{"id":920,"date":"2007-06-13T05:06:37","date_gmt":"2007-06-13T11:06:37","guid":{"rendered":"http:\/\/www.shotinthedark.info\/wp\/index.php\/index.php\/2007\/06\/13\/never-ascribe-to-testosterone\/"},"modified":"2007-06-13T05:06:37","modified_gmt":"2007-06-13T11:06:37","slug":"never-ascribe-to-testosterone","status":"publish","type":"post","link":"http:\/\/www.shotinthedark.info\/wp\/?p=920","title":{"rendered":"Never Ascribe To Testosterone…"},"content":{"rendered":"

…what can be better explained by experience.<\/p>\n

When you’re a Second Amendment activist in a liberal city, you get used to the usual slurs; self-defense activists are anger-prone, compensating for something, or awash in testosterone.\u00a0 The writer of this bit<\/a>, a leftyblogger named “CharlieQ” from “Across the Great Divide”, has ironically subtitled his blog “Can we disagree and still build a decent world?” – but then partially answers his own question with the title of the post, “Be Sure to Check the Testosterone Levels”, regarding last weekend’s shooting of an off-duty cop by a citizen with a concealed carry permit.\u00a0<\/p>\n

Of course, if you’ve been through any <\/em>concealed carry training, you know that “testosterone” – as shorthand for “excessive emotion” – is the last <\/em>thing you want involved.\u00a0 Which is difficult to accomplish, given that self-defense situations tend to be rife with stress, emotion and adrenaline.\u00a0 Hence, the need for training before one gets ones’ permit; for those few that had any illusions about how easy self-defense shooting is, they are quickly disabused.<\/p>\n

Those are the facts.<\/p>\n

“Facts” are few and far between in Mr. Q’s piece:<\/p>\n

\n
There’s more than one way to view the accounts about the shooting of an undercover Robbinsdale cop<\/font><\/a> by a motorist. But one view certainly prevails over here<\/font><\/a>.<\/div>\n<\/blockquote>\n

The link is right back to my piece from the other day – and he’s right, to the extent that I have reason to believe Mr. Treptow, the alleged shooter, is probably in a fairly decent legal position right now.\u00a0<\/p>\n

Now, I’m not sure if Mr. Q got the “information” for his piece from the initially-terrible major-media coverage (which spun Mr. Treptow as a villain, up until he was released without being arraigned or charged), or if he’s got a jones for leaving facts out of stories, but suffice to say that it’s a good thing that only 93 people a day<\/a> are getting their “news” from him:<\/p>\n

\n

A supposedly menacing cop didn’t shoot back at someone who nailed him with three shots. And he’s the bad guy?<\/p>\n<\/blockquote>\n

It’s hard to know exactly how to answer this question, because – with all due respect to “CharlieQ” – it’s a staggeringly dumb one, one I can assume is driven by a complete, if not willful, ignorance of the law.<\/p>\n

Mr. Q omitted the fact that the cop pointed a gun at Mrs. Treptow<\/em>.\u00a0<\/p>\n

Now, as I’ve noted over and over again, there are four elements to a “self-defense” case.\u00a0 I keep repeating these, because so many people (regardless of their politics) are completely unaware of them, and they really are <\/em>abolutely important:<\/p>\n

    \n
  1. \n
    You can’t be a willing participant in the scuffle.\u00a0<\/div>\n<\/li>\n
  2. \n
    You must reasonably <\/em>fear death or great bodily harm.<\/div>\n<\/li>\n
  3. \n
    You must make a reasonable<\/em> effort – and “reasonable” in his case always means “a jury will buy it” – to disengage from the incident.<\/div>\n<\/li>\n
  4. \n
    Lethal force must be reasonable <\/em>under the circumstances.<\/div>\n<\/li>\n<\/ol>\n

    The law doesn’t say “you have to let yourself or your family get shot”.\u00a0 If someone points a gun at you, that is a reasonable <\/em>indication someone wants to kill you, for any jury outside of San Francisco.<\/p>\n

    Was Mr. Treptow a “willing participant”?\u00a0 Did he try reasonably <\/em>hard to get away from the cop, given that he was in a big clunky SUV with his family (keep your “Dukes of Hazzard” fantasies to yourself)?\u00a0 Was lethal force reasonably<\/em> justified?\u00a0 We don’t know for sure, but even if the victim weren’t <\/em>a policeman, it’d very unlikely the County Attorney would have released Treptow without charging him, much less exacting bail from him if Treptow wasn’t looking pretty good on all those counts.\u00a0<\/p>\n

    I mean, think about it.<\/p>\n

    Unfortunately, with his next comment, Mr. Q shows that “thought” isn’t his long suit:<\/p>\n

