Last Week Tonight Discussion : Brazilian Election+Law and Order (9/25/22)

[Oniya]

The thing is (to realign the discussion a bit) Castle/SYG laws were originally designed for when someone breaks into, or chases you into your home.  Concealed or open-carry ceases to be an issue in those cases, as I could grab a 10" carving knife from my butcher block and not be questioned as to 'why do you have a 10" knife at hand?'  Same with a gun that someone keeps in the house.  Hell, I could grab an actual sword from the wall.  It may not be 'combat ready', but it's still a yard of metal whoop-ass.

SYG laws, in contrast, can relieve the person from the 'duty to retreat' as long as the person is in a place that 'he or she is legally allowed to be' - like the grocery store or a parking lot.

[Kathadon]

The thing is (to realign the discussion a bit) Castle/SYG laws were originally designed for when someone breaks into, or chases you into your home.  Concealed or open-carry ceases to be an issue in those cases, as I could grab a 10" carving knife from my butcher block and not be questioned as to 'why do you have a 10" knife at hand?'  Same with a gun that someone keeps in the house.  Hell, I could grab an actual sword from the wall.  It may not be 'combat ready', but it's still a yard of metal whoop-ass.

SYG laws, in contrast, can relieve the person from the 'duty to retreat' as long as the person is in a place that 'he or she is legally allowed to be' - like the grocery store or a parking lot.

My biggest problem with "duty to retreat" , as a concept, is that it forces de-escalation onto what is, often, the victim. How does one de-escalate a mugging without being mugged? Or an armed robbery? Paradoxily, escalation can lead to de-escalation, you scare off the perpetrators and they run away. I really think this is a case of our societies both being so inured to violence and outraged by it at the same time.

[Saria]

My biggest problem with "duty to retreat" , as a concept, is that it forces de-escalation onto what is, often, the victim.

It forces deescalation onto the—assumedly—reasonable person in the encounter… which is not the same as the “victim”.

Thinking in terms of “victim” before the situation has played out betrays bias in your thinking. You are making assumptions about what is going on. For example, you assume that if one person is chasing another, the person being chased is the “victim”. Possibly… but what if the person doing the chasing is someone who is experiencing an acute mental health crisis, and does not understand what is going on, and does not have control over their own actions… and then the person being chased thinks, “fuck this, I ain’t no pussy, I run from no-one,” and rather than simply escaping the situation, turns around and blows the sick person’s head off. Who’s the victim now?

Keep in mind that the shooter in the scenario above has absolutely no way of knowing that the other person was just having a crisis. All encounters like this are going to happen in an information void; you will never know the full story of what is really going on in the heat of the moment. And a mental health crisis is hardly the only situation where it gets murky who the “victim” is… there could be a situation where there actually was a mugger, but some idiot decided to give chase to be a hero and beat the crap out of him, only they mistake you for the mugger and… well, whoever dies in that scenario, it will be an innocent person.

In any of those scenarios, all it takes is one reasonable person to choose to deescalate rather than be an action movie hero. In a sane legal regime, one without stand-your-ground, a sensible person following the law would do the sensible thing, and get the hell away from potential danger, rather than being all American about it and saying, “I have muh rights to be here!” and straight-up committing murder (whether ultimately justifiable or not). This even applies to your home, by the way, not just the kind of stand-your-ground laws that apply everywhere you have a “legal right to be”. I don’t care how pretty your house is or how much cool shit you have in it, it’s not worth unnecessarily killing someone over it.

By the way, the idea that “escalation can lead to de-escalation” is absurd, and so obviously wrong it’s almost not even worth pointing that if it were true, then every crisis intervention training program in the world would be teaching people to whip out a machete and charge screaming at their opponent… rather than what they actually teach, which is the literal exact opposite.

As always, if you cannot escape, or if you could but doing so would lead to other bad consequences (like leaving a vulnerable person behind, or “I could have run, but then the attacker might have been able to take the gun from my car” kinda thing), then sure, yeah, stand your ground. But if you can escape a dangerous situation without bad consequences (other than to your ego), to put it bluntly, only a fucking idiot would stand and fight.

How does one de-escalate a mugging without being mugged? Or an armed robbery?

You run the fuck away, duh.

