I think we agree. The way we get there (less vigilantism) is for reasonable people to expect that the authorities will handle crime. When people believe the authorities will do nothing, they become much more sympathetic to people taking the law into their hands (and much more tolerant of what should be viewed as overreactions).
I think you are missing what happened with the Goetz shootings. I don't think very many people ever thought it was appropriate for Goetz to shoot a bunch of kids because they were asking for money. You agree, but that's kind of a straw man.
At the peak of the 80s-90s crime wave more people were willing to believe that the youths were not just begging for money. Just as the mafia don says, "nice place, it'd be a shame if anything happened to it" isn't wishing you good fortune, many people believed the kids ask for money was the first step in a violent mugging.
People supported Goetz (or thought he was an attempted murderer) based on their belief of what they thought would happen if Goetz had declined to hand over money. In many peoples' view, this was the request for money was just the first step in a mugging, a mugging that was backed up with sharpened screw-drivers. If that supposition is correct, self-defense was on the table. If that belief was incorrect, then you are just shooting kids.
Now I believe Goetz had been a mugging victim several times, and therefore subjectively believed he was about to be a victim again. For self-defense, however, his beliefs must be objectively reasonable. The kids hadn't brandished any weapons or made any verbal threats. But there behavior of surrounding him went beyond mere begging, and was objectively coercive. But then, Goetz continued shooting after any possible threat had passed, and his statements at the time indicate he was acting out of vengeance for being a victim rather than self-defnse ("You don't look so bad, here's another").
And whether a belief is objectively reasonable may change over time. Increased crime shifts the bell curve of the public's response to the right. There will be more people willing to use violence to confront criminal behavior, and the public will be more accepting of it. On the right tail of the curve, that means vigilante murder will occur, and it will be tolerated more. But it also means that what is objectively reasonable changes as well.
I think juries are going to jury, and that includes taking into account, in practice, the kind of community standard and knowledge you are putting forth as a justification for Goetz. In a sense, that's what we want juries to do-- it's why we have them judge negligence cases, even though negligence is as much about a legal standard as it is about fact-finding.
But having said that, the point you get to at the end is the problem. Broadening the rules of engagement so that you can fire or choke earlier is going to cheapen human life. It is going to lead to people getting killed who weren't going to commit a violent crime or even a property crime. It's going to lead to excessive force, and needless death.
The reality is that the vigilante fantasy doesn't work. It can't reduce the homicide rate, because even if it does kill some actual criminals it will also kill a bunch of innocent people as well. And to be clear, I don't think that's the attraction of it. I think the attraction absolutely includes some sense that the kids who asked Goetz for money, and all the other people who accost folks on the subway who they stood in for, deserved what they got. It's a toxic attraction for society.
I have no sympathy for Goetz. I have some for Penny. There is evidence that he was threatening people, and he didn't act alone (which indicates at least SOME people felt it was reasonable). That being said: while what both did is understandable that doesn't make it morally right. Perhaps Penny was right to restrain Neely, but he clearly overdid it and killed a man. That requires, on basic principle, that society respond. I can quibble over what the proper sentence is, but I do not believe that Penny is innocent of all crimes. I can't. Even if it was an accident (and I do not think Penny intended to kill him; I do reserve the right to change my mind if more evidence comes forward) Penny went too far. End of story. Same with Goetz. Sure: shoo off the hecklers. They didn't deserve to die.
The first priority for police and law enforcement is to protect the lives of its citizens. If society cannot provide for physical protection then anarchy will be the inevitable result.
We have the right to self-defense, and furthermore to defend others. This right of self-defense can be triggered by heuristics and, in the case of a Marine, training. Heuristics require 1/25th the time and energy of cognition. In other words, we act on instinct and training to defend outselves, and then we jjibber jabber about what the politics of that event should be. The inherent right of self-defense implies that the individual gets to decide when they feel threatened.
