Myers, who says he’s a licensed security guard, was sitting in his car Wednesday to conduct “overwatch” while his son trains because “he has seen numerous crimes occur” in the parking lot, according to the probable cause statement.
The surveillance footage shows Myers approach the teens with a gun in his hand, point it directly at them and then move quickly toward them, police said. One of the boys pulls a BB gun out of his pocket, lays it on the ground and extends his arms out as if to show he has nothing in his hands, police said in the document.
“Immediately after … it is clear that he has been shot because he abruptly jerks his body away from Myers and falls to the ground,” the document says.
What do you expect them to say? That they’re proud of this guy? Even though he’s clearly a madman?
I know IRL gun nuts, and none of them would identify with this person. Also, none of them subscribe to the fallacy/straw-man of a “good guy with a gun”. The ones who carry concealed would remind you that they are carrying for themselves, not for you. If you find an active shooter in a mall, you can count on them… to run away.
Skillful gun nuts know that shooting defensively is never worth the legal hassle unless it saves your life (or a family member’s life).
The shooter in this article is nothing like any of the gun nuts I’ve ever met. This shooter is another Kyle Rittenhouse, someone anxious for a chance to kill a person and get away with it under the excuse of defense.
I could be considered a gun nut myself but I will not pretend that this behavior is some abnormal outlier. There are plenty, plenty of American gun owners who think like this man does, they just haven’t had the opportunity for their malformed amygdala to get someone killed.
You mention Rittenhouse but he’s a gun culture hero. Zimmerman and the like, all heroes. People who get to use their gun to lay down the law like the Earp posse are generally seen as heroes when they don’t completely fuck up like this guy, they’re not shunned as short-sighted and reckless.
A set of excellent counterpoints. I’d also point out that “gun nut” is quite different than “2nd Amendment nutter”. You’re into guns. Maybe the mechanics, maybe the design aspect, maybe you enjoy shooting as a hobby, maybe all of the above and more. That’s fine, if you’re also a responsible gun owner who secures their weapon, does not leave it loaded when off your person, does not point it at something they don’t intend to destroy, and so on and so forth.
A “2nd Amendment nutter” thinks the 2nd Amendment absolves them of responsibility.
Also important to note the difference between all varieties of nuts and acorns, which are natural predators of gun nuts.
At least the ones that are cops…
https://www.nbcnews.com/news/us-news/video-shows-florida-deputy-repeatedly-shoot-man-thinking-falling-acorn-rcna138829
So, you know responsible gun owners - note I didn’t mention them. I’m happy they exist. But you don’t know every gun owner, or even a significant fraction of them, and if you believe nobody with a gun subscribes to the “good guy with a gun” fallacy then you’re delusional.
Yes, that’s what I expect. And then for the shooter to appear on podcasts and political rallies
Maybe not, but when they resist any and all legislation to control access to guns, don’t support mandatory training, red flag laws, etc, they accept that people like this can legally get them. That’s an acceptable tradeoff for them. Maybe your gun nut friends support reasonable legislation, it’s possible I suppose.
Ultimately this is no true scotsman territory I think.
Wow, tell me you don’t know anything about the Kyle Rittenhouse story without saying it directly, lmao.
I love how the Rittenhouse story has become such an effective litmus test to easily distinguish between honest left-wingers/progressives, and ones who are either gullible enough to swallow the narrative that is clearly disproven by all of the evidence (up to and including publicly-available direct video evidence) and testimony, or malicious and dishonest enough to cling to said narrative out of solidarity for their political ‘team’, knowing that it is categorically false.
All Kyle had to do to not have any of that happen is not show up. The odds of that dramatically increased when he decided to show up with a gun where he knew a bunch of people, some of whom would would be armed, would be out in force and opposing his views.
Much like a lone women wandering late at night through a crime-ridden part of town getting raped, he may not have done anything wrong, but his bad judgement led to the expected consequences. And before we talk about defending his workplace, there’s a reason many places say to not try to stop robberies - the insurance claim is far cheaper than the cost of most outcomes of trying to stop the thefts, even the relatively positive outcomes.
Victim blaming.
Open carry state, nobody gave a fuck that he was there while armed. He showed up while obviously visibly armed, and was there walking around while obviously visibly armed, for hours, with zero negative reaction from anyone. He gave some degree of medical assistance to at least 8 people there, according to the trial, and handed out water bottles on request, while walking around yelling “medic” and “friendly”.
Nobody attacked him for “his views”–he wasn’t even counter-protesting (and literally stated he supported BLM in an interview, to boot)! Literally every action he took there, before he was forced to defend his left not once, but three times, was objectively altruistic/benevolent. Hell, we have evidence he was cleaning graffiti off a high school earlier that same day.
The ONLY reason things started to go south is because he put out a particular dumpster fire that happened to be set by a literal homicidal maniac (someone literally released that day from a hospital, where he was held for a recent suicide attempt), whose horrific plan was to wheel said flaming dumpster into a nearby gas station (want to take a few guesses why he wanted to bring a big fireball into a gas station?), and said maniac decided to scream death threats at him (as well as calling him and a few other people (all of whom were white, far as we know) the n-word) for putting out his fire, and later, LITERALLY tried to make good on those death threats.
If someone else had put out that dumpster fire, they would have been attacked instead. This argument is absolutely idiotic. What, are you going to try and tell me that putting out a fire is some sort of aggressive or provocative act?
Kyle never aggressed on anyone, and his FIRST response to EVERY act of aggression against him, was literally TO FLEE. If any of the people he ended up shooting literally LET HIM RUN AWAY, they’d all be alive/not injured. But they INSISTED on attempting their murder, and chased him down, until they had him cornered, and then tried to kill him. He prevented them from succeeding and protected his life. End of story.
You’d imply it was her fault by saying that her presence is the reason it happened, lol.
Bad judgment to put out fires, okay, lol. That’s the lesson everyone should learn from this, right? Don’t put out a fire with an unknown cause, just in case it happened to be
Assuming all of this is true, and I’m not saying it isn’t, how does that in any way refute what I said? Sure, call it victim blaming if you want. I’m very careful when I have to go into bad parts of town at bad times, and avoid them altogether when I can because, even if I’m not doing anything wrong, that’s cold comfort when I’m lying in a hospital or a morgue. So far it’s worked pretty well for me. I suppose that makes me a perpetual victim. Sure, it shouldn’t have to be that way, but I don’t think my being mugged or murdered is going to tip the scales and I don’t have any great desire to be a poster child.
It sounds really similar to what I teach my kids about driving - it doesn’t matter if you’re right but someone else crashed into you, you’re still the one injured or dead
And if someone tries to run you off the road for no good reason, and your swerve to avoid them results in them missing you and crashing into the median and dying, it’d be pretty stupid to blame your presence for their death.
Doesn’t make jaywalking on a racetrack a brilliant idea.
Jaywalking is a crime, and a race track is a place that is specifically not meant to have pedestrians on it, ever.
Ridiculous, terrible analogy.
That’s a pretty cool story.