Honestly, you’d have a much better chance of surviving a mugging unhurt if you blew on a rape whistle, rather than tried to play Chuck Norris and fight the mugger. You have no idea if they’re like some crazy-ass 10th level master of muay Thai or some crazy shit where they could snap your femur like a twig. Or on the other hand they could be so hopped up on drugs that even though they have no earthly hope of taking you out in a straight fight, they’re too out of it to care, and could do you serious damage before you finally put them down. Or they could have friends just around the corner. Or…. Or…. Or….

Seriously, if you have the option to retreat, choosing to get into a fight over your wallet has got to be the height of stupidity.

[Sara Nilsson]

Armed robbery? Mugging? Give them the fucking money.

Easy deescalation, money isn't worth a life. I been robbed (on a trip to London) i gave him my money, took it up with my insurance, got the money back. No one was hurt. Most of the time they just want the cash for drugs or whatever they don't want to hurt you, but start shit ...

let the police deal it with after you reported. It aint my job to act like some demented action hero and try and kill another human being over a wallet, ring, phone whatever.

Seriously whipping out a weapon will not deescalate anything.

We where told by the police back when I worked at a supermarket and was in charge of opening/closing and depositing the money at the bank. If someone tries to rob you, give them the money. Don't do anything else. Again thats what insurance is for.

[Oniya]

The number of non-lethal ways I've been told to use as a female in a potentially violent situation are - extensive.  Up to and including peeing on someone who is trying to get physical.  I've never had to use any of these, but the overwhelming impetus is to get me out of there with as little harm to my person as possible.  Money, credit-cards, jewelry, any of that - can be replaced.

[Kathadon]

Again such a mind set is alien to me.

I will not engage with hypotheticals with these sorts of arguments. Especially ones as politically charged as mental health or any scenario with rape, and I already stated my concern with cowboy syndrome with firearms. I will say granting that all of these scenarios are possible, and are tragedies, they do not change the fact that every 25 seconds a violent crime occurs in the U.S. And property crimes happen unbelievably every 4 seconds. These crimes have clear victims and aggressors in the majority of cases. So even if we had hundreds of these hypothetical scenarios playing out every day, they would take years, if ever, to even remotely catch up to the actual statistics. And directing policy over such marginal edge cases, even if tragedies, is naïve and bad law making. Besides, history is full of examples of what capitulation to such criminal violence eventually can lead.

Also I have yet to see, even with violent crime taking place at such an unbelievable rate, scores of dead criminals filling graveyards with the current laws in place. Much less property crimes staggering frequency. Which to me shows either far less people are armed in America than I originally had been lead to believe, or armed individuals are practicing lethal force restraint already.

As to property, these arguments are very emblematic of the class privilege of wealth. Even if you do not realize it. If being robbed is only a few hour inconvenience for you, then by all means hand over whatever your assailant desires. Heck, you might just be able to go to Wal-mart, or where ever, that evening and replace whatever was stolen out of pocket with marginal financial discomfort. But do not argue to take away the legal right of those less fortunate to defend themselves from potentially catastrophic changes to their well being. 33% of the working poor still use cash primarily, even now during the pandemic. As do the elderly. The dismissive "it is only property" line shows how folks twist an inconvenience for potential catastrophic financial collapse in these conversations.

Next huge corporations, even regional chain stores, can absorb massive losses from theft. Small mom and pop bodegas, franchised fast food, independent gas stations, and any other independent small business cannot. They often exist by razor thin profit margins week to week, month to month. Yes insurance may cover losses for those that can afford said insurance. Or the police may find your property and recover it, however unlikely that may be. But insurance is not all encompassing or even fair. For businesses, it all depends on what the policy covers, and insurance does not always have to cover product losses. Or that costs extra. Or there may be a ceiling in losses claimable. Or they may require the policy holder pay out of pocket for improved security going forward. Not to mention having to repeatedly draw on any insurance that you can afford will soon price said insurance out of your reach. Then you will have either a worse policy or none all together. Then you are out of business. Ever wonder why retail stores in bad neighborhoods change so often?

And all of this ignores the separate issue of mental trauma of being victimised in the first place.

[Saria]

These crimes have clear victims and aggressors in the majority of cases.

You missed the point spectacularly. There are only “clear victims and aggressors”… AFTER THE FACT. During the heat of the incident, no one has access to all the information, so no one can say for sure whether they’re the victim or the aggressor. While someone’s whipping out their gun or knife to be the gritty, tough, cowboy asskicker, they have literally no way of knowing whether an hour or two later, the people reviewing the incident are going to see them as the rugged hero… or a sociopathic maniac who straight-up murdered a person who just desperately needed help.