I can tell you this with absolute certainty: if a man entered the subway car with us right now, yelling about how he did not care for his life anymore and was ready to die, or go to jail, because he is frustrated by the world (elements of this event that you see fit to elide), and that Marine had put him in the hold in front of us when he got aggressive, you can be damn sure I would be helping the Marine. Then I would damn the state and the activists, testify in his defense, and call him a hero.
This post seems to breezily hand-wave away any argument that isn't yours.
"It is something of a cliche among gun rights advocates to claim that private gun ownership deters crime. Supposedly, criminals know that the armed populace will shoot them if they engage in criminal mayhem, and it prevents crime. Or at the very least, it prevents the specific crimes being interdicted by the self defense. This position is obviously silly, which is probably a big reason why you don’t see, say, Republican presidential candidates espouse it (even as they appoint judges who toe the NRA line). We have a gun homicide rate that far exceeds other developed countries; obviously the number of homicides deterred by citizens exercising self defense rights is far exceeded by the number of additional homicides generated by widespread gun ownership."
I don't see how either of these 'obvious' points is obvious. As to the first, I'd say the United States has a much more permissive culture in many ways than other developed countries; it is not impossible that this, all other things being equal, would lead to a higher base level of crime. It strikes me as anything BUT obvious that a well-armed populace does keep the level of crime below that base rate.
I'd say the same about the second point; I think it might be impossible to directly measure deterrent effect. Things that didn't happen didn't happen and can't be measured. I'm likely wrong about this in a literal sense, and it's certainly not my area, but the decision to just put up a strawman and then set it on fire makes me skeptical of your good faith in this respect.
"As I said, there’s no serious argument that people asking for 5 dollars are threatening deadly force against your life."
I don't see how this follows; I accept that Goetz took action at least, too far down the causal chain. But I'm not at all convinced that asking for five dollars isn't a prelude to a violent mugging, especially when there are three potential aggressors.
As to the specific case of Neely, I don't think he needed to die. But I do think that any citizen, in that situation, would have the right to physically restrain such a person, not necessarily in (or only in) self-defense, but in defense of others as well. Of all the people on that train, it strikes me as plausible that the least threatened by Neely would have been the young, fit, ex-Marine. The same likely cannot be said about the other passengers. The specific use of a chokehold, definitely a bad choice; it's well known how dangerous such holds are, but the risks aren't an issue for, say, soldiers on deployment. Funnily enough, this situation strikes me as very reminiscent of the set up for the Nic Cage movie Con Air, for example.
Also, see this tweet from Wilfred Reilly, re-tweeted by Wes Yang:
"It's fascinating and hilarious to see that the 'speech is genocide' people have identified ONE phrase that clearly is just harmless word-play: "I will hurt/kill all of you!!! I ain't afraid to go back to prison!!!""
"the victim must be about to attack the other passengers, at the very least."
So, again, we're talking about where in the causal chain we 'activate' the right to self-defense or defense of others. I don't at all think that Penny intervened too early; he intervened incorrectly perhaps, but not too early. He didn't use a firearm or a knife, for example.
"I am very skeptical that in fact a bare threat to stab someone, with no knife anywhere to be found, is sufficient authorization under the law to shoot someone dead."
This is certainly incorrect. Just plainly, baldly incorrect. If someone threatens to stab me, in the context of a fight outside a store and a bag of stolen goods, I am going to believe that person. See 3 California Criminal Defense Practice § 73.11, Penal Code § 197; People v. Ceballos (1974) 12 Cal. 3d 470, 477–478, 116 Cal. Rptr. 233, 526 P.2d 241 (although terms of Penal Code § 197 appear to permit killing to prevent any felony, defense is available only when crime is violent). Granted, this is California law, but CA is where I live.
I ordinarily at least can understand your points, but the shoddy reasoning, strawmanning, and just plain lack of diligence displayed in this post has me reconsidering my decision to even be a free subscriber.
1. I concede your point on culture. I absolutely think there's a ton of ways we are violent that don't just have to do with guns. Switzerland has a lot of guns but isn't violent the way are.
