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Another deadly shooting? Trigger happy security guards?
- Thread starter WillEH
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seconded...
As far as I am concerned you try to rob someone or someplace with a firearm your life is forfeit.
Once you commit a violent crime such as robbery or murder, or assault, as far as I'm concerned you lose all rights. If somebody kills you, too bad. If somebody captures you and beats you to a pulp, too bad.
Once you initiate aggression you are done. There is no recourse unless somebody is merciful and subdues you.
Once you initiate aggression you are done. There is no recourse unless somebody is merciful and subdues you.
Unintended consequences. Bad guy pulls a gun, citizen#1 with permit to carry a gun pulls gun to shoot bad guy. Citizen#2, because they are not trained and are hyped to the gills on adrenaline, does not fully comprehend the situation and shoots at citizen#1 thinking they are a bad guy. At which point it becomes a general shoot out.
Besides.... when you have a population that is armed the people who get shot are the domestic partners (about 50% of gun homicides occur during domestic disputes), other family and good friends (about 25% of gun homicides), and acquaintances (about 12% of gun homicides). The remaining 12% are people killed during the commission of another crime.
These stats come from King County Washington and are typical of American experience, and I know them because I offer them a lot on these threads. I will go and find the link - again - or you can just do a search on my name and "guns" on these forums and save me the time.
+1
If there was some way to detain the gunmen with zero risk to them, the security guard, or the public, then I'd be very much for it. Where that's not possible (i.e. most of the time), the safety of the gunmen should be the lowest priority.
Imagine how you'd feel if someone you cared for was injured, because security staff (or police) didn't want to risk injuring the gunmen.
Credit to the security guard, but that said. How scary is it living somewhere that armed security guards are a necessity? (And not just a token old man with a sidearm, but obviously a competent marksman).
Yes. Because it is obviously much safer for you loved ones (crouched under the food court tables) to let highly trained security guards get into a shoot out with the untrained bad guys, than to just let the bad guys walk out with the goods.
Concern for the public I can understand. Concern for the bad guys waving the guns; much, much less so. Was it luck that no one was hurt in this shoot out? Or competence on the part of the security staff? You seem to be assuming if the guard had done nothing, they would have left without anyone being hurt. But we have no way of knowing that, and the guard - making a split second decision - certainly didn't. The guy who was shot in the back was facing the other way pointing his gun a second earlier. I can't imagine anyone thinking "I'll leave him off, hopefully he won't shoot us".
How well trained are the bad guys? Wouldn't the safest thing be for them to not pull their guns out at all?
....
Even highly trained police officers, who train a lot more than most guards, can't guarantee that they will hit their intended target, especially when that target is shooting - to kill - back at them. How many innocent people were between the shooters? How many "loved ones" were behind the people being shot at? How many civilians were on the other side of the walls that stray bullets could pierce?
You are correct ... there is no guarantees that these bad guys would not have starting shooting regardless. But when a shoot-out starts, you can guarantee there will be a lot of stray bullets. It is only good luck that in this case no one else was hurt. You can look at other places where security guards are not armed at all... and you know what? In those places the number of armed robberies, with the potential for innocent people getting shot, is far fewer than in places where the guards are armed. So... it appears that it is safer to have unarmed guards than armed guards. Go figure....
"Internet Cafe" could have video slots that pay off. There are many of these flying under the legal radar down south. Not sure, but this could be why the security was necessary.
Yeah, DRT: Dead Right There! Good riddance. Once less predator stalking the streets.
Keeping in mind that under current conditions and laws, for every criminal currently shot dead - about 8 family members and friends are being shot dead during domestic disputes ... because the guns are in the house and easily available during an argument.
That stats show that the victims of the gun carnage in US are not "predators" (to use your word) but family and friends.
I was speaking of the predator robbing the store. I wasn't trying to make an anti-gun political issue out of the proper use of deadly force in an armed confrontation. And of course lacking a disclosure of your sources, I have no way of verifying your numbers, so I have to dismiss them out of hand.
Any time you have a bunch of people claiming that shooting someone is the right thing to do, then it has already become a political issue about guns.
Link to my numbers.
From that report: p. 13- "In King County there were 43 firearm suicides, criminal homicides, or unintentional deaths involving agun kept in the home for every 1 case of homicide for self-protection. Firearm deaths that occurred in King County homes involved friends or acquaintances 12 times as often as strangers."
Or in other words, for every case of "shot the criminal dead" 43 other people were killed by guns. From other stats in the report, just over half are suicides. If we assume that a suicidal person will find a way regardless to kill themselves (this is in fact a faulty assumption, but then again this is a tech forum) that means that 20 people are being killed for every criminal shot in self defence. Note the figure, 12 times as many family, friends, and acquaintances are shot dead than strangers.
