A millionaire businessman is facing jail for attacking a career criminal who had held his family hostage at knifepoint. [More]I know some will say he should have stopped once the attack was over.
I'm not one of them.
[Via Jeffersonian]
Thursday, September 17, 2009
Meanwhile, Across the Pond in Sarah Brady Paradise...
I'm not one of them.
[Via Jeffersonian]
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8 comments:
A government that will not allow its people to take the moral action of defense in the face of evil cannot claim itself to be a bastion of civilization, but becomes a violator of the basic rights endowed upon humanity and is therefore deserving in being thrown off.
There's a reason God put those people on an island...
I for one, will begin the killing once an attack starts, and stop when all the attackers are dead. Then I will reload, and consider summoning the only ones.
Survival in a courtroom may indeed depend on using only enough force to stop an attack. But we can probably all appreciate that legal and moral considerations only occasionally overlap.
Ethically, if someone initiates aggression against someone else (and certainly a home invasion at knifepoint, by multiple assailants, would count if anything would) then a lethal response is justifiable, period. Moral ambiguity only becomes possible when the response takes so long that it starts to look like return aggression.
That is: there would be far less ambiguity here if he'd have been able to put the intruder down for the count immediately.
Hey...you know, there is an emergency rescue device that would have allowed Mr. Hussain to do just that, with a minimum of fuss. In fact, it may well have allowed him to respond to all three attackers instead of just the one. Some even think that it may have proven so overwhelmingly threatening to the attackers that they may have just called the whole deal off before it even happened.
Naw, I must be hallucinating.
It certainly seems smart to me, if attacked, to use overwhelming force to stop a fight that someone else starts (solving "problem 1"), and then to stop after the threat is shut down, in anticipation of the inevitable legal hassle that will follow (anticipating "problem 2"). If your goal is to stay out of trouble, that is a well-prioritized strategy, and I sure hope if I ever end up in that position, heaven forbid, that I keep my head well enough to solve both problems in that order.
But...the human being in me can certainly understand a little righteous indignation on a moral and ethical level. Jeff Cooper loved to talk about the attitude of the African buffalo, Syncerus caffer, pointing out that the problem of wounding a buffalo that decides to return your attentions is that "only death will turn him off. His death, not yours."
Gruesome as a buffalo pounding sounds, one can hardly fault the buffalo for reducing the man who shot him to a pile of remains unrecognizable as a previously living thing.
I fully agree, Kevin. I am wondering about the part where the report says the man lied about it.
Obviously, we don't have a clear picture of what happened, but I think it is safe to say that if the victims had been properly armed there would never have been any danger of the criminal being beaten up.
Not cricket to beat them after they're full of holes, you know. [grin]
I would never second-guess a person who has defended themselves from an attack. If they thought they needed to keep beating, stabbing, shooting, kicking, setting fire to, or otherwise defending themselves from an attacker I will trust their judgment.
It didn't help that he lied. Since logic is no longer allowed in the court room, character counts for a whole lot.
I don't see equivalence with the Oklahoma drug store owner's case, whose intention was obviously to kill the intruder. However, as someone pointed out with the earlier story, a government which severely punishes any attempt to properly defend one's life is strongly encouraging defenders to absolutely, positively kill their attackers, since such an opportunity may not present itself in the future....when the attacker seeks revenge.
The other side effect of punishing defense is that the courts and police stations are filled to overflowing with cases--the latter being unsolved cases--because the crime was not stopped as it happened, where there was no question about who was the guilty party.
The only thing that can hold crooks like that down is six feet of dirt.
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