Having said that, our violence and our gun culture are connected. Members of Congress send Christmas cards out with their kids posing with AK-47's. Americans love violent movies, shoot 'em up fantasies, and movies featuring vigilantism. Guns are portrayed as solutions to life's aggravations and annoying people rather than as tools to be treated with solemnity (which is what they really are).
2. However, our gun homicide rates are so much higher than other countries that it's literally impossible that it's all due to culture. And you can look at the Australian graph in this Vox piece and see it pretty clearly: https://www.vox.com/policy-and-politics/2015/10/2/9440369/gun-violence-statistics . Widespread gun availability causes more homicides than it prevents. That's just true.
3. You just can't shoot people because they ask you for $5. That's the point. Sure, maybe they do intend to attack you. But you can't shoot anyone that maybe, possibly, might attack you. If that's the rules of engagement, life has no value anymore and lots of people die who weren't going to attack anyone.
4. There was no knife. That matters. If someone threatens to stab you and you have reason to believe they have a knife, that's one thing. But there was no knife. Remember Kevin Costner's "finger gun" in Field of Dreams? It was played for laughs, because threatening to shoot someone without a gun isn't a threat that is going to be carried out.
We can discuss Section 197, a very weird statute, if you want to, but there was no violent robbery going on when Brown picked up the bag of stuff and since he didn't have a knife, we know that he wasn't going to stab the security guard. So one person is now dead when nobody would have died if the guard had kept his gun holstered.
"Americans love violent movies, shoot 'em up fantasies, and movies featuring vigilantism." This is a strawman, a literal religious right talking point from the 90s. There is absolutely no reliable evidence that consumption of violent media leads to increased violence in real life. People in Switzerland love all that stuff too. In fact, causality might go the other way; I believe there is evidence (for example) that access to porn reduces rape, for example.
"However, our gun homicide rates are so much higher than other countries that it's literally impossible that it's all due to culture." I never said it was all due to culture, and I agree that widespread availability of guns leads to more crime. I think that's one of the costs of having superior policy which protects the right to bear arms (although I don't accept that the mere availability of guns drives all of this, either; again, see your example re Switzerland). I also don't see the problem being very fixable on a fundamental policy level; whatever your preferences, the 2nd amendment exists and is extremely difficult to amend. No other country has such a strong protection for the right to bear arms (as indicated, I think this is on net positive, but there are unquestionable downsides).
"You just can't shoot people because they ask you for $5. That's the point." I never said you could. But I think Goetz would have been perfectly justified in, say, brandishing his weapon to deter aggression. That's why your post strikes me as being a lot of salami-slicing about where to draw the line, while using catastrophic strawmen to pull the line in your direction. Where to draw the line absolutely important, of course.
"There was no knife. That matters. If someone threatens to stab you and you have reason to believe they have a knife, that's one thing. But there was no knife." No it doesn't. In a crisis, the participants obviously don't have the benefit of hindsight to determine who actually had a knife, or whether (in another common example) the gun was loaded or hopelessly jammed or loaded with the wrong cartridges such that it wouldn't fire or made of chocolate, or whatever. The bit I quoted just above is literally self-refuting. In the context of a shoplifting and a fight, if one of the participants threatens to stab someone, that is reason to believe they have a knife!
"We can discuss Section 197, a very weird statute, if you want to, but there was no violent robbery going on when Brown picked up the bag of stuff" There was no violent robbery going on? Maybe I'm woefully misunderstanding your summary of the event (I actually don't think I'd heard about this incident before I read your post), but wasn't the bag of goods the product of his shoplifting? And wasn't he involved in a violent physical fight with the guard just before the shooting? I grant maybe that these things happening in sequence is not the same as, say, threatening the clerk with a knife (or even just fists) to empty the register, but 2+2 still equals 4.
"So one person is now dead when nobody would have died if the guard had kept his gun holstered." But how was the guard to know that during the crisis? He hadn't done a pat-down search of Brown to determine if he was armed, right? Considering what the guard knew at the time, what is to say that a fleeing perpetrator, holding stolen goods, who had threatened the guard with a stabbing, might not come back? Or stab passersby, whether they tried to intervene or not? Again, I'm relying on your summary of the events for my understanding of what happened.
