Justified Killing - Progressive vs Conservative morality

[Cow Poke]

Your reinterpretation of my view is all kinds of laughably stupid. I never said a beating wasn't a big deal. What I said was that the value of intelligent life is a bigger deal.

I'm saying that the view of "they're just a criminal, therefore their life doesn't matter and it's fine for people to kill them" is unacceptable and immoral.

And your view of our position "we only kill as a very last option" is sick --- nobody here has expressed anything like "their life doesn't matter" and nobody is claiming "it's fine to kill them".

[Cow Poke]

Starlight's attitude of "it's just a beating, no big deal" is all kinds of laughably stupid.

I think even his fan club has started to lean toward he's just "pulling your chain". I really seriously doubt if SL would stand there and take a beating if he had the physical means to ward off the attack.

[CMD]

It seems a very strange hypothetical scenario where the only available defense is lethal defense. For example, if you had a gun, which is the main weapon that offers lethal defense, then your options include threatening to use it on the criminal and actually using it non-lethally on an arm or a leg and attempting to disable them. However, it is my view that a criminal trying to beat up your family does not validate shooting them four times in the chest, for example.

This isn't Hollywood. Shooting someone in the arms or legs - particularly someone who is moving around - is incredibly difficult, even for someone who is highly trained. It's also much less likely to stop someone before they can do any (further) damage, particularly if that someone is pumped full of adrenaline, alcohol and/or drugs.

As for using a weapon to threaten, that happens all the time and it can certainly be effective, but there are plenty of situations where simply threatening the use of force is not enough. It really depends on the circumstance.

For example, if someone is on top of someone else and they're beating the ever living crap out of them, chances are they're not even going to hear you or see that you have a gun. Waving a gun around yelling "I've got a gun and I'm not afraid to use it" in that instance is just a waste of precious seconds that the person taking the beating might very well not have.

[mossrose]

I think even his fan club has started to lean toward he's just "pulling your chain". I really seriously doubt if SL would stand there and take a beating if he had the physical means to ward off the attack.

He has no regard for his own intelligent life, apparently.

And what does his regard for intelligent life say about a father who kills his 12 year old handicapped daughter because he feels sorry for her, as was the case in Canada a number of years ago? Because she didn't live up to SL's view of intelligence, is he okay with it?

Would SL defend a Down's Syndrome child against attack? Or would he allow the attack to continue because the child isn't "intelligent".....

There are all kinds of holes in his mindset.

[Adrift]

Using 'Reddit' in this manner is like saying 'Americans'. There's nothing like a consistent ideology among Redditors. It'd be different if you were listing specific sub-reddits.

Oh ok. "Not really what I've seen in places like America. While they are more libertarian-centric, they are most certainly card carrying left wingers. So, for instance, there was MASSIVE support in favor of Bernie Sanders in this recent election among them, while still holding their views on gun ownership."

You're wrong of course. Reddit is known for it's "hive-mind". That is, it often aligns positively or negatively to a number of issues with the same voice.

[Bisto]

It seems a very strange hypothetical scenario where the only available defense is lethal defense. For example, if you had a gun, which is the main weapon that offers lethal defense, then your options include threatening to use it on the criminal and actually using it non-lethally on an arm or a leg and attempting to disable them.

Indeed it's an odd example, but hopefully it got to the heart of the matter.

However, it is my view that a criminal trying to beat up your family does not validate shooting them four times in the chest, for example.

In general, the answer to your question is that I do not agree that the use of lethal force is reasonable in such situations, because the value of the criminal's life outweighs the non-lethal harm done to people. Not to mention that it sets a terrible precedent of people thinking they are free to kill criminals whenever they feel threatened.

Well, thanks for your answer. I won't keep fuelling the fire of reactions to your view since there are enough posts about that (CMD's for instance).

[CMD]

I never said a beating wasn't a big deal.

You've been downplaying the very real threat that physical violence using only one's own body actually poses to the recipient on multiple occasions.

What I said was that the value of intelligent life is a bigger deal.

You appear to value the "intelligent" life of the person who's currently dishing out the beating over the life of the one who's receiving said beating.