So at the moment you pull out your weapon to fight, you are only guessing that you’re the angel in the story with limited information, and more likely than not, your guess is being influenced by factors that have nothing whatsoever to do with rational thought, like adrenaline, and your built-in biases. That means that even if you were 100% confident you could win the fight without being harmed (which, again, you have no way of knowing, because you don’t have all the information), it would still be stupid to escalate to violence unnecessarily. Any action you can take to avoid unnecessary violence would make more sense.

You cannot know whether you are the “victim” or the “aggressor” in a situation. The only thing you can do is try to remain calm and think rationally about what the smart thing to do is. Which brings me back to the point I was trying to make: deescalation is “forced” (in your words) onto the grown-up in the situation. If you are the sensible one in a situation where violence is not absolutely necessary, then you will deescalate it. Always.

If, instead, you turn it into a straight-up fight, then you are not the rational person in the situation. That much you can know in the heat of the moment. Whether or not you will be the “victim”, you’ll find that out later.

And directing policy over such marginal edge cases, even if tragedies, is naïve and bad law making.

The scenarios I offered are hardly “marginal edge cases”. In contrast to the nihilistic view of crime and criminals popularized by action movies and right-wing thinking, the types of cases I described are probably the norm. Let’s take Canada as an example, just because the numbers are manageable. Let’s use the incidents of police killings, and focus on 2019 (because it’s the most recent year minus one, which gives more time for inquests and stuff to be completed so we can get the full story). I count 35 cases.

Now when I go through them and pick out the ones that either explicitly say the person was experiencing a mental health crisis, or just say they suffered regular crises (and don’t explicitly say they were having one at the time, though it’s pretty clearly implied), I count 11. And I’m not even including the cases where it sounds a lot like a mental health crisis, but mental health wasn’t explicitly mentioned; like, I didn’t count this one: “An unnamed woman who phoned the RCMP for assistance was fatally shot at her home after she charged police with a katana.”

11 out of 35 is neither “marginal” nor “edge”. That’s almost a full third. And that’s just mental health crises. A lot of the ones that didn’t mention mental health could still have been cases of drunkenness or being high, or other situations where the person who attacked the police had circumstances. (Like, for example, they might have been indigenous and plausibly believed the cops were going to straight-up murder them… something which is, sadly, not all that uncommon.)

And these are the cops, remember. They are supposed to be the ones who are trained to know when it is necessary and appropriate to escalate the violence. (They’re also the first to tell people not to do so, incidentally, which seems a little odd if escalation was more likely to lead to good circumstances than bad, hm?)

Besides, history is full of examples of what capitulation to such criminal violence eventually can lead.

Any examples not in movies?

Because history is also chock full of examples of people who escalated unnecessarily, leading to tragedy. In fact, I challenge anyone to watch the news for a year, and count the number of cases where someone escalated the violence without justification and it ended happily, versus the number of times it ended badly. For any case in the last year you can identify where someone escalated the violence and won out, I can easily point to five or more where things went tragically bad.

Also I have yet to see, even with violent crime taking place at such an unbelievable rate, scores of dead criminals filling graveyards with the current laws in place. Much less property crimes staggering frequency. Which to me shows either far less people are armed in America than I originally had been lead to believe, or armed individuals are practicing lethal force restraint already.

Most likely there are fewer people stupid enough to actually take advantage of SYG laws than you’d think. I wouldn’t be surprised if most of the machismo fuelling SYG laws turned out to be performative, and whenever real situations happen to arise, the proponents aren’t as stupid as they pretend to be when the cameras are rolling. I think most people instinctively understand that deescalating the situation always makes more sense.

As to property, these arguments are very emblematic of the class privilege of wealth. Even if you do not realize it. If being robbed is only a few hour inconvenience for you, then by all means hand over whatever your assailant desires. Heck, you might just be able to go to Wal-mart, or where ever, that evening and replace whatever was stolen out of pocket with marginal financial discomfort. But do not argue to take away the legal right of those less fortunate to defend themselves from potentially catastrophic changes to their well being. 33% of the working poor still use cash primarily, even now during the pandemic. As do the elderly. The dismissive "it is only property" line shows how folks twist an inconvenience for potential catastrophic financial collapse in these conversations.

Bullshit. I know more about being devastatingly poor than you’d think, and it doesn’t matter how poor you are, your life is still worth more than whatever cash you have on you. It’s ironic that you’re trying to accuse other people of privilege blindness, because it says a lot that you think so little of the lives of poor people that you sincerely believe their money or their possessions are worth more to them than their lives.

