reckless endangerment?
So, yesterday, a man robbed the Verizon store on White Bridge road (and today, appears to have committed suicide). From yesterday’s story on the robbery:
Authorities said the man held up five store employees and two customers inside, and when he came out into the parking lot, he held up a third customer.
He didn’t realize that customer also had a gun. Police said the customer pulled a handgun and fired several shots at the robber.
A News 2 crew on the scene said four shots were fired in the parking lot as the suspect was fleeing.
No one was struck.
The customer missed his attacker but possibly hit the getaway car, 2005 or 2006 silver Ford Escape SUV.
Investigators said the victim did have a handgun carry permit and according to police, was within his rights to pull his gun in self defense.
Can anyone familiar with the law explain this to me? Is it state-specific? How is discharging a weapon in city limits at a person that is fleeing (i.e. not constituting a threat to the shooter, or anyone else) not reckless endangerment or something? I was under the impression that in most scenarios, shooting at someone that presents no immediate threat was illegal. That issue aside, his choice strikes me as wantonly irresponsible — that area is extraordinarily crowded. He could have hit any number of innocent bystanders.
WKRN’s article seems to be framing this debate in the context of carry permits and where it’s legal to have a firearm:
Where it’s appropriate to have a gun has been a hot topic for lawmakers in recent weeks.
The legislature recently approved a bill that will allow handguns in restaurants that serve alcohol, as long as the person has a carry permit.
Mitch Shelton does not support the legislation.
“You’re at a family restaurant… No guns should be allowed in a place like that, no way, shape or form,” he told News 2.
When it comes to self-defense, Giles said it’s a different issue.
“That’s a horse of a different color. When it’s defense, that’s a different story,” he said. “You pick and choose where you go. Hopefully it’s a safe place.”
This seems to me to be missing the point entirely. This has nothing to do with whether or not he should have had a gun. It has everything to do with whether or not he should have discharged it — and it shocks me that his actions are being considered “within his rights”. What am I missing?
Preach it, brotha. I think watching that all go down yesterday made me seriously rethink my apathy regarding gun issues.
Well, the disclaimer I should go ahead and lay down (because I know it’s gonna be the first assumption made) is that I am actually fairly pro gun rights.
Honestly I think the whole “gun control” debate would be a little more progressive if it focused less on when and where people are allowed to have guns and more on prosecuting people that are fucking idiots with them.
Absolutely. I was thinking about it yesterday and how it wasn’t a situation where he was carrying illegally, so stricter permit laws probably wouldn’t have helped. The process he went through to obtain the permit was probably completely legit. But the second he fired it into a busy street, there should’ve been repercussions–the very least of which should be losing the permit.
Agreed. Now that we know the whole story, this man was not acting responsibly in any shape, form, or fashion. Discharging a weapon at a fleeing attacker is bad enough, but doing it so recklessly, jeez. Way to give us all a black eye.
The first question you have to ask, before recklessness or even negligence becomes an issue, is who was harmed? If there isn’t an injury, there isn’t a cause of action, and therefore the degree of his breach of duty is a moot point. I’m not sure the shooter’s actions in this case constitute recklessness, either. According to the report, he hit the vehicle his assailant was using to flee the scene of the crime. As the police pointed out, his actions were within the bounds of the law; if the shooter wasn’t supposed to use his CC to fire at a man who was attempting to rob him, under what circumstances should he be allowed? The shooter is *always* responsible for where their bullet strikes, and if someone else was hit it would have been easy to sue the shooter for damages under a negligence theory (which is a much lower standard than recklessness). In order to prove recklessness, the shooter would have needed to fire much more wildly, and in blatant disregard for public safety, than it appears he actually did.
Personally, I could get a CC, but I don’t, because I’m not that good a shot with a handgun. I also think I would have stopped firing after the assailant got in his car and started driving off, but that’s a judgment call, and the burden of responsibility can end up very very great. What if I fire and miss? What if I fire and strike someone else? What if I don’t fire and he turns the car on me, or starts firing back at me with a weapon that was concealed in it? What if I don’t fire, and he ends up killing someone else later who is unarmed? Is the area crowded? Are my skills sufficient to avoid harming others? All of these questions must be answered instantly, under stress, and in time to react.
It does make me wonder if we should require more testing and evaluation of CC permit holders. Keep in mind, though, that whenever we start regulating a Constitutional right in this manner, we run the risk of creating a system that is unjustly prejudicial and discriminatory. Who do we need more protection against – criminals or CC permit holders? Do the majority of CC permit holders already take their responsibility seriously enough? I don’t necessarily think this guy is a bad example. It’s certainly not something I would have felt comfortable trying, but he seems to have carried it off rather well.
Well, that’s the first question you have to ask if you’re considering criminal charges of assault with a deadly weapon or something, I don’t know? Recklessness and negligence is what I’m talking about here.
Minor, but important quibble here: the authorities said he was within “his rights”, not the law. I don’t know what the law actually says here, since IANAL (or even a LS). Obviously they didn’t charge him with anything, so I’m assuming what he did actually is not illegal. If the law does indeed state that what he did was legal, I’d have to say I disagree with it. Societies don’t often (or in my mind, ought not to) make laws that are subjective or selective in their application depending on the skill of the subject. Michael Schumacher doesn’t get a pass for driving 120 mph down I-40 just because he happens to be particularly good at it. Nor is the outcome ever a sufficient justification for a risk. As I understand it, “reckless endangerment” and other offenses of their ilk exist to embody the legal equivalent of “oh my god, you fucking idiot, you could have gotten someone killed”.