[rogue06]

It seems a very strange hypothetical scenario where the only available defense is lethal defense. For example, if you had a gun, which is the main weapon that offers lethal defense, then your options include threatening to use it on the criminal and actually using it non-lethally on an arm or a leg and attempting to disable them. However, it is my view that a criminal trying to beat up your family does not validate shooting them four times in the chest, for example.

In general, the answer to your question is that I do not agree that the use of lethal force is reasonable in such situations, because the value of the criminal's life outweighs the non-lethal harm done to people. Not to mention that it sets a terrible precedent of people thinking they are free to kill criminals whenever they feel threatened.

There is a reason that folks trained to use firearms, especially handguns, are not taught to try to shoot someone in the arm or leg. In the hands of all but a tiny fraction of people they are not very accurate and in a situation where you are being attacked the vast majority of people are even less accurate with them.

The point is that most people often even miss hitting the center of mass, often by a couple of feet. Trying to hit rapidly moving parts like hands or legs is a recipe for disaster and best left for movies and TV shows where the heroes are capable of the most astounding shots conceivable.

[Terraceth]

It seems a very strange hypothetical scenario where the only available defense is lethal defense. For example, if you had a gun, which is the main weapon that offers lethal defense, then your options include threatening to use it on the criminal and actually using it non-lethally on an arm or a leg and attempting to disable them.

1) Shooting someone in the arm or leg can very frequently be lethal; indeed, shooting someone anywhere in the body is potentially lethal. An arm or leg is less likely to be lethal than hitting them in the chest, but to dismiss it as "non-lethal" is stupid.
2) More importantly, it's much harder to hit an arm or leg. The reason people aim for the chest isn't because it's the most lethal place to shoot (I believe the head is actually better if you're going for a kill shot), but because when shooting, you are often not going to hit exactly what you are shooting at. Shooting at the chest means that if you don't quite hit what you're shooting for, you have a much higher chance of hitting their body somewhere because it's the center of the body. If you shoot at an arm and leg, not only is it harder to hit, it also means if you miss the arm or leg you're not going to hit anything. Depending on the situation, you can actually have a better chance of hitting an arm or leg if you shoot at their chest than if you actually shot at their arm or leg.

However, it is my view that a criminal trying to beat up your family does not validate shooting them four times in the chest, for example.

Why? It is still very possible for a fatally wounded person to kill hurt or even kill someone else before they actually die. Not to mention that in the short amount of time this all elapses in, it is not easy to perfectly determine if your shots have hit and where they have hit and what effect they have had, so shooting multiple times ensures that you have accomplished your objective.

In general, the answer to your question is that I do not agree that the use of lethal force is reasonable in such situations, because the value of the criminal's life outweighs the non-lethal harm done to people.

This is the sort of thing that sounds great in the abstract, but the problem is that you frequently cannot determine until after the situation has been resolved whether the amount of harm that would be done to people would be non-lethal or not.

[Starlight]

As for using a weapon to threaten, that happens all the time and it can certainly be effective, but there are plenty of situations where simply threatening the use of force is not enough. It really depends on the circumstance.

For example, if someone is on top of someone else and they're beating the ever living crap out of them, chances are they're not even going to hear you or see that you have a gun. Waving a gun around yelling "I've got a gun and I'm not afraid to use it" in that instance is just a waste of precious seconds that the person taking the beating might very well not have.

It kind of shocks me the way you guys talk about these extremely hypothetical scenarios as if you face them every other week... Rogue's insane delusion that he needs his gun to protect his family... you all discussing highly unlikely hypothetical scenarios as if they were some sort of serious threat that you really needed to take seriously. Either you guys live in some sort of horrific post-apocalyptic hellscape where gangs of marauders roam the streets and thus a gun is vital for self-defense... or much more likely I think is that you're just all delusionally paranoid and absolutely kidding yourselves about the seriousness of the threat and dwelling in fear that is purely a construction of your own minds and completely lacking any sense of reality about the sheer improbability of any of these things ever, ever, ever, happening to you.

