To be fair, we need more notebooks.
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Notebooks?!?
It’s ON
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I disagree with that. Use of force is a last option, and needs to be proportional. So pulling a weapon on unarmed people is hardly ever justified.
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How about if two people have your daughter on her knees and are kicking her in the head?
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To clarify, did my daughter try to take their notebooks?
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How about that? It honestly doesn’t matter who it is. If there are two of us, against two people kicking, we kick them back. That’s what I meant by “proportional”. Pulling a gun would not be sporting/ethical. When I said “hardly ever justified”, I acknowledge that there are some exceptions, but normal hand-to-hand against untrained assailants is usually not going to be deadly.
In this case, it looks like the risk was mostly pulled hair and light scratching and bruises. Definitely not enough to warrant deadly force. Dislocate their shoulder and/or knee and they live to learn their lesson. I know that not everybody feels they can learn to fight, but IMO risking the taking of a life is a big responsibility and not to be done lightly.
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I’m reasonably certain that stopping a physical assault on a loved one is both morally and legally one of the few unambiguously permissible reasons to escalate the use of force.
But again, yes, context is everything. WTF happened that people are in a knock down, hair pulling physical altercation in a goddamned Walmart?
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It makes zero difference who picked up the notebook first - It is Walmart’s notebook until it is paid for. Look at it how you want, but no one’s property was being taken. It was a disagreement over a trivial matter that escalated, and escalation takes two parties. Reasonable people do not get into fights over things like this.
What I see looking at the video in slow-mo is two girls fighting over a note book (Pink shirt and black hoodie) with mom (brown stripped shirt) and extra mom (blue stripped shirt) trying to break it up. Gun-mom shows up and tries for about one second to stop the fight and then goes for her gun. It looks to me, that black hoodie girl has already let go of pink shirt girl’s hair and it is no longer a fight before anyone even notices gun-mom has gone Rambo. Essentially you have two girls fighting over a swing on the playground and gun-mom goes nuclear.
It was foolish pulling a gun in a close quarters crowd like that in anything short of a life or death situation, especially with kids around. Anything can happen when you pull a weapon. She endangered every person visible in that video not to mention those in the adjacent aisles. The person that is carrying the gun has the most responsibility to act in a reasonable manner.
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It’s a notebook. Its a packet of papers. If it were two kids quarreling in the back seat of your car, you wouldn’t accept, “but he started it!” as an alibi, why should that carry any weight this time?
Raising the stakes this much doesn’t put her in the right, it just makes her an asshole. (With crosshairs on her forehead to some other “good guy with a gun”)
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That’s exactly why you can’t be trusted with a gun.
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The gentle woman with the gun was Walmart Security. I know it’s hard to tell because she “don’t need no stinking badges.”
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Nope.
The general rule is that you can use force proportional to that being used against you (or in defence of another). You don’t get to fire a pump action shotgun into someone’s face because they bumped into your kid in the line for the swing.
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“Clean up on aisle three… and four… and it looks like someone caught a ricochet in the disabled parking zone.”
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… and people wonder why the US police are so easy to escalate to violence when they e.g. start tasering stroke victims or kill unarmed children.
The “extreme violence is the solution to any problem” reasoning isn’t law enforcement specific but just an exaggerated attitude already prevalent in the general US public.
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The woman with the gun - everything about her posture and behaviour screams coward - probably why she was carrying a gun. She was not going to be dislocating any knees.
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The icing on the cake would have them fighting over the last box of ammo.
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Nothing like Titanic then?
Kids these days…Now a vinyl cape jawa, that might be worth fighting for.l
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