe don’t really apply. I will grant that if the intruder makes a sudden move, shooting could be morally justified, but in the OP I don’t see how you can justify killing someone in this situation. Just step back, keep the gun trained on them, get help.
Any serving police officer who discharged their weapon in the circumstances described should be summarily fired (snort) in my view, or at least never allowed to use weapons on duty again. I realise Joe is not a police officer, but if people are going to own guns they need to be held to high standards.
It worked out well, then, that you dont live here, where it is the law of the land.
For my part, I believe in holding honest citizens to a reasonable standard. Bullshit, now, is all the contortions folks have put themselves through in two threads trying to make the homeowner the bad guy.
So what does legality have to do with whether it’s bullshit or not?
As many others said, these are tragic circumstances, but absolutely justified morally. This guy was in his house, whether he broke in or not, he definitely did not have a valid reason to be there, and he advanced after being warned twice without any ambiguity. Sure, the guy was probably crazy or maybe on some drugs, and being half his size, he may not have been a threat, but would you be willing to bet your life on that? Given all the things he’d already done, between invading his home and advancing aggressively, how sure can one be that he isn’t armed with a gun, a knife, or some other weapon? Hell, even if he’s unarmed and attacking a much larger and more skilled target, how certain can one be that he’d not receive serious injuries? There’s no way I could morally condemn a man for making that call in that situation.
With that said, particularly with regard to the number of shots taken, I would agree that in this particular situation, there isn’t morally a difference between 1 and the whole clip, assuming it’s a typical home defense weapon like a revolver or semi-auto with maybe a 10-round clip. That said, in the same situation, I’d like to think I’d have the presence of mind to shoot maybe 3-4 rounds then reassess the situation. Especially shooting as many as 10-rounds without further consideration, it gets significantly more likely after a few that your aim is off, but at the same time, one should typically fire more than one to be sure the target is disabled or dead. Further, I’d not want to be caught in that situation with no rounds left when clearing and securing the rest of my home. But again, not a moral judgment, just a question of his training and thought process, particularly as I’d figure a trained fighter would probably be more clearminded in such a situation.
In a good many threads, you seem to want to play the role of the world’s conscience. This seems to be another of those occasions. So, why don’t we start with why, exactly, castle doctrine is bullshit other than that you have spoken ex cathedra?
Well, Billy Graham is toast if I run into him.
The fact that he was rambling about Jesus indicates an unstable person but not necessarily a dangerous one. Joe was able to and should have made his retreat, called police, and let them handle it. The intruder was not brandishing a weapon and posed little danger. This is manslaughter in my book and Joe should be convicted.
Not to mention, there’s the adrenaline factor. If I’m scared enough of someone to start shooting them, I’m going to still be pulling that trigger well past the point where I’ve run out of bullets.*
He may not be brandishing a weapon, but if I’m Joe, I still don’t know he doesn’t have one. (Gun? Knife? Who knows?) And the fact that he’s (a) in my house, (b) disobeying my orders, and (c) advancing on me, means I don’t have much room to make a mistake.
Retreat has its own problems - if I back up, I could trip over stuff that I’ve forgotten I’ve left on the floor (I know what a klutz I can be, I’d be scared to back up in a situation like that, I could find myself flat on my back and this guy right on top of me), if I take my eyes off of the intruder he could pull out a weapon while I’m not looking.
Maybe Joe is immune to such klutzery, but it’s hard for me to judge that. If it’s me in Joe’s situation, I’m going to shoot. So I would give the benefit of the (ETA: moral) doubt to Joe.
*“but pity stayed his hand. It’s a pity I’ve run out of bullets, he thought as he went back up the tunnel…”
Yes, I also voted not justified for these reasons.
I am a conservative gun owner and lifetime NRA member.
My opinion is this shooting is not morally justified. It’s a close question, but Joe would admit, I think, that he had no real reason to fear for his life or health before he pulled the trigger.
When did we move to the question of legal justification?
You mean all those threads that ask me what my opinion on something is, those threads? Sorry, wasn’t aware any threads here had an invisible “Only people in scumpup’s jurisdiction need opine” rider :rolleyes:
You mean this thread created specifically to ask for moral judgements?
Why don’t you start with answering why the legality of it matters for this thread, first?
If an intruder invades my home, am I justified to torture him for a week? Most Americans would probably say yes. :rolleyes:
This scenario is easier because in this case there is no other occupant of the house that could conceivably have invited the milk-drinker into the house, so there is no longer any doubt that he is there innocently.
So could the lady in the other scenario, yet when I said that it was dismissed as crazy talk. Interesting.
Would they, now? Do the people you hang with routinely assert this? You know of at least a few instances of this actually happening, maybe ? I on the other hand know exactly 0 Americans who would “probably say yes”. But that’s just me.
We aren’t starting off from the proposition that castle doctrine is bullshit just on your say so, is why. First, establish that it is, then I will address legality.
Nuh uh, asked you first.