The shooter was a guy who repeatedly made a pain in the ass of himself by being an irritating busybody and he carried a gun. That makes me think he packed heat just to deal with any situation he might get himself into by being so irritating, no too different from packing while going to a biker bar to deal with trouble resulting from insulting a Hell's Angel's old lady. Far better to rely on courtesy and discretion than the weapon to deal with such situations.
Then, turning to the situation itself, it looks like the decedent gave the shooter a hard, double handed push, knocking the shooter to the ground and immediately backed off when the shooter drew his weapon. In self-defense law, that means the aggression that would have justified firing the weapon had ceased and the shooter had no remaining right to fire. Hence, there"s a good chance he could be found guilty of voluntary manslaughter.
This also differs profoundly from the Michael Brown and Trayvon Martin cases because Brown and Martin were actively attempting to murder their victims, potential murders that were stopped by timely, legitimate, moral shootings.
I am not sure what the legalities are but if all I knew was what I saw on the tape, I would never vote to convict if I was a juror.
I do know what I was taught when I was being trained in firearms. I have every right to defend myself, but I need to always adhere to three principles:
1. Innocence (I should be innocent in the eyes of the law, and should not be the one who provoked a situation and then claimed self defense when there was a reaction to my provocation)
2. Imminence (there should be clearly imminent violence coming my way)
3. Proportionality (I shouldn’t fire a 9mm HST in response to a slap to the face ...and yes, I know for some that’s perfectly okay).
4. Avoidance
That’s what I follow, and it has worked quite well for me. I stay away from certain places, I don’t get into arguments, I don’t get ‘triggered’ or whatever people call it nowadays, my situational awareness is well honed, etc etc etc.
What I see happening here is some man arguing with a woman, that woman’s boyfriend/whatever comes out and shoved the first man hard, the shoved man (who was the one having the argument with the Lady) draws a pistol and aims it at the second man, the second man starts to back away, and the first man shoots him.
If this goes to court I am very curious what the jury says.
On FR ...does not matter much. The man shot was black - or as a poster on this thread said, a ‘thug’ - and I’m sure many in the ‘new FR’ are thus okay with him being shot. After all, the ‘thug violently shoved the other man to the ground because he was arguing with his Baby Mama.’ Thus, totally justified as per the rules here.
I am really curious how some of the posters here would react if I (a black man) was having a shouting match with their spouse in the parking lot. I wonder if they would come out, and maybe even shove me ‘violently.’ I wonder what would happen if as soon as my ass hit the ground I drew my Glock 17 and put my carry round for the day (depending on month, a 147g HST or 147g Winchester Bonded) into them. As an IDPA ranked Sharpshooter (no USPSA where I am), at that range I wouldn’t miss. Couldn’t miss.
I’m sure though that when that video was shown on FR the narrative would be ‘I’ would be the thug.
And no, I’m usually not concerned with the silly racial mumbojumbo in the US. A some of you may know, there is VERY little love lost between Africans and African Americans. But the hypocrisy is ridiculous.
Trayvon Martin deserved the S&B 115gr 9mm he got ...that was proper self defense, and Trayvon should not have done what he did.
The man in this video however did not deserve to die. His killer may get away with it, and probably will, but the man did not deserve to die.
She might still get ticket for parking in a handicapped zone.
She thinks it’s ‘her right’ to park anyplace she wants to.
It was an eye opener for me when KrissKringle posted THIS to the long thread discussing this topic.
It's the Florida Statutes that address what constitutes Assault and what constitutes Battery. It also defines what is the reasoned reaction to Assault, and that Assault is not limited to physical activity.
What McGlockton was guilty of was battery, not assault. And when he committed battery, he may have been justified by Florida legal code to do pretty much exactly what he did.
There is a certain protected class of people that believes it has a civil right to violently assault people they feel “disrespected” by and that those other people do not have a civil right to reciprocate in kind.
So the author of this "piece" claims to know what was going through the mind of the man pushed to the ground by a much larger other man?
Really?
And this in "Reason" magazine, huh? They ought to change their name to "Feelings"
“The shooter was a guy who repeatedly made a pain in the ass of himself by being an irritating busybody and he carried a gun.”