So I agree we aren't getting rid of the right to keep and bear arms. It's in the Constitution and is an important individual right.
But just because something is in the Constitution doesn't mean we shouldn't care about how it is exercised. Imagine if our pornography industry was a lot worse than it is, and Americans were obsessed with watching the most violent porn that features simulations of women being beaten up and raped. And imagine if further our sexual assault rate was far higher than the rest of the world. If I posted a substack in that situation saying "we have a porn culture problem", and arguing for limitations on "porn made me do it" defenses in sexual assault cases, you'd understand why I was doing that, right?
I think the way Americans think and talk about and act around guns has nothing to do with the Second Amendment. The Second Amendment does not say that you should handle guns when you are drunk, or amass an arsenal of AR-15's, or buy a calendar that poses girls in bikinis holding assault weapons, or posing your family including your young children with military style weapons on your Christmas card. Indeed, if anything, the Second Amendment's text discourages all that, by spelling out the tie between your right to keep and bear arms and your obligation to protect the government through service in the unorganized militia.
And I am sorry, I see this self-defense stuff as part of that. It's not that self-defense shouldn't be available; philosophically, the basic notion that if it is an attacker's life or yours, you have the right to shoot or use other deadly force is absolutely valid.
But it's also important to understand that the justification breaks down when it isn't actually his life or yours. There may be a legal justification for, for instance, the cops who shot Amadou Diallo when he was reaching for his wallet thinking it was a gun, or Sean Groubert shooting the guy he pulled over because he didn't realize that the driver was reaching for his license. (In the actual legal world, the former case resulted in an acquittal and the latter one a conviction). But you have to understand that moral philosophy says those situations are extremely bad, because had nobody shot, everyone would still be alive and unhurt, and since someone did shoot, that didn't happen.
In other words, and this is important, we protect people who mistakenly but reasonably believe they are in danger NOT because they didn't do something bad- killing someone when nobody would have died if nobody had shot is actually profoundly bad- but because there's no way of protecting the core self-defense right, "him or me", without protecting people who act reasonably but mistakenly.
By saying that, I think I put this all on the proper philosophical footing. A person making moral choices should avoid shooting or choking or any other similar action whenever possible, because those calculations could be wrong and when they are, life is taken that did not have to be taken. And my problem with the way so many Americans see these self-defense cases is instead of saying "did this meet the narrow 'him or me' criteria where someone has absolutely no choice but to take human life?", they see it instead through the lens of frustration about underpolicing, frustration with nasty people on the subway, hair trigger fears that something is going to happen to them, etc.
And here's my broader point-- that sort of hair trigger fear and cheapening of human life is PART of the culture that results in our gun homicide rate. Essentially, I am saying take the Second Amendment seriously-- I have said this before. The Second Amendment essentially says we are all soldiers and, well, soldiers are expected to never treat their guns as toys, never think they are badass because they own a gun, never use a gun as a prop, and yes, only fire their weapon under strict rules of engagement and bearing responsibility for when they make a poor decision.
Our current gun culture, in contrast, comes out of the Wild West, where there's the criminals and there's us, and a man's gotta be able to draw his gun at a moment's notice because the threats are everywhere. But in a sense it's even worse than that-- it combines the worst aspects of hair trigger "draw" Wild West culture with an irresponsible feeling that these things are toys.
If we want to get this under control, we have to hold the line on self defense. There will be acquittals for people who make reasonable mistakes; I get that. But we should always think of these cases in terms of the default, desirable position is that nobody ever uses deadly force, with the use of such force being the exception dictated by necessity. Not going out of our way to excuse people who kill other people they code as "threats" even when, objectively, the threat hasn't yet materialized or has dissipated.
Those last few paragraphs deserve a post of their own. I don't love this headline that ChatGPT come up with, but something along those lines: "Taking the Second Amendment Seriously: The Responsibility of Gun Ownership".
