As my sensei (a 30 year cop) says, the best defense is not to be there. The second best defense is your voice. The last defense is to render your attacker unable to follow you when you run.
One dead perp; one dead victim; both avoidable tragedies.
Excellent article. I am sorry to say my X feed had multiple posts about "the poor veteran shot by a crazy black woman" and I was astonished when I came across a post with the video - he was threatening her, she warned him off, he kept advancing - to do WHAT? Good shooting if you ask me. Another lesson in "don't rely on interpretations of an event - wait to hear the facts."
I have spent most of my adult life as a Second Amendment advocate. For years I taught gun law in a state that had “no duty to retreat laws.” I run an organization that spent many, many thousands of dollars to defend a person who drew a firearm WHILE retreating from a mob that had clearly articulated its desire to harm him.
Needless to say, he was arrested. He never even placed his finger on the trigger. He was backing up the entire time. All of this is recorded on video. The sergeant of the police squad who arrested him told me he ( the cop) would have done exactly what this guy did. He was convicted of 15 felonies.
“Stand your ground” laws may be black letter law, but in the wrong jurisdiction with an unfriendly court the law means very little. I make it a point to not draw conclusions about events from amateur video clips knowing they never tell the whole story. But in the case you wrote about, it looks to me like the decedent was practicing turbocharged stupidity. Of course I could not see all that led up to this. But It seems to me that when a woman has drawn a firearm on an adult male and he keeps advancing she has damn little choice. There is still a gun on the scene and if she does NOT use it she could soon be on the receiving end of it. Walking away is a great option for things way more valuable than a parking space.
Stand-your-ground laws are arguably the most misunderstood legal concept in the country. As you pointed out, it's not a license to kill. And if you're judged to be the aggressor, you're basically screwed.
I raised four sons & taught them all boxing, shooting, etc. I also taught them their most important weapon was between their ears...read the room. And a pair of legs to leave.
Glad I did. They are all big boys but the biggest (6'4"/250#/lifts, judo), can barely walk downtown with his gf on a Sat night without some little dude trying to pick a fight.
Fighting over a parking space is dumb. It's also dumb to think you need to park as close as possible so you can avoid a 20 second 100 foot walk... but here in Houston people will block traffic and wait for several minutes waiting for spot up front to clear out instead of just parking and walking. Just dumb.
And if it's Christmas and you are having to fight for EVERY space in the lot? Go home and find some other time to shop and avoid that nonsense.
I can see where a legitimate handicap person might have a beef with someone else preventing them from using a handicap spot. No idea if that's what happened in the second case, but that's about the only way I can having an argument over a parking space.
Hell, I'll drive an extra 5-10 minutes on a trip just to avoid certain intersections where everyone's competing and racing to get in front of everyone else. Conflicts over cars and parking spaces is just ridiculous.
In the case of the handicapped space, the shooter, a black man, took offense to how close the person using the handicapped space parked to him and started mouthing off. The victim and their family did the right thing and parked elsewhere. However, the black man wouldn't let it go and confronted them in the store. That's when things got physical and the oppressed one ended up murdering an innocent man.
Totally different type of case. He deserves the rope.
"There’s also unfortunately the race angle here. As Andrew Branca, who’s absolutely not a liberal, also points out, those who think Diguglielmo was murdered are suffering from “race derangement syndrome”. They think that because the shooter was black and Diguglielmo White, there’s no possible way she could ever have acted in self-defense."
Get real. Imagine of this was the other way around. We need to be selective and play the game the way they do.
Also, it is ironic that some on the right are making this about race, when they accuse people on the left making everything about race. How did humans manage to make it this far, anyway? Or is it just that it’s easier for stupid ones to survive these days?
Either a person believes in the right to self-defense or they don't. This racialized stuff is stupid, a low-IQ way of looking at the world. You can't call blacks low-IQ for looking at everything through a racial lens but do the exact same thing. People of higher intellect are capable of discernment.
My standing advice for young men is to just walk away from a confrontation over stuff that doesn’t matter. Pride and being macho is such a stupid reason to die, or to kill someone over something minor and spend decades of your life in prison. I guess it is hard for people to keep that in mind in the heat of the moment and I think in general it is the people who don’t have any experience with violence who are more likely to do stupid things like that. It’s never like the movies and you don’t have plot armor.