As for the rest of your comment, you seem to be operating again on the assumption that I’m advocating for any stricter CC laws, which I’m not. I’m simply making the case that this strikes me as a pretty clear case of recklessness (based on my admittedly limited information about what happened). I was under the impression that there are other jurisdictions where discharging a firearm like this had at least one necessary prerequisite: a clear and present danger to a life (the shooter’s, or someone else’s). Maybe I’m wrong, or maybe that’s just not the case in TN, which seems fucked up.
Let’s review some hypotheticals about this scenario, and the risks involved (to others, mind you, taken on behalf of the shooter, who was not in any physical or material danger): he hit the door of a van. Had he missed — a clear possibility, even for a very talented shooter — a moving target with only a few feet between “door of van” and “clear open space and whatever is behind the van from the shooter’s angle”. It doesn’t take a wild imagination to suppose what would have absorbed that bullet had it not been the door of that van. You could perhaps suppose that this shooter calmly and rationally surveyed the landscape and made the judgement call that nothing/no-one behind the van was at risk of being hit. I’d also like a hit of the crackpipe you’re suckin on. Now, what if he had hit the driver? What exactly does that help? We now have a wounded, incapacitated or dead driver behind the wheel of a van that was already driving fast and erratically from a crime scene. Great, way to go, Tex. What if he had disabled the van instead of the driver? (hint: disabling a vehicle does not always make it safer, or make it stop).
Compare and contrast this to the risk or consequences of not shooting at the van: … uh, the suspect in the van drives away, and is apprehended later, which in fact is what happened. Horror of horrors. The most hilarious point about his firearm discharge is that, surprise, it didn’t do jack to change things. The jackass with the gun just made things worse (making a dangerous situation more dangerous — and in this case, not for him, incidentally — for others).
Society of course is always a complicated network of negotiated decisions of risk/benefit between rational thinking beings. I’m not proposing that the risk involved there is something we can just legislate away. But there are some clear boundaries that seem worth considering — for example: you don’t risk taking another life (perp included) if there’s no clear and present danger of another life being taken. Frankly I think it’s a bit presumptuous of you to assume that the risk here (needlessly killing a bystander) is something you feel is within your right to “try”. If you had been in his position and had “tried” and failed, perhaps killing an innocent bystander, do you still have the same casual shrug of indifference? “Oh well, good try, let’s go grab a brew”?
So am I. My analysis above is based strictly on Tort. Criminal law is a completely different matter, which actually doesn’t have any application under the circumstances (at least in respect to the shooter).
You might disagree with it, but this is the entire purpose for a licensing system. It grants certain members of our society the right to exceed lawful limits of conduct, presumably because they have demonstrated enough skill and judgment to be trusted with that extra responsibility. For instance, far more people are killed every year by the conduct of reckless licensed drivers than reckless licensed CC holders, but rarely are there serious discussions of raising the standard of drivers license testing made with the same frequency and fervor with which we discuss regulating gun permits.
Furthermore, to use your example of speeding on the highways, police officers and some other emergency personnel are frequently allowed to break traffic laws because, 1) they are pursuing a public interest (such as responding to a grave emergency) that’s greater than the public interest in maintaining the speed limit, and 2) they’ve (supposedly) received special training in how to break those laws and still navigate the roadways with reasonable safety. This sort of exception *could* be extended to private individuals if they met these conditions and the conditions outweighed the prior public interest of roadway safety, but evaluating and balancing those factors would be up to a jury.
Reckless endangerment doesn’t exist to punish mere stupidity, it exists as a legal theory to sue someone for damages resulting from their stupidity.
I appreciate that you’re presuming the shooter’s life was no longer in jeopardy once the robber was fleeing, but I don’t think everyone would agree with you on that point. He was very likely fleeing *because* he was being shot at. If the shooter had not continued firing, the encounter probably wouldn’t have ended so quickly or with so little harm to everyone involved.
It’s not material to the discussion, but by and by, ad hominems do nothing for your argument.
Like I said – I wouldn’t have done it myself, and if the bullets had actually hit someone, this would be an entirely different scenario. You may feel outraged at him all you like, but you asked if what he did was legally wrong, and it was not.
Show me where in my original post I indicated this is something I would try. I was very clear on the fact that I wouldn’t have done what he did, even if I had a CC in that same situation. However, no one was hurt, and a crime was prevented. Considering there were four shots fired, that is really a rather splendid outcome, and I have to give the guy kudos for pulling it off.
Gun laws have never and will never keep guns out of the hands of criminals; they will merely cause obstacles that must be overcome by brave citizens able and willing to fight back against gun-wielding thugs that use illegal firearms to commit crime.
A well-trained shooter, legally carrying a concealed firearm, should always return fire to protect the lives of others as well as his or her own. To not return well-aimed, well-intentioned fire would be both reckless and negligent. God bless those brave enough to act with good intentions and God save the Second Ammendment!
You … didn’t even read the post, did you.