I think we agree. The way we get there (less vigilantism) is for reasonable people to expect that the authorities will handle crime. When people believe the authorities will do nothing, they become much more sympathetic to people taking the law into their hands (and much more tolerant of what should be viewed as overreactions).
Dilan,
I think you are missing what happened with the Goetz shootings. I don't think very many people ever thought it was appropriate for Goetz to shoot a bunch of kids because they were asking for money. You agree, but that's kind of a straw man.
At the peak of the 80s-90s crime wave more people were willing to believe that the youths were not just begging for money. Just as the mafia don says, "nice place, it'd be a shame if anything happened to it" isn't wishing you good fortune, many people believed the kids ask for money was the first step in a violent mugging.
People supported Goetz (or thought he was an attempted murderer) based on their belief of what they thought would happen if Goetz had declined to hand over money. In many peoples' view, this was the request for money was just the first step in a mugging, a mugging that was backed up with sharpened screw-drivers. If that supposition is correct, self-defense was on the table. If that belief was incorrect, then you are just shooting kids.
Now I believe Goetz had been a mugging victim several times, and therefore subjectively believed he was about to be a victim again. For self-defense, however, his beliefs must be objectively reasonable. The kids hadn't brandished any weapons or made any verbal threats. But there behavior of surrounding him went beyond mere begging, and was objectively coercive. But then, Goetz continued shooting after any possible threat had passed, and his statements at the time indicate he was acting out of vengeance for being a victim rather than self-defnse ("You don't look so bad, here's another").
And whether a belief is objectively reasonable may change over time. Increased crime shifts the bell curve of the public's response to the right. There will be more people willing to use violence to confront criminal behavior, and the public will be more accepting of it. On the right tail of the curve, that means vigilante murder will occur, and it will be tolerated more. But it also means that what is objectively reasonable changes as well.
(None of which, obviously, is a good thing).
I think juries are going to jury, and that includes taking into account, in practice, the kind of community standard and knowledge you are putting forth as a justification for Goetz. In a sense, that's what we want juries to do-- it's why we have them judge negligence cases, even though negligence is as much about a legal standard as it is about fact-finding.
But having said that, the point you get to at the end is the problem. Broadening the rules of engagement so that you can fire or choke earlier is going to cheapen human life. It is going to lead to people getting killed who weren't going to commit a violent crime or even a property crime. It's going to lead to excessive force, and needless death.
The reality is that the vigilante fantasy doesn't work. It can't reduce the homicide rate, because even if it does kill some actual criminals it will also kill a bunch of innocent people as well. And to be clear, I don't think that's the attraction of it. I think the attraction absolutely includes some sense that the kids who asked Goetz for money, and all the other people who accost folks on the subway who they stood in for, deserved what they got. It's a toxic attraction for society.
I have no sympathy for Goetz. I have some for Penny. There is evidence that he was threatening people, and he didn't act alone (which indicates at least SOME people felt it was reasonable). That being said: while what both did is understandable that doesn't make it morally right. Perhaps Penny was right to restrain Neely, but he clearly overdid it and killed a man. That requires, on basic principle, that society respond. I can quibble over what the proper sentence is, but I do not believe that Penny is innocent of all crimes. I can't. Even if it was an accident (and I do not think Penny intended to kill him; I do reserve the right to change my mind if more evidence comes forward) Penny went too far. End of story. Same with Goetz. Sure: shoo off the hecklers. They didn't deserve to die.
The first priority for police and law enforcement is to protect the lives of its citizens. If society cannot provide for physical protection then anarchy will be the inevitable result.
We have the right to self-defense, and furthermore to defend others. This right of self-defense can be triggered by heuristics and, in the case of a Marine, training. Heuristics require 1/25th the time and energy of cognition. In other words, we act on instinct and training to defend outselves, and then we jjibber jabber about what the politics of that event should be. The inherent right of self-defense implies that the individual gets to decide when they feel threatened.