Not a single person I know has ever been "beaten up" even once in their entire life. That's just not a thing that happens often. Because it is such a rare event, no normal person spends time thinking about how they would prevent it happening, or believes they need a gun to protect their family in case it happened, any more than any normal person spends time worrying about how they would respond to a meteor crashing into their neighborhood. Obsessing over the possibility of being beaten up (and to the point of death at that) strikes me as a sign that a person needs medication for mental illness as they would seem to have paranoid delusions out of all proportion to actual reality and probability. Now, of course, it's theoretically possible that where you live is such a hellish place that you need guns for self-defense to save you and your family from the roaming hordes of zombies criminals, in which case move somewhere else ASAP. But, in practice, when I look at the US gun statistics I see that actually a family with a gun in the house is many times more likely to have an accident with it or use it for a suicide than they ever are to use it in self-defense against those virtually completely imaginary criminals who are on the prowl waiting to attack the family. So, because the threat is imaginary, the "solution" of a gun makes the family demonstrably less safe. (A similar issue arises with the mostly-imaginary fear about it being dangerous for children to walk alone - parents driving their children to school to 'protect' them from all the imagined predators cause more children to die in car accidents, because cars are dangerous, than child-snatching predators ever did.) So it seems like anti-anxiety medication would be the better solution to the fear of imaginary violence that seems rampant in this thread.

P.S. An analogy I've just thought of is that a person carrying a gun around to protect themselves from all the imaginary people about to beat them up is like a person who insists on always wearing a hat with a lightening rod on it in order to protect themselves from a lightening strike, except stupider because the gun is actually dangerous to themselves whereas with the lightening rod hat they merely look silly. A person who is genuinely that scared of highly improbable things happening to them should probably spend their life cowering in a fetal ball barricaded in their home.

[Adrift]

It kind of shocks me the way you guys talk about these extremely hypothetical scenarios

Everything shocks you on this forum because you're the one who lives in cuckooland. You're the one who is wrong about almost everything all of the time. You're the one who has crazy discussions with your weird friends about things that most normal people would find aberrant and abhorrent. You've surrounded yourself with crazy people in your own Twilight Zone community on your island nation, and then think the rest of the world is crazy when you come to this forum. You've never known a single person who's been beaten up? Seriously? Come on man. New Zealand ain't' that small. Dude, you. are. the. delusional one. Seriously.

And what is with your weird hat analogies? They are some of the dumbest analogies I've ever heard anyone on this forum make.

[Sea of red]

Everything shocks you on this forum because you're the one who lives in cuckooland. You're the one who is wrong about almost everything all of the time. You're the one who has crazy discussions with your weird friends about things that most normal people would find aberrant and abhorrent. You've surrounded yourself with crazy people in your own Twilight Zone community on your island nation, and then think the rest of the world is crazy when you come to this forum. You've never known a single person who's been beaten up? Seriously? Come on man. New Zealand ain't' that small. Dude, you. are. the. delusional one. Seriously.

And what is with your weird hat analogies? They are some of the dumbest analogies I've ever heard anyone on this forum make.

I find some of the stuff to be pretty funny honestly. He is extreme no doubt about it but I think he helps balance out the extremism from the right-wing side.

[Cow Poke]

He has no regard for his own intelligent life, apparently.

And what does his regard for intelligent life say about a father who kills his 12 year old handicapped daughter because he feels sorry for her, as was the case in Canada a number of years ago? Because she didn't live up to SL's view of intelligence, is he okay with it?

Would SL defend a Down's Syndrome child against attack? Or would he allow the attack to continue because the child isn't "intelligent".....

There are all kinds of holes in his mindset.

All of which support my suspicion that he's just here messing with people - he has no integrity.

[Cow Poke]

There is a reason that folks trained to use firearms, especially handguns, are not taught to try to shoot someone in the arm or leg. In the hands of all but a tiny fraction of people they are not very accurate and in a situation where you are being attacked the vast majority of people are even less accurate with them.

The point is that most people often even miss hitting the center of mass, often by a couple of feet. Trying to hit rapidly moving parts like hands or legs is a recipe for disaster and best left for movies and TV shows where the heroes are capable of the most astounding shots conceivable.

And in every single class I've ever taught or been a part of or knew about, it wasn't about KILLING the assailant - it was about stopping him. If he (the assailant) got dead in the process, that's the sad truth.

[Sea of red]

All of which support my suspicion that he's just here messing with people - he has no integrity.

I think he is partly messing with people. All he has to do is start threads and people freak out and become so upset they can't see straight. I know from experience that people misunderstand things on here very easily and often assume the worst in their opponents, which is what I think he uses for his own entertainment.