Posted on 01/17/2014 6:10:16 AM PST by Anton.Rutter
Guns don’t kill people, popcorn kills people. Or maybe it’s texting. Or just being in the wrong place at the wrong time with some fool who thinks he needs to take a gun to the movies.
(Excerpt) Read more at touch.latimes.com ...
He should face the music or consequences for what he did. And that should be spending the remainder of his life in prison.
So THAT is where that post went ;)
Sorry about that.
The reason the guy was texting.
LOL!!
OK, got it -- thanks. Yes, if a parent can't check on a child by texting without someone else's recreational entitlements overwhelming their trigger finger, the end times are here.
LOL-- AssinacanLand!
More than that -- don't forget the dog.
Oh, I'll just leave that to the cops. They'll take care of it in 45 minutes or so, as soon as they get here.
It is not narcissism when someone jumps up three feet in front of you and displays violence as he is screaming at you. The event was over and done with until the guy who got shot decided to get physical and assumed a threatening posture and threw something in the shooters face. What has not been reported is what the guy was screaming. Was it a verbal threat or words that conveyed his ability to do violence?
I'm sorry this all happened it was needless. I'm very much not patting the shooter on the back either. It is clearly a fact that the guy who got shot did have a big part in what happened and made some bad choices. It was his choice to continue and escalate the confrontation after the old cop returned to his seat. I'm still going to wait and see how this all plays out in court.
No you do not have to stand to draw a pocket piston/subcompact pistol from a pocket. I carry a subcompact in my back pocket all the time. All I have to do is lean slightly forward to allow it to be quickly and easily deployed. I have not read anywhere if he was standing or not but the assumption that he had to be standing is completely wrong.
The witnesses said he drew his firearm and fired. There is no report that he brandished his handgun as a threat. This actually supports his contention that he believed he was in danger. When the guy who got shot stood up and turned on him, yelling and threw something in his face he reacted. There was not time for a thought process. He reacted as he was trained to react.
The courts will sort all of this out. There are still many things that have not been reported and we do not know. What I do know is that they both made very bad decisions and this was needless and never should have happened.
Technically, I fall back on this: An armed society is a polite society.
Imagine if everyone in the theater had a sidearm and everyone knew it. It would go down much differently. No popcorn would have been thrown, for starters.
It such a dumb idea that it is discussed at length in every self-defense class I have ever taken.
Throwing something in someone's face is the crime of assault. Throw popcorn in a cop's face and see if you go to jail.
Showing a deadly weapon without the justification to use it is a crime. Walk up to a cop with a gun in your hand and see if survive long enough to go to jail.
If it was not reasonable to shoot the popcorn thrower, then it would not have been reasonable to display a deadly weapon.
If the cop had brandished his weapon, would the popcorn thrower have been justified in drawing a gun, assuming he had one, and firing? If the ex-cop had ended up dead in that way, would you then be calling for conviction of the popcorn thrower for murder?
Everything being claimed about this case was also claimed about Zimmerman.
I still haven't heard a good explanation of what the popcorn thrower was going to do next. Turning his back on someone he just attacked and sitting down seems totally irrational to me.
I'm sure that Trayvon Martin was surprised as hell to get shot dead. That was probably the furthest thing from his mind. He was just going to teach some "creepy ass cracker" a lesson.
My guess is that the popcorn thrower also didn't consider the possibility of being shot either and also was determined to teach a lesson.
What do you think was going to happen if no gun had been drawn?
Whether throwing popcorn constitutes assault is one question. Whether that rises to justification for lethal response is another. There are degrees of assault, and I imagine that throwing popcorn falls in the lowest level of assault. A level of assault where the target should have no valid, let alone sane, reason to think their safety was in jeopardy.
Seriously, you are harming CCW with this kind of nonsense. Sometimes (and rarely) the CCW holder is just plain wrong. From all I have seen so far, this is one of those cases.
That’s a ridiculous analogy.
Agreed.
Many, many years ago I managed a convenience store. Early one morning a nicely dressed professional looking woman came in for coffee and she was the only customer in the store at the time. She poured her coffee and put in one of those individual creamers but the creamer curdled. She was quite upset and showed it to me and I of course apologized profusely and told her that I’d go to the back and get a fresh box of creamers which I did. FWIW, sometimes one out of a hundred of those will curdle for no apparent reason. I returned and got her a new cup, even poured her coffee for her and then handed her a creamer from the newly opened box.
What she did next will never cease to amaze me. She looked at the cup, picked it up, glared at me and then told me “I don’t want any of your G-D coffee” and then she hurled the cup of scalding hot coffee at my head. Fortunately I had some pretty quick reflexes back then and ducked but the scalding hot coffee still hit me although not in my face.
I was so shocked that I stood there frozen as she stormed out of the store, got into her very late model and expensive car (a BMW IIRC) and sped away. If I had more of a presence of mind, I might have gotten her license plate number and called the police to file assault charges against her but then again there were no witnesses and we didn’t have security cameras back then. And this wasn’t the first time I had been horrifically verbally assaulted by an angry customer for no legitimate reason or the last, although this was the only time I had been physically assaulted with hot coffee, which BTW is a lot more dangerous and potentially physically harmful than a bag of popcorn.
So what if I had had a firearm on me that day? Would I have been justified to pull it out and shoot her in her back as she was leaving my store after she assaulted me? Would I have been justified to run out after her, get in front of her vehicle and threaten to shoot her or shoot her if she still tried to speed away?
What about the guy who severely and very aggressively tailgated me for well over 10 miles on a narrow country road a few weeks ago and once he got in front of me, kept slamming on his brakes in hopes of causing me to hit him? What he was doing IMO was a lot more dangerous and potentially life threatening to me and to other drivers on the road that day than some guy throwing some popcorn in someone’s face. Would I or should I have been justified to follow him, pull out my gun and shoot him? What I did was to take out my cell phone and take a picture of his car and license plate and I called the police, not that he was caught or that anything happened. FWIW, here in PA, what I did, using my cell phone while driving to either take his picture or to call the police, is technically illegal as the cop who took my report reminded me.
I think what will happen next is you are going to generate a zot warning. Stop it.
With Zimmerman, he was having his head bashed against the sidewalk. The level of assault had escalated to clear intent to kill.
Throwing popcorn is the lowest level of assault. No physical contact was made. No injury rendered. It was a clear over-reaction.
No one takes such an absurd moral equivalence attempt seriously.
You're supposed to issue an Amber Alert when one of those gets away from you :)
Or light a match...
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