I can tell you this with absolute certainty: if a man entered the subway car with us right now, yelling about how he did not care for his life anymore and was ready to die, or go to jail, because he is frustrated by the world (elements of this event that you see fit to elide), and that Marine had put him in the hold in front of us when he got aggressive, you can be damn sure I would be helping the Marine. Then I would damn the state and the activists, testify in his defense, and call him a hero.
This post seems to breezily hand-wave away any argument that isn't yours.
"It is something of a cliche among gun rights advocates to claim that private gun ownership deters crime. Supposedly, criminals know that the armed populace will shoot them if they engage in criminal mayhem, and it prevents crime. Or at the very least, it prevents the specific crimes being interdicted by the self defense. This position is obviously silly, which is probably a big reason why you don’t see, say, Republican presidential candidates espouse it (even as they appoint judges who toe the NRA line). We have a gun homicide rate that far exceeds other developed countries; obviously the number of homicides deterred by citizens exercising self defense rights is far exceeded by the number of additional homicides generated by widespread gun ownership."
I don't see how either of these 'obvious' points is obvious. As to the first, I'd say the United States has a much more permissive culture in many ways than other developed countries; it is not impossible that this, all other things being equal, would lead to a higher base level of crime. It strikes me as anything BUT obvious that a well-armed populace does keep the level of crime below that base rate.
I'd say the same about the second point; I think it might be impossible to directly measure deterrent effect. Things that didn't happen didn't happen and can't be measured. I'm likely wrong about this in a literal sense, and it's certainly not my area, but the decision to just put up a strawman and then set it on fire makes me skeptical of your good faith in this respect.
"As I said, there’s no serious argument that people asking for 5 dollars are threatening deadly force against your life."
I don't see how this follows; I accept that Goetz took action at least, too far down the causal chain. But I'm not at all convinced that asking for five dollars isn't a prelude to a violent mugging, especially when there are three potential aggressors.
As to the specific case of Neely, I don't think he needed to die. But I do think that any citizen, in that situation, would have the right to physically restrain such a person, not necessarily in (or only in) self-defense, but in defense of others as well. Of all the people on that train, it strikes me as plausible that the least threatened by Neely would have been the young, fit, ex-Marine. The same likely cannot be said about the other passengers. The specific use of a chokehold, definitely a bad choice; it's well known how dangerous such holds are, but the risks aren't an issue for, say, soldiers on deployment. Funnily enough, this situation strikes me as very reminiscent of the set up for the Nic Cage movie Con Air, for example.
Also, see this tweet from Wilfred Reilly, re-tweeted by Wes Yang:
"It's fascinating and hilarious to see that the 'speech is genocide' people have identified ONE phrase that clearly is just harmless word-play: "I will hurt/kill all of you!!! I ain't afraid to go back to prison!!!""
"the victim must be about to attack the other passengers, at the very least."
So, again, we're talking about where in the causal chain we 'activate' the right to self-defense or defense of others. I don't at all think that Penny intervened too early; he intervened incorrectly perhaps, but not too early. He didn't use a firearm or a knife, for example.
"I am very skeptical that in fact a bare threat to stab someone, with no knife anywhere to be found, is sufficient authorization under the law to shoot someone dead."
This is certainly incorrect. Just plainly, baldly incorrect. If someone threatens to stab me, in the context of a fight outside a store and a bag of stolen goods, I am going to believe that person. See 3 California Criminal Defense Practice § 73.11, Penal Code § 197; People v. Ceballos (1974) 12 Cal. 3d 470, 477–478, 116 Cal. Rptr. 233, 526 P.2d 241 (although terms of Penal Code § 197 appear to permit killing to prevent any felony, defense is available only when crime is violent). Granted, this is California law, but CA is where I live.
I ordinarily at least can understand your points, but the shoddy reasoning, strawmanning, and just plain lack of diligence displayed in this post has me reconsidering my decision to even be a free subscriber.
Thanks for your comment.
1. I concede your point on culture. I absolutely think there's a ton of ways we are violent that don't just have to do with guns. Switzerland has a lot of guns but isn't violent the way are.