Let me try to put you into the mindset of someone who’s experienced real poverty: Yes, of course being mugged will sting a lot more for a poor person than a rich one. But that still doesn’t make it rational to risk injury or death to protect your shit. It will also sting a poor person a lot more if they have to pay the hospital bills after they get badly hurt in the fight, not mention lost wages if they can’t work due to the injuries, and to say nothing of what might happen if the other person sues (and it won’t matter whether they were the aggressor or not). Yeah, it will hurt a poor person a lot to get mugged… but it will probably hurt them a whole lot more to be an idiot about it and try to fight. Being dirt poor doesn’t make someone more likely to think they can be an action hero, it makes them less likely. This is actually established science; look up poverty and risk aversion, or poverty and learned helplessness. The satisfaction of beating the shit out of a mugger? That is a privilege the wealthy can enjoy. The poor? They can’t take the risk.

The trite “mom and pop bodega” case is even more disingenuous. Attacking a thief over a couple hundred bucks in the till? Are you out of your mind? If you actually hurt the thief, they could sue you for hundreds of thousands, maybe even millions. And you best hope and pray that no innocent bystander gets caught up in the fracas. Fighting the crook is idiotic. Give them the money. Let them take whatever they want to steal. If you weren’t insured, then you made a choice beforehand that any losses would be the cost of doing business. If you can’t manage to run your business in a “bad neighbourhood”, then you can’t manage to run your business. Shitty as that may be, it does not justify harming anyone, even if they were trying to rob you. And it certainly doesn’t justify taking the risk of harming yourself, or innocent bystanders.

Besides, even if were true that the possibility of losing everything they own (or at least a massively significant portion of it) is more likely to drive someone to violence escalation… that does not make it the smart choice. If someone does make that choice out of desperation (and, again, both my personal experience and the science tell me it won’t), then they are making that choice out of desperation… not out of a rational weighing of the pros and cons. Even in your own view of the scenario, if they could choose not to escalate—if they had the resources where they could just “go to Walmart” and buy back their shit—they would do so. So even if your use of the poor as rhetorical tokens to justify violence was legit (which it isn’t), it still wouldn’t actually justify escalation.

[Kathadon]

Spoiler: Click to Show/Hide

You missed the point spectacularly. There are only “clear victims and aggressors”… AFTER THE FACT. During the heat of the incident, no one has access to all the information, so no one can say for sure whether they’re the victim or the aggressor. While someone’s whipping out their gun or knife to be the gritty, tough, cowboy asskicker, they have literally no way of knowing whether an hour or two later, the people reviewing the incident are going to see them as the rugged hero… or a sociopathic maniac who straight-up murdered a person who just desperately needed help.

So at the moment you pull out your weapon to fight, you are only guessing that you’re the angel in the story with limited information, and more likely than not, your guess is being influenced by factors that have nothing whatsoever to do with rational thought, like adrenaline, and your built-in biases. That means that even if you were 100% confident you could win the fight without being harmed (which, again, you have no way of knowing, because you don’t have all the information), it would still be stupid to escalate to violence unnecessarily. Any action you can take to avoid unnecessary violence would make more sense.

You cannot know whether you are the “victim” or the “aggressor” in a situation. The only thing you can do is try to remain calm and think rationally about what the smart thing to do is. Which brings me back to the point I was trying to make: deescalation is “forced” (in your words) onto the grown-up in the situation. If you are the sensible one in a situation where violence is not absolutely necessary, then you will deescalate it. Always.

If, instead, you turn it into a straight-up fight, then you are not the rational person in the situation. That much you can know in the heat of the moment. Whether or not you will be the “victim”, you’ll find that out later.

The scenarios I offered are hardly “marginal edge cases”. In contrast to the nihilistic view of crime and criminals popularized by action movies and right-wing thinking, the types of cases I described are probably the norm. Let’s take Canada as an example, just because the numbers are manageable. Let’s use the incidents of police killings, and focus on 2019 (because it’s the most recent year minus one, which gives more time for inquests and stuff to be completed so we can get the full story). I count 35 cases.

Now when I go through them and pick out the ones that either explicitly say the person was experiencing a mental health crisis, or just say they suffered regular crises (and don’t explicitly say they were having one at the time, though it’s pretty clearly implied), I count 11. And I’m not even including the cases where it sounds a lot like a mental health crisis, but mental health wasn’t explicitly mentioned; like, I didn’t count this one: “An unnamed woman who phoned the RCMP for assistance was fatally shot at her home after she charged police with a katana.”

