Liko81 wrote:I hate to say it, but the Brady bunch do have a point when they say that the penalty under the law for armed robbery isn't death; why should a single CHL be judge, jury and hangman unless necessary to preserve innocent life?
No the Brady bunch doesn't have a point. When you are faced with
armed robbery, you are faced with imminent threat of death or injury, otherwise you wouldn't cough up your wallet, would you?
A judge and jury have the luxury of hindsight when reviewing an armed robbery -- they know what the outcome was. If no one was shot or injured, it is still "just" an armed robbery. If the police find your body, and your wife's body, and your childrens' bodies bled out in the back room, like those ladies in Chicago, well then it's not just an armed robbery any more, is it? And you don't have the luxury of hindsight that the judge, jury, and Brady bunch do. You are dead.
The penalty for armed robbery is not death because at the point of a trial, we know if anyone was killed or injured or not. If someone died, then the trial is about murder.
You can't reliably predict what the final outcome of an armed robbery is, just like you can't predict what the outcome of a home invasion is. They may only want your money, or they may only want your money and you dead on the floor. If you are willing to place the entire decision about whether you and your family will live or not in the hands of others, by all means, go ahead. Me, I at least want a vote in the final outcome.
You are not guaranteed to only be presented with situations where you absolutely know you will be killed or seriously injured if you don't use deadly force yourself. You will have to make a decision based on incomplete, confusing information, and do so quickly. And even if somehow convinced that you should use deadly force, you are certainly not guaranteed that you can do so without harm to yourself or your family, or even that you have a reasonable chance for success. You may very well be facing multiple assailants looking down their gun barrels at you. You may elect to "go for it" and fail entirely. But the odds are you will be better off if you fight back than if you don't, and the harder you fight back, the better odds you will have.
Your tactical decisions will be governed by the actual situation, but morally and legally, a couple guys waving shotguns at you and yelling for your money are definitely candidates to be shot early and often.
The Brady argument is immoral - it misdirects attention away from the evil of the perpetrator and tries to hang it on the citizen willing to defend himself.
elb