Having said that, our violence and our gun culture are connected. Members of Congress send Christmas cards out with their kids posing with AK-47's. Americans love violent movies, shoot 'em up fantasies, and movies featuring vigilantism. Guns are portrayed as solutions to life's aggravations and annoying people rather than as tools to be treated with solemnity (which is what they really are).
2. However, our gun homicide rates are so much higher than other countries that it's literally impossible that it's all due to culture. And you can look at the Australian graph in this Vox piece and see it pretty clearly: https://www.vox.com/policy-and-politics/2015/10/2/9440369/gun-violence-statistics . Widespread gun availability causes more homicides than it prevents. That's just true.
3. You just can't shoot people because they ask you for $5. That's the point. Sure, maybe they do intend to attack you. But you can't shoot anyone that maybe, possibly, might attack you. If that's the rules of engagement, life has no value anymore and lots of people die who weren't going to attack anyone.
4. There was no knife. That matters. If someone threatens to stab you and you have reason to believe they have a knife, that's one thing. But there was no knife. Remember Kevin Costner's "finger gun" in Field of Dreams? It was played for laughs, because threatening to shoot someone without a gun isn't a threat that is going to be carried out.
We can discuss Section 197, a very weird statute, if you want to, but there was no violent robbery going on when Brown picked up the bag of stuff and since he didn't have a knife, we know that he wasn't going to stab the security guard. So one person is now dead when nobody would have died if the guard had kept his gun holstered.
"Americans love violent movies, shoot 'em up fantasies, and movies featuring vigilantism." This is a strawman, a literal religious right talking point from the 90s. There is absolutely no reliable evidence that consumption of violent media leads to increased violence in real life. People in Switzerland love all that stuff too. In fact, causality might go the other way; I believe there is evidence (for example) that access to porn reduces rape, for example.
"However, our gun homicide rates are so much higher than other countries that it's literally impossible that it's all due to culture." I never said it was all due to culture, and I agree that widespread availability of guns leads to more crime. I think that's one of the costs of having superior policy which protects the right to bear arms (although I don't accept that the mere availability of guns drives all of this, either; again, see your example re Switzerland). I also don't see the problem being very fixable on a fundamental policy level; whatever your preferences, the 2nd amendment exists and is extremely difficult to amend. No other country has such a strong protection for the right to bear arms (as indicated, I think this is on net positive, but there are unquestionable downsides).
"You just can't shoot people because they ask you for $5. That's the point." I never said you could. But I think Goetz would have been perfectly justified in, say, brandishing his weapon to deter aggression. That's why your post strikes me as being a lot of salami-slicing about where to draw the line, while using catastrophic strawmen to pull the line in your direction. Where to draw the line absolutely important, of course.
"There was no knife. That matters. If someone threatens to stab you and you have reason to believe they have a knife, that's one thing. But there was no knife." No it doesn't. In a crisis, the participants obviously don't have the benefit of hindsight to determine who actually had a knife, or whether (in another common example) the gun was loaded or hopelessly jammed or loaded with the wrong cartridges such that it wouldn't fire or made of chocolate, or whatever. The bit I quoted just above is literally self-refuting. In the context of a shoplifting and a fight, if one of the participants threatens to stab someone, that is reason to believe they have a knife!
"We can discuss Section 197, a very weird statute, if you want to, but there was no violent robbery going on when Brown picked up the bag of stuff" There was no violent robbery going on? Maybe I'm woefully misunderstanding your summary of the event (I actually don't think I'd heard about this incident before I read your post), but wasn't the bag of goods the product of his shoplifting? And wasn't he involved in a violent physical fight with the guard just before the shooting? I grant maybe that these things happening in sequence is not the same as, say, threatening the clerk with a knife (or even just fists) to empty the register, but 2+2 still equals 4.
"So one person is now dead when nobody would have died if the guard had kept his gun holstered." But how was the guard to know that during the crisis? He hadn't done a pat-down search of Brown to determine if he was armed, right? Considering what the guard knew at the time, what is to say that a fleeing perpetrator, holding stolen goods, who had threatened the guard with a stabbing, might not come back? Or stab passersby, whether they tried to intervene or not? Again, I'm relying on your summary of the events for my understanding of what happened.