11 out of 35 is neither “marginal” nor “edge”. That’s almost a full third. And that’s just mental health crises. A lot of the ones that didn’t mention mental health could still have been cases of drunkenness or being high, or other situations where the person who attacked the police had circumstances. (Like, for example, they might have been indigenous and plausibly believed the cops were going to straight-up murder them… something which is, sadly, not all that uncommon.)

And these are the cops, remember. They are supposed to be the ones who are trained to know when it is necessary and appropriate to escalate the violence. (They’re also the first to tell people not to do so, incidentally, which seems a little odd if escalation was more likely to lead to good circumstances than bad, hm?)

Any examples not in movies?

Because history is also chock full of examples of people who escalated unnecessarily, leading to tragedy. In fact, I challenge anyone to watch the news for a year, and count the number of cases where someone escalated the violence without justification and it ended happily, versus the number of times it ended badly. For any case in the last year you can identify where someone escalated the violence and won out, I can easily point to five or more where things went tragically bad.

Most likely there are fewer people stupid enough to actually take advantage of SYG laws than you’d think. I wouldn’t be surprised if most of the machismo fuelling SYG laws turned out to be performative, and whenever real situations happen to arise, the proponents aren’t as stupid as they pretend to be when the cameras are rolling. I think most people instinctively understand that deescalating the situation always makes more sense.

Bullshit. I know more about being devastatingly poor than you’d think, and it doesn’t matter how poor you are, your life is still worth more than whatever cash you have on you. It’s ironic that you’re trying to accuse other people of privilege blindness, because it says a lot that you think so little of the lives of poor people that you sincerely believe their money or their possessions are worth more to them than their lives.

Let me try to put you into the mindset of someone who’s experienced real poverty: Yes, of course being mugged will sting a lot more for a poor person than a rich one. But that still doesn’t make it rational to risk injury or death to protect your shit. It will also sting a poor person a lot more if they have to pay the hospital bills after they get badly hurt in the fight, not mention lost wages if they can’t work due to the injuries, and to say nothing of what might happen if the other person sues (and it won’t matter whether they were the aggressor or not). Yeah, it will hurt a poor person a lot to get mugged… but it will probably hurt them a whole lot more to be an idiot about it and try to fight. Being dirt poor doesn’t make someone more likely to think they can be an action hero, it makes them less likely. This is actually established science; look up poverty and risk aversion, or poverty and learned helplessness. The satisfaction of beating the shit out of a mugger? That is a privilege the wealthy can enjoy. The poor? They can’t take the risk.

The trite “mom and pop bodega” case is even more disingenuous. Attacking a thief over a couple hundred bucks in the till? Are you out of your mind? If you actually hurt the thief, they could sue you for hundreds of thousands, maybe even millions. And you best hope and pray that no innocent bystander gets caught up in the fracas. Fighting the crook is idiotic. Give them the money. Let them take whatever they want to steal. If you weren’t insured, then you made a choice beforehand that any losses would be the cost of doing business. If you can’t manage to run your business in a “bad neighbourhood”, then you can’t manage to run your business. Shitty as that may be, it does not justify harming anyone, even if they were trying to rob you. And it certainly doesn’t justify taking the risk of harming yourself, or innocent bystanders.

Besides, even if were true that the possibility of losing everything they own (or at least a massively significant portion of it) is more likely to drive someone to violence escalation… that does not make it the smart choice. If someone does make that choice out of desperation (and, again, both my personal experience and the science tell me it won’t), then they are making that choice out of desperation… not out of a rational weighing of the pros and cons. Even in your own view of the scenario, if they could choose not to escalate—if they had the resources where they could just “go to Walmart” and buy back their shit—they would do so. So even if your use of the poor as rhetorical tokens to justify violence was legit (which it isn’t), it still wouldn’t actually justify escalation.

This might come off as very dear reddit, but I do not care and this is fresh in my mind.