There was at least one prior similar incident.
A few months ago, according to the Tampa Bay Times, Rick Kelly parked his tanker truck in the same handicapped spot and said he was confronted by Drejka.
Drejka walked around his truck, looking for handicap decals, then demanded to know why Kelly had parked there, the trucker told the Tampa Bay Times. At one point Drejka threatened to shoot Kelly.
“It’s a repeat. It happened to me the first time. The second time it’s happening, someone’s life got taken,” Kelly told the Tampa Bay Times. “He provoked that.”
I can see both sides here, but in the man with the gun defence, what is being said is NOT accurate and leaves things out.
The armed citizen was “talking” to the girlfriend.
The now dead guy walks briskly up to the armed citizen with his hands in his pockets. The now dead guy “blindsides” the armed citizen. The armed citizen was VIOLENTLY shoved to the “pavement” (not ground, earth, grass, sand etc.).
The now dead guy takes several steps forward toward the armed citizen. The now dead guy takes a step and a half back, takes a stance, while BOTH hands go to his waistband area, (probably pulling down his shirt, but in the moment who knows what he has in his waistband. The armed citizen draws his weapon.
At this moment, from The armed citizen’s perspective, is this confrontation over? Does The now dead guy have a weapon (in his pocket/waistband)? He has already proven how physically strong he is. He is only several feet away. What if he lunges at me again?
The armed citizen fires his weapon. THEN, The now dead guy retreats. The armed citizen does NOT fire on the now dead guy as he retreats.
I just don’t see how the armed citizen can be convicted, if even charged, in this shooting.
It’s not a question of whether it could have been avoided, it CAN’T. IT HAPPENED!
Can the armed citizen present a credible case for self defence? YES, I just did.
I was just thinking of what I would have done in either person’s shoes.
First of all, I played college football, attended on an athletic scholarship. I am a fairly large person, in fact a lot larger than most. In my youth I was tough.
Now I am 71 years old, infirm and couldn’t fight my way out of a paper bag.
First of all, I never would have parked in a handicapped space. I would never have said anything to someone who did.
If someone were arguing with my wife, I would probably have asked her to come away with me. If the person kept on haranguing her, I would have gotten between them and tried to calm things down.
Would I have blind sided a much smaller guy who appears infirm? Never in a million years. That is in fact the one act which went way beyond normal behavior.
Now the final question. Would I shoot a big guy who just sent me sprawling from the side? The guy then begins to approach the little guy.
Yes, in my present state of health, I would very definitely pull a gun. I am not certain if there was time to stop the trigger pull. Just don’t know. I do know it was a very short timeline, not several seconds as someone said.
You don't violently knock someone to the ground like that—certainly not for a mere verbal altercation which had no indication of turning violent.
A police officer would doubtless be justified in shooting someone in such a case, even though the person was backing off. It was a "heat of the moment" situation and the shooter's frame of mind at that moment must be considered. An armed citizen should "get away" with that if a police officer would.
Never initiate a violent assault against anyone without due cause. The decedent had absolutely no justification to do what he did, and that's why he's dead.
A close call, but I agree with the "no charge". No jury would convict the shooter in any event, since he didn't initiate any violence. People are sick and tired of thugs who think they can get violent simply because they don't like a non-violent situation that's going on.
Did the shooter overreact? Yes—but he had already been violently assaulted and was in "fight or flight" mode, and "flight" was not an option. In such a situation, many reasonable people might overreact—such as a police officer, for instance. But, as I said, it is a close call.
This is a teachable moment for anyone who thinks they can walk up to someone and violently shove them to the ground or punch them—out of the blue, essentially—without a damn good reason for doing so...
Maybe the witness who went into the store and reported the confrontation to the boyfriend should bare some responsibility. He might have said the shooter was acting more aggressively than he was.
The guy who was killed had come up from behind the shooter and shoved him (sucker shove, if you will) him down into the ground.
I don’t know....
No it didn’t a coward with a gun killed him...
It was “stand your ground” that will let that coward get away with murder.
