Smoking guy likely had it coming, its definitely not to be taken lightly to be pumping gas and smoking. I won’t lie that i did enjoy seeing him get sprayed, but it seemed rather unnecessary.
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technically the correct answer
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The legal system is fun like that. It’s not the actual objective situation that matters in determining if wrong doing is taking place but rather the feelings of the people involved. Cops use this line of reasoning all the time when they shoot people. Let’s normalize that idea shall we?
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Fair points, all. It would be interesting to know if there’s more backstory, to find out why attendant guy got so bloody frustrated. But it’s the interwebs. Backstory not included. 
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Definitely, i doubt i’ll learn what the backstory was for this incident. Seems like spraying the shit out of someone and the inside of their car with flame retardant as excessive but i hope this video is a learning moment for those that might be inclined to smoke at a pump though. Don’t be that guy.
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don’t be any of those guys… I sense a trend.
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I’d bet that those aren’t just rules from the owner, but like “all employees must wash hands,” are actual laws.
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"You mean I can’t smoke here just because it MIGHT cause a horrific explosion and not because it would GUARANTEE a horrific explosion??
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I don’t see anyone saying that it is the LIGHTING of the cigarettes that poses the most risk to gas/petrol stations; naked flames are the worst type of naked…
Note 1: The smoker was stupid.
Note 2: The attendant did not solve that problem peacefully.
So, two selfish asshats nearly made the day worse in their own way. Yay.
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worse safe vs worse unsafe
Lawful evil meets Chaotic neutral
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I think it would be hard, at this point, to “normalize” something that has been part of English legal tradition since before the first studies of English law were published in the early 1600s. I also don’t see how eliminating intent as an element of a crime (and thereby changing every accident into a crime) would solve the problem of police brutality, or give the police fewer things to brutalize people for.
It’s quite possible that the attendant thought, “This guy is being an asshole, I’m going to show him” and went to get a fire extinguisher. It’s also quite possible the attendant thought, “Oh my god, oh my god, this guy is going to blow us up. What the fuck am I supposed to do, this is fucking crazy. Fuck it, I’m going to have to use the fire extinguisher.”
I think it’s unreasonable to conclude that the attendant was being selfish or an asshole. We might say he was uninformed about the risks of smoking as a gas pump, but I think he was uninformed in an awfully reasonable way, since “everyone knows” that smoking around gas pumps is dangerous. Or, even if he wasn’t uninformed, he might have reasonably believed that a person who would flout the consensus that it’s dangerous to smoke around a gas pump might also light up another one around a gas pump, which could cause fire or an explosion.
I just want people to imagine a situation where another person is doing something you honestly believe might cause immanent death for themselves and others, including you. You try to point out the danger by appealing to the fact that pretty much everyone agrees what they are doing is stupid and dangerous but they insist on continuing on their deadly course of action, directly threatening your life. This is not an unreasonable response.
If I sit here and enjoy watching the video because I don’t like smoking and so I want to see smokers suffer, then, by all means, call me an asshole for doing that.
I don’t like the enlightened middle of blaming both parties here. The smoker was a dangerous idiot, the attendant behaved well within the bounds of reasonability (admitting that he might not have actually been reasonable, but might have rather been vindictive).
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This is where that old cowboy proverb comes into play: better safe than sorry.
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I’m an “enlightened middle” (whatever that means, i’m not gunna try to read into that) for thinking that both parties were unreasonable?
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Crime? You may want to step back from the legal viewpoint for a minute and think about this in less pedantic terms. Sometimes the law has nothing to do with right or wrong. It’s just the law. Law isn’t justice and it has nothing to do with who was being an asshole. You can retreat in to the semantics of legaleze but that doesn’t excuse the behaviour of either party here.
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That’s fair enough, I tend to think legally when I see the word “assault,” but I guess that’s idiosyncratic. I think in this case the law and reasonability overlap. If the attendant genuinely thought that the smoker was putting everyone’s lives at risk by smoking by a gas pump (which I think is a thing a reasonable person might think) then their actions were totally justified. I understand that if you are convinced that no person who was genuinely intensely anxious would behave the way the attendant did then you’d think the attendant was just being an asshole. I think people behave in a lot of different ways.
I’m imagining a world in which smoking next to a gas pump is actually an incredibly dangerous ticking timebomb that might cause a fatal explosion at any moment. In that world I think it’s definitely reasonable to use a fire extinguisher (or some other means) to stop someone from doing it if you couldn’t think of any other way to stop them (or even if you could but the other way would take significantly longer).
I also think it’s reasonable for the attendant to believe that’s the world they are living in. I even think it’s reasonable to argue that is the world we are living in (since, as I said above, I have no reason to think that a person is willing to smoke at a gas station wouldn’t also be willing to light another cigarette at a gas station, and lighting cigarettes around gas fumes is dangerous as hell). If I were in that situation I’d probably think, “Wow, I hope he doesn’t pull out a lighter and blow himself (and maybe me) up, but it would be wrong for me to intervene beyond asking him nicely to stop!” but I think actually doing something about it has something to be said for it.
Yeah, I’m being a jerk. I’m deriding the idea that the most reasonable position (in an arbitrary situation) is to say there is blame on bother sides, or that the truth is somewhere in the middle. Obviously in any given situation the truth might be in the middle and blame might be on bother sides. I don’t think it’s fair to guess with any surety that the attendant overreacted, but that is just, like, my opinion.
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