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[–] 21 points 6 hours ago (1 child)

How about the fact that in some states, if someone is invading your home in the middle of the night and you shoot them you can be convicted depending on if you give them an avenue of egress, but these guys jumped in front of a moving car and their "reaction" was "justified?"

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  • [–] -1 points 24 minutes ago

    Wouldn't that depend though?

    It is the responsibility of the police to make arrests, not prove guilt or innocence - that is the job of the courts. The police gathered what information they could, rightly concluded that someone had committed theft and attempted to make an arrest. This means that if they can use their bodies to stop the perpetrator from escaping that arrest, they should.

    The question then falls on the idea of, was the car already going 30MPH and an officer jumped in front of it not giving them enough time to stop, and that was seen as an act of violence? That then would have been two poor decisions on behalf of that officer. First, jumping in front of the car, and two, in assuming the car's not stopping to be an act of aggression upon them that warranted a returned act of agression.

    If someone came into my home, robbed me and my family then ran out to their car and I was standing at the end of my driveway by the time the car started moving (I own firearms) and they clearly held no intention of not running me over, I would shoot to kill and I would be completely justified in doing so. Not because they robbed me (though that can actually be warranted too, it just depends), but because they made an attempt on my life, or at the very least, on my physical well-being.

    No man should be made to accept another's attempts to strip them of their life or well-being. I should not be made to suffer a broken body because the only way to have stopped that would be to have taken the life of the assailant who had no qualms with crushing my body.

    Also regarding what you posted, many states are wholly nonsensical in the vast majority of their laws. What is rational is that if someone were to enter your property, you are justified in analyzing the threat as rationally as you can, given the circumstance, and acting accordingly. If you shoot the 8 year old running across your yard, you're in the wrong and just murdered a child, but there are many different situations that can arise. If someone walks into my home (I have young children) and I see that they are carrying a knife or firearm, I'm not going to speak with them, warn them, or otherwise give them an "egress", I am going to shoot to kill, period, the state be damned.

    The 3 seconds it might take me to ask questions and wait for a response could be all it takes before my toddler is shot dead. I don't have that time, I don't know this person, I don't know their intentions, and this is the single most horrific and pivotal moment of likely my entire life - the notion that I should be held more accountable for how I react than the individual who entered my home armed is utter nonsense. NOBODY matters to me as much as my children, and that should be a universality across the whole of humanity. If you don't believe that, you're doing "human" wrong.

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