On the same page of the report "Seattle and Vancouver BC are nearly identical cities in terms of population demographics but have onefundamental difference; access to firearms, especially handguns. When compared to Vancouver BC, Seattle had a fivefold higher risk of handgun homicide" ... Vancouver is considered to be one of Canada's more dangerous cities. Seattle is not.
King County - Seattle runs below the US national average for firearm shootings.
Okay, well thanks for at least providing your source. You should always do that.
A security guard shot a would-be robber. That is, the security guard did his job. End of story. It's not a political issue. It's not a gun ownership issue. It's an example of someone not using his powers of choice wisely. This guy could have chosen to finish school, or chosen to study to learn a marketable skill, or chosen to not hang around with the sort of urban culture that encourages violent crime over personal achievement. But he didn't. He chose to rob a store, instead, and it went south on him very badly. I only hope his last few thoughts before he embarked on the celestial dirt nap were "man, did I ever screw up my life!"
With respect, you have no idea what his background was. If it's been printed somewhere, I'd be happy to read it. I mean that in all seriousness.
The security guard took a chance.... and they got lucky. That situation could have escalated beyond their control and instead of the guard being hailed a hero, he could be up on several homicide charges. Compare that to another thread on MR where an upset man is ripping apart a mobile phone store. Link with video. In this case the security guard just stands there and watches. Nobody gets hurt, nobody dies. No chance of an innocent bystander getting hit in a firefight gone south. In my opinion the "hero" is this 2nd guard, who exhibited patience and understood that in no circumstances is someone's life worth less than the value of some goods.
Once the robbers came into the establishment with guns, that changed the dynamics of use of force. In the reported scenario, I believe, the security guard had every right to stop the robbers from fleeing. This was not an unarmed robbery. One or more of the robbers could have easily turned and fired at the guard as he made his attempt to stop them.
Why should the guard try to stop them if they are leaving? Is his job to protect the patrons or to enforce the law? The robbers didn't get anything, so he isn't protecting any "stuff".
Wouldn't the smart thing have been to create the situation where the robbers leave with minimal risk to the patrons? By starting to shoot the guard guaranteed that the level of risk to the patrons escalated by making sure there were bullets whizzing around.
Couldn't have been much of a background if he decided to indulge in armed robbery. Educated people with productive paying jobs in general do NOT feel a need to try to take wealth away by force from someone else at the point of a gun.
And when you threaten an innocent person like that, when you're bringing the possibility of death or grave bodily harm to someone else who was just minding his or her own business, I'm sorry but you should expect similar force to be used against you to neutralize the threat.
As to your phone store link, did the guy draw a gun? No, he didn't. He was engaged in criminal destruction of private property but was not endangering the lives of people around hem. The security guard (actually it just looked a store employee and was probably unarmed, so your comparison is invalid) did the correct thing which was to call the police, and they came and took him away. Had the guy introduced a deadly weapon onto the scene, however, then you have a completely different scenario and the use of deadly force to eliminate the new grave threat would be both entirely justified and proper.
That may be your personal opinion, but you don't know. And -wow- are you making some interesting assumptions... lots of educated people fall into a life of crime in a system that often throws them into jail the 1st time they make mistake, and then makes it difficult to pursue a legitimate career afterwards. There are a few exceptions, of course, but once someone has entered the penal system (as opposed to programs that divert them into rehabilitation programs, educational programs, detox programs, etc) for the most part they are stuck on the fringes. We don't anything about that robber, so it is just as likely they had a college degree and got busted in the past for doing something stupid (as opposed to maliciously criminal) - or just having friends that were stupid; as to actually choosing to lead a life of crime. I agree that they need to bear the responsibility for their actions. It's just in my world the consequences are slightly less severe than, it seems, in your world. Plus in my world people are safer.
If that force has perfect aim... each and every time, maybe. And even then... I'd rather get at the root of the issue and try to create a situation where robbers are not carrying guns with them in the 1st place.
Good observation. Ask yourself... why did he not draw a gun?
The robbers (in the initial video) were there to rob people of their private property. Why did they need to bring guns?
They're both employees. Both have a duty to protect their clients. One makes sales as well, if they weren't in fact a guard.
One brings a gun to work... the other brings a phone. The bad guys know all this ahead of time, incidentally.
Sigh. Ok... whatever you say....
Well... we're just not going to agree on anything, except probably our choice of hardware vendor.
Let's just leave it at that, and I wish you all the best. Well... we're just not going to agree on anything, except probably our choice of hardware vendor.
You are probably right. I like living in a country where my chances of being shot to death is, iirc, about a 1/10 of the average American. And yet we still score very badly compared to the rest of the industrialized world. And you think that you have constitutional right to shoot people. Despite the fact that bringing a gun to any current fight your constitution envisioned is equivalent to the revolutionaries in 1776 bringing broadswords to overthrow the Brits.
But we still like Macs... that is true.