So I agree we aren't getting rid of the right to keep and bear arms. It's in the Constitution and is an important individual right.
But just because something is in the Constitution doesn't mean we shouldn't care about how it is exercised. Imagine if our pornography industry was a lot worse than it is, and Americans were obsessed with watching the most violent porn that features simulations of women being beaten up and raped. And imagine if further our sexual assault rate was far higher than the rest of the world. If I posted a substack in that situation saying "we have a porn culture problem", and arguing for limitations on "porn made me do it" defenses in sexual assault cases, you'd understand why I was doing that, right?
I think the way Americans think and talk about and act around guns has nothing to do with the Second Amendment. The Second Amendment does not say that you should handle guns when you are drunk, or amass an arsenal of AR-15's, or buy a calendar that poses girls in bikinis holding assault weapons, or posing your family including your young children with military style weapons on your Christmas card. Indeed, if anything, the Second Amendment's text discourages all that, by spelling out the tie between your right to keep and bear arms and your obligation to protect the government through service in the unorganized militia.
And I am sorry, I see this self-defense stuff as part of that. It's not that self-defense shouldn't be available; philosophically, the basic notion that if it is an attacker's life or yours, you have the right to shoot or use other deadly force is absolutely valid.
But it's also important to understand that the justification breaks down when it isn't actually his life or yours. There may be a legal justification for, for instance, the cops who shot Amadou Diallo when he was reaching for his wallet thinking it was a gun, or Sean Groubert shooting the guy he pulled over because he didn't realize that the driver was reaching for his license. (In the actual legal world, the former case resulted in an acquittal and the latter one a conviction). But you have to understand that moral philosophy says those situations are extremely bad, because had nobody shot, everyone would still be alive and unhurt, and since someone did shoot, that didn't happen.
In other words, and this is important, we protect people who mistakenly but reasonably believe they are in danger NOT because they didn't do something bad- killing someone when nobody would have died if nobody had shot is actually profoundly bad- but because there's no way of protecting the core self-defense right, "him or me", without protecting people who act reasonably but mistakenly.
By saying that, I think I put this all on the proper philosophical footing. A person making moral choices should avoid shooting or choking or any other similar action whenever possible, because those calculations could be wrong and when they are, life is taken that did not have to be taken. And my problem with the way so many Americans see these self-defense cases is instead of saying "did this meet the narrow 'him or me' criteria where someone has absolutely no choice but to take human life?", they see it instead through the lens of frustration about underpolicing, frustration with nasty people on the subway, hair trigger fears that something is going to happen to them, etc.
And here's my broader point-- that sort of hair trigger fear and cheapening of human life is PART of the culture that results in our gun homicide rate. Essentially, I am saying take the Second Amendment seriously-- I have said this before. The Second Amendment essentially says we are all soldiers and, well, soldiers are expected to never treat their guns as toys, never think they are badass because they own a gun, never use a gun as a prop, and yes, only fire their weapon under strict rules of engagement and bearing responsibility for when they make a poor decision.
Our current gun culture, in contrast, comes out of the Wild West, where there's the criminals and there's us, and a man's gotta be able to draw his gun at a moment's notice because the threats are everywhere. But in a sense it's even worse than that-- it combines the worst aspects of hair trigger "draw" Wild West culture with an irresponsible feeling that these things are toys.
If we want to get this under control, we have to hold the line on self defense. There will be acquittals for people who make reasonable mistakes; I get that. But we should always think of these cases in terms of the default, desirable position is that nobody ever uses deadly force, with the use of such force being the exception dictated by necessity. Not going out of our way to excuse people who kill other people they code as "threats" even when, objectively, the threat hasn't yet materialized or has dissipated.
Those last few paragraphs deserve a post of their own. I don't love this headline that ChatGPT come up with, but something along those lines: "Taking the Second Amendment Seriously: The Responsibility of Gun Ownership".