Instead of turning towards his car and away from the shooter, to immediately drive away after pushing the shooter down, McGlockton pushed the shooter and took 3 steps toward him before the gun was pulled. I don't think McGlockton was going to put out a helping hand to get him back on his feet. Which is how the shooter will likely present his side to the story.
And I say this as someone who thinks the shooter should never have approached the woman in the handicap space.
I really thought the shooter was in the wrong on this. But then I read another story, about a woman in a Walmart Parking lot.
In this second story, the woman comes out of Walmart with one kid in a cart, and an infant in her hands. She sees a man leaving a cart partially blocking her car. She asks the man, “could you move your cart to the storage”?
He says no, and she asks if he could at least move it out from behind her car.
In response, he runs at her and pushes her to the ground.
Note that this is very similar to the above story, where a guy was complaining about parking, and in response a man ran at him and pushed him to the ground.
But in the Walmart case, the wmoan did not have a gun. So the man came at her, started kicking her. He then pulled her hair out, grabbed her cart, and pushed it, with her child, away from her, sending it rolling through the parking lot.
Fortunately, at this point another woman intervened, restraining the man while the mother got off the ground and ran after her child in the cart.
So, the Walmart case shows what MIGHT have happened in the above case, if the man on the ground hadn’t shot the man who pushed him. We can’t know what the dead man’s next move was. He had stepped toward the shooter — was he going to help him up? Was he going to start kicking him and punching him? Was he so mad he might have picked up the much smaller man and slammed him to the ground again, possibly fracturing his skull?
The walmart case turned out OK, because the man who started the fight was stopped by someone else who intervened, but only after threatening the woman’s life — and if a car had been driving through a normal speed at the time, quite possibly her child would have been hit by the car and killed.
If the woman in the walmart case had pulled a gun and shot the guy after the first push — would we have said she was acting out of turn? Knowing what the man eventually did to her, I think most of us would have supported her had she shot him — but of course, if she had shot him after the first push, we’d not have known what his next violent actions were to be.
In some cultures being knocked on your @$$ is the prelude to being stomped to death. Fear for your life...
Regardless who shot whom, it’s still more evidence that the The Surgeon General was spot-on with his pronouncement that it improves your children’s chances of not dying a violent death before the age of 30 by 87% if you don’t name them from a handful of Scrabble tiles thrown onto the kitchen table.
Say Brittany Jacobs had been carrying a firearm. And when Drejka came towards her yelling about the parking spot she pulled her gun out and blew his head off. Stand your ground, she felt her safety was being threatened, no charges should be filed. Right?
Bottom Line.
The shooter (murderer) placed himself in harms way.
He had absolutely NO business starting a confrontation.
I carry 99.9% of the time and Rule # 1 is to AVOID confrontations that may become ‘ugly’.
Apparently this guy came back and got in peoples faces, different situation if the guy walking by and the shover felt ‘dissed’ and shoved him, backing off or not, you just won the ‘booby prize’ AND got in the running for a ‘Darwin’ because you just happened to be ‘Macho’ with ‘Dirty Harry’, not ‘Casper Milquetoast’.
When frequenting my Buddy’s Bar, I will normally leave when the conversation starts getting ‘hostile’ especially amongst patrons as that type of situation can turn ugly if an ‘outsider’ attempts to step in. If the outsider armed, the odds of a problem rise.
I speak as a former fully functional ‘professional drunk’ and even when drinking I was (or could be) the ‘smooth talker’ and managed to stay out of fisticuffs. (I did not carry when drinking, normally had something in the truck but in ‘those times’ the ‘fight’ usually ended rather quickly and one may want to come back and kick some ass later, but the idea of coming back and shooting the place up was remote).
Now I figure if it is not my business, best I leave but certain circumstances could change my mind but it would have to be pretty outrageous behavior on the attackers part.
In other words, even if I know you and you know I am armed don’t run your mouth or let your hummingbird ass overrun your alligator mouth, I will NOT be ‘saving’ you unless a weapon pulled and the guy(gal) gonna shoot you BUT that is a judgement call and sitting here I don’t know exactly how far I will go to ‘save’ your sorry ass from yourself.