Former cop kills man in a Florida cinema over texting

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Given the number of theaters and that each theater can have as many as 18 or more viewing rooms it's hardly a trend or crime wave.

The New York times has removed the controversial sentence about how the shooting "underscored the increased debate about when to use smartphones in public."

Seems the deeper we go into the 21st Century, the more people act like Neanderthals. Who probably acted better, actually.

It's not the number, but the ambiance.


Wise move. Smart phone developers would have to produce phones with lasers to combat the gunfire.

I really don't get why people are so bothered by others' use of phones in public. I couldn't care less . . . actually, I prefer it, because then I don't have to talk to them.

We came into the 21st century with multiple sources of 24 hour continuous news on TV and the internet. We didnt have either until relatively late in the 20th century. IAW, it's been happening but generally kept local until recent decades.

Leaving aside the question of what medical evidence you are relying on for your twin diagnoses of dementia and acting under the influence of a psychotic ( sic), what is it in my post that seems cribbed from others.

I have long posted that the epidemic of firearms violence in the United States is a matter of culture rather than legislation. I don't see the media jumping on the cultural argument, nor looking into their crystal balls for the paradigm shift.

What, precisely, am I blinding myself to? What propaganda is evident in my post? Do you even understand what I am writing?

None of us are In a position to say what SYG is--there is too small a corpus of judicial consideration of the statute to make an accurate assessment of what behaviors it excuses, and which will continue to be criminalized. The accused has already sworn an affidavit claiming that he was struck by an object and was in fear of an attack, so the groundwork for the defense is being lain. I have no expectations about the outcome.

The issue I have is not whether this act was legal or not--that is a matter for Florida law, and the courts to determine. Rather, my issue is that it is a wanton exercise in public policy making to create a legal environment in which the use of disproportionate force can be excused. The question of whether Reeve is guilty of murder, of manslaughter or of nothing at all is, frankly, a secondary question.

At Common Law, the prerequisite for the exercise of self-defense is a reasonable apprehension of an immediate threat to personal safety; and the excuse only applies to a use of force that is reasonably required to repel the threat and permit escape. These strike me as the appropriate balance between the individual's interest in security of the person and the state's interest in public peace, which has been developed over centuries of jurisprudence. Where courts have shifted that balance, it is certainly appropriate for legislatures to step in and correct it but it is not at all clear to me that SYG constitutes a correction of mischief that has been done to the law of self-defense, so much as a complete rewriting of the defense. That strikes me as foolhardy.

As for holding my breath, my reference to thousands of deaths was not hyperbole. That is the scale on which paradigm shifts occur in a polity as large and complex as the United States.

We are in a position to at least know the the intent of the SYG laws of where we live if that state has such laws. Each state has its own laws.
SYG isn't going to cause the streets to run red with blood. The intent of the law is meant to benefit the would be victim, not their assailant. If that comes at the cost of a wrongful shooting once in a while it's not going to be an issue for me. The rare wrongful shooting, if that's what this turns out to be, is hardly enough to cause a paradigm shift.

Last edited by Raptor on 16 Jan 2014, 10:55 am, edited 1 time in total.

What a marvellous idea for a song.

A serial killer describes a murder in every set of verses, and at the end of each we learn that he got away with it, because "I stood my ground, I stood my ground, the DA agreed I stood my ground..."

And the body count keeps rising...

It's really just like a SLAPP hearing but for self defense cases, so that people who legally defend themselves but end up charged can peremptorily challenge the charges, and not be bankrupted by an expensive trial if the state's case is flimsy. Even if it's allowing a few people to get away with crime, which is far from certain, I'm always going to come down on the side of subjecting less innocent people to our justice system vs punishing a higher percentage of the guilty.

Just another law abiding gun owner exercising his Second Amendment rights to murder people.

Great then he will be acquitted, the same way the cops who murdered Kelly Thomas were.

Just another crazy ex-cop. This is the sort of person that the anti-gun nuts would trust with guns...

I just knew you wouldn't be able to let this go without comment.

The system has accepted this crazy idea that everyone wants to kill the cops. Thus, cops, it is accepted, are trained to use deadly force and it is justified when there is any remote possibility that harm can come to that cop... a 1% possibility is enough. The defence can argue that this cop simply used his training and what the system says he should do when faced with such a situation and acted accordingly, and be acquitted.

Unless there's some critical factor the newzies have left out, hat's not gonna wash in court.