As my sensei (a 30 year cop) says, the best defense is not to be there. The second best defense is your voice. The last defense is to render your attacker unable to follow you when you run.
One dead perp; one dead victim; both avoidable tragedies.
Excellent article. I am sorry to say my X feed had multiple posts about "the poor veteran shot by a crazy black woman" and I was astonished when I came across a post with the video - he was threatening her, she warned him off, he kept advancing - to do WHAT? Good shooting if you ask me. Another lesson in "don't rely on interpretations of an event - wait to hear the facts."
It's a lesson the Right sometimes needs to learn also.
I benefitted from the reminder even though I'm really not a hothead.
I have spent most of my adult life as a Second Amendment advocate. For years I taught gun law in a state that had “no duty to retreat laws.” I run an organization that spent many, many thousands of dollars to defend a person who drew a firearm WHILE retreating from a mob that had clearly articulated its desire to harm him.
Needless to say, he was arrested. He never even placed his finger on the trigger. He was backing up the entire time. All of this is recorded on video. The sergeant of the police squad who arrested him told me he ( the cop) would have done exactly what this guy did. He was convicted of 15 felonies.
“Stand your ground” laws may be black letter law, but in the wrong jurisdiction with an unfriendly court the law means very little. I make it a point to not draw conclusions about events from amateur video clips knowing they never tell the whole story. But in the case you wrote about, it looks to me like the decedent was practicing turbocharged stupidity. Of course I could not see all that led up to this. But It seems to me that when a woman has drawn a firearm on an adult male and he keeps advancing she has damn little choice. There is still a gun on the scene and if she does NOT use it she could soon be on the receiving end of it. Walking away is a great option for things way more valuable than a parking space.
Stand-your-ground laws are arguably the most misunderstood legal concept in the country. As you pointed out, it's not a license to kill. And if you're judged to be the aggressor, you're basically screwed.
I raised four sons & taught them all boxing, shooting, etc. I also taught them their most important weapon was between their ears...read the room. And a pair of legs to leave.
Glad I did. They are all big boys but the biggest (6'4"/250#/lifts, judo), can barely walk downtown with his gf on a Sat night without some little dude trying to pick a fight.
Fighting over a parking space is dumb. It's also dumb to think you need to park as close as possible so you can avoid a 20 second 100 foot walk... but here in Houston people will block traffic and wait for several minutes waiting for spot up front to clear out instead of just parking and walking. Just dumb.
And if it's Christmas and you are having to fight for EVERY space in the lot? Go home and find some other time to shop and avoid that nonsense.
I can see where a legitimate handicap person might have a beef with someone else preventing them from using a handicap spot. No idea if that's what happened in the second case, but that's about the only way I can having an argument over a parking space.
Hell, I'll drive an extra 5-10 minutes on a trip just to avoid certain intersections where everyone's competing and racing to get in front of everyone else. Conflicts over cars and parking spaces is just ridiculous.
In the case of the handicapped space, the shooter, a black man, took offense to how close the person using the handicapped space parked to him and started mouthing off. The victim and their family did the right thing and parked elsewhere. However, the black man wouldn't let it go and confronted them in the store. That's when things got physical and the oppressed one ended up murdering an innocent man.
Totally different type of case. He deserves the rope.
"There’s also unfortunately the race angle here. As Andrew Branca, who’s absolutely not a liberal, also points out, those who think Diguglielmo was murdered are suffering from “race derangement syndrome”. They think that because the shooter was black and Diguglielmo White, there’s no possible way she could ever have acted in self-defense."
Get real. Imagine of this was the other way around. We need to be selective and play the game the way they do.
Also, it is ironic that some on the right are making this about race, when they accuse people on the left making everything about race. How did humans manage to make it this far, anyway? Or is it just that it’s easier for stupid ones to survive these days?
Either a person believes in the right to self-defense or they don't. This racialized stuff is stupid, a low-IQ way of looking at the world. You can't call blacks low-IQ for looking at everything through a racial lens but do the exact same thing. People of higher intellect are capable of discernment.
My standing advice for young men is to just walk away from a confrontation over stuff that doesn’t matter. Pride and being macho is such a stupid reason to die, or to kill someone over something minor and spend decades of your life in prison. I guess it is hard for people to keep that in mind in the heat of the moment and I think in general it is the people who don’t have any experience with violence who are more likely to do stupid things like that. It’s never like the movies and you don’t have plot armor.