    \n

    Note to Hamas: Want America on your side? Start issuing conceal and carry permits.<\/p>\n<\/blockquote>\n

    I try to stay civil.\u00a0 I don’t throw words like “stupidest thing I’ve ever read in my life” around lightly.\u00a0<\/p>\n

    \u00a0So I won’t.\u00a0 I’ll just ask Mr. Q how on earth <\/em>he equates citizens with no criminal records, who’ve passed background checks and taken training classes, with people who blow up buses full of civilians?<\/p>\n

    \n

    Presumably witnesses will surface to sort out what happened, since neither party seems all that reliable.<\/p>\n<\/blockquote>\n

    Given that Mr. Q’s knowledge of the law is so very, very sketchy, I’ll reserve my own judgement about “reliability”.\u00a0<\/p>\n

    Especially after reading this bit…:\u00a0<\/p>\n

    \n

    Ask yourself how many times you’ve felt threatened by aggressive driving and you fantasized about having a gun. And, of course, you did absolutely nothing to provoke the other driver. Oh, and you’re not on a freeway going 70 mph. You’re on a boulevard next to a shopping center. And your wife and kids are in the car.<\/p>\n

    Probably found a way not to come to blows, right?<\/p>\n<\/blockquote>\n

    Yes, but then nobody’s ever pointed a gun at me or my family, either.\u00a0 I’d suspect Mr. Q could say the same.<\/p>\n

    Do you see the pathology at work, here?\u00a0 Mr. Q is holding Mr. Treptow – and all law-abiding civilians – to an absurd standard; to him, there is apparently no <\/em>threshold of criminal behavior that’ll justify a civilian defending himself against an aggressor.<\/p>\n

    \n

    So either the undercover cop was on meth or Mr. Ex-Security Guard isn’t quite telling the whole story.<\/p>\n<\/blockquote>\n

    But it’s not “either\/or”, because there’s a third option, one that is much <\/em>more likely, given that Mr. Treptow was released without being charged after shooting an undercover cop<\/em>:\u00a0 he did the right thing.<\/p>\n

    \n

    But for sure, there was plenty of stupidity and testosterone at 99th and Woodward that day.<\/p>\n<\/blockquote>\n

    We’ll wait and see what the final findings are, here.<\/p>\n

    And we’ll see what Mr. Q has to say then.<\/p>\n

    I’m guessing “silence”.<\/p>\n","protected":false},"excerpt":{"rendered":"

    …what can be better explained by experience. When you’re a Second Amendment activist in a liberal city, you get used to the usual slurs; self-defense activists are anger-prone, compensating for something, or awash in testosterone.\u00a0 The writer of this bit, a leftyblogger named “CharlieQ” from “Across the Great Divide”, has ironically subtitled his blog “Can […]<\/p>\n","protected":false},"author":1,"featured_media":0,"comment_status":"open","ping_status":"open","sticky":false,"template":"","format":"standard","meta":{"footnotes":""},"categories":[22],"tags":[],"class_list":["post-920","post","type-post","status-publish","format-standard","hentry","category-victim-disarmament"],"_links":{"self":[{"href":"http:\/\/www.shotinthedark.info\/wp\/index.php?rest_route=\/wp\/v2\/posts\/920","targetHints":{"allow":["GET"]}}],"collection":[{"href":"http:\/\/www.shotinthedark.info\/wp\/index.php?rest_route=\/wp\/v2\/posts"}],"about":[{"href":"http:\/\/www.shotinthedark.info\/wp\/index.php?rest_route=\/wp\/v2\/types\/post"}],"author":[{"embeddable":true,"href":"http:\/\/www.shotinthedark.info\/wp\/index.php?rest_route=\/wp\/v2\/users\/1"}],"replies":[{"embeddable":true,"href":"http:\/\/www.shotinthedark.info\/wp\/index.php?rest_route=%2Fwp%2Fv2%2Fcomments&post=920"}],"version-history":[{"count":0,"href":"http:\/\/www.shotinthedark.info\/wp\/index.php?rest_route=\/wp\/v2\/posts\/920\/revisions"}],"wp:attachment":[{"href":"http:\/\/www.shotinthedark.info\/wp\/index.php?rest_route=%2Fwp%2Fv2%2Fmedia&parent=920"}],"wp:term":[{"taxonomy":"category","embeddable":true,"href":"http:\/\/www.shotinthedark.info\/wp\/index.php?rest_route=%2Fwp%2Fv2%2Fcategories&post=920"},{"taxonomy":"post_tag","embeddable":true,"href":"http:\/\/www.shotinthedark.info\/wp\/index.php?rest_route=%2Fwp%2Fv2%2Ftags&post=920"}],"curies":[{"name":"wp","href":"https:\/\/api.w.org\/{rel}","templated":true}]}}