Imagine a couple of gun control advocates are traveling through a southern state with strong stand-your-ground laws. They’re on vacation and their children are with them. They get a hotel room for the night and a responsible gun owner criminally negligent sociopath in the next room accidentally criminally negligently fires his gun through the wall between the rooms and shoots one of the gun control advocates’ children.
Imagine that one of the parents runs out into the hall on the way to get help just as the responsible gun owner criminally negligent sociopath comes into the hall with the gun still in his hand. Suppose the parent thinks the maniac is going to try to murder the whole family so they try to disarm the responsible gun owner criminally negligent sociopath.
Now, what if the responsible gun owner criminally negligent sociopath happens to get fatally shot with his own gun during the struggle? More questions follow below the fold.
What are the legal ramifications? Do the authorities charge the parent with murder? Homicide? Manslaughter? Nothing at all in this strong stand-your-ground state? If there is a trial, how does that play out?
What about the gun lovers who were so quick to defend George Zimmerman and Michael David Dunn? How do they react?
There are responsible gun owners. I know them. I live with them in my community. But let’s not kid ourselves. How many not-so-responsible gun owners do we all know or know of? How many are out there that we do not know or know of?
Now, if you’ve made the same assumptions I’d probably be likely to make, you may have assumed that the gun control advocates were liberals, maybe with a good chance of them not being from the south. And you might have assumed it was the father who struggled with the responsible gun owner criminally negligent sociopath. What about my exclusive use of male pronouns to describe the responsible gun owner criminally negligent sociopath? How do permutations of these variables affect your answer?
Did you, like I almost certainly would have, assume both the mother and father are white? What if they are Latino/a? Asian? Black?
What if the father is black and the mother is white?
And let’s say the responsible gun owner criminally negligent sociopathh was a southern white rightwinger with a long history of gun fetishism and brandishing “long guns” in all kinds of stores, restaurants, and across from schools. For freedom.
How would the gun lovers react in the scenario with a black father and white mother? Or, say, a white father, and a black mother who is the one who engages in the struggle with the responsible gun owner criminally negligent sociopath?
And what if the responsible gun owner criminally negligent sociopath wasn't a southern white rightwing man? Female? Latino/a? Asian? Black? A Muslim of any race/ethnicity? Liberal? Atheist activist? A union organizer?
What about the courts? What about the responding law enforcement officers?
What if the parents aren't necessarily a couple of nice traditional opposite-sex USAmericans?
Is something like this more or less bound to happen sooner or later? Has it already happened?
How do you think you’d feel about all this if it did happen or has happened (besides feeling generally shitty about it all)?
What should we be doing to avoid situations like this?
10:44 AM PT: Apologies for all the questions and complete lack of answers. I just want to hear what people think about whatever question or questions here they have an interest in.
9:57 PM PT: Yes, these questions are simplistic but what does it say about us that we have such difficulty acknowledging the reality underlying them?