So I have had an interesting afternoon off. I woke up late and decided to check E, read a few posts. Read this one. Then I noticed I was low on cigarettes. No problem. The weather is nice. A quick shower, throw on some clothes, and take a quick stroll to the local gas station two blocks away. I get there, put on my mask, and find a few customers already about inside the maybe 20'x30 foot building. I grabbed a 20 oz. pop and got in line to make my purchase. I then notice that a man who has been there since I entered, off to the side of the counter, is getting louder. He is threatening the skinny mixed kid, probably early 20's, behind the counter. (who I know as a good kid. He likes anime and used to be a waiter before the pandemic. He hates working at the gas station just because of situations like these) The skinny clerk tells the man to get out. He begins to call the cops. The irate man is so uncaring that he begins to describe himself in detail, loudly, while the skinny kid is on the phone. He pulls out a pocket knife and slams it down on a display shelf. Slips off his back pack and drops it to the floor. He yells for the skinny kid to "do somethin" and starts calling racial slurs. I wait. I am in line behind a black woman that simply throws down her things and leaves. Another man comes in from pumping his gas. At this point it has been over a minute, and I decide to step up. I tell the irate man that he is going to end up in jail. To just leave. This isn't worth it. The other man either having heard the commotion outside, or just realising what is going on, yells for the guy to leave.

Now as I said before I am always armed with my knife. And unlike his little flip pocket knife, I know mine is dangerous. I also know at this point I have not been threatened or in danger. Neither has anyone else around me. So it stays on my hip. The man now has two customers confronting him. He sneered, puffed out his chest, punched a standing cooler, called all of us various names, then slammed into the hanging plexi glass in front of the cash register. He asks what we are going to do. I just reminded him that when the cops did come if he was still here he was going to jail. Or he was going to get shot. I did not back down. Neither did the man next to me. The clerk is still on the phone with the police.

So the guy, for whatever reason, decided to snatch up his things, yell a few last threats and expletives to all of us, and slammed the glass exterior door hard enough to spiderweb it on his way out.

My point in this story is not to toot my own horn or show that I am a bad ass. It is to show that I escalated. Intervention even non-violent intervention is escalation. This punk now was not just threatening the skinny mixed kid on the phone behind the counter. He now had two, fairly large, men confronting his behavior. Which also comes with an implied threat of violence, little different than if the skinny kid behind the counter would have pulled out the baseball bat ( which I know the owner has one under the counter just for these type of situations). And the aggressor backed down.

So this is always my mindset. I will talk until it comes to violence. If ,god forbid, this man had tried to swing on me or anyone else, then I would have had no qualms in using whatever force to defend myself or others that I saw fit in the moment. I do not know if the irate man saw my knife or not, but I already knew that this man was armed, aggressive, and had serious disregard for anyone else's safety or property. I would not have attempted to restrain an armed individual. This is my realty, and the reality of ten if not hundreds of thousands of individuals every minute of every day. You may think my behavior is stupid, or even reckless, but this is my mindset in real life practice.

[Saria]

Intervention even non-violent intervention is escalation.

That is not escalation. That is literally the opposite of escalation. Escalation would have been more like: he put his knife on the counter, and you drew yours, or the clerk pulled out his baseball bat, or the guy who was pumping gas pulled a gun or put up his fists. Or he started screaming racist obscenities, and everyone started screaming back at him or shoving him around. Escalation means increasing the violence… not the exact opposite: taking actions to defuse it.

By contrast, what everyone did in that situation is exactly what you should do to deescalate a situation. The angry guy was being threatening and violent, so immediately the clerk started calling the cops. That’s deescalation: don’t wait for trouble, take proactive steps to discourage it from even starting.

The woman saw that things were getting racist and violent, so she got the hell out of Dodge. If you feel in potential danger, that’s exactly what you should do. That’s deescalation: don’t wait for a fight you can see about to happen, walk away from it if you can.

You and the other guy did not feel endangered, so you talked the aggressor down, explaining to him that his actions were about to put him in danger. Again, that’s deescalation: you talk to the other person, and try to communicate with them to get them to stand down. You actually used empathy to get through to them! You basically said, though not in these exact words: “Look, you’re about to be in real trouble, and I’m trying to help you avoid it.”

I don’t think you understand what deescalation means. Deescalation is NOT the same thing as capitulation. And no, mere intervention is not escalation (that’s absolutely ridiculous, because if any intervention were escalation, then even things like hostage negotiation would be escalation… which is complete nonsense). I get the sense that you think that deescalation is about cowardice… nothing could be further than the truth. It often takes far more bravery to choose not give in to your primate urges and fight, and instead stay calm and think things through.

Capitulation can be one way to deescalate, in some situations, and the same is true for non-intervention (like just walking past, or running away). But those are far, far from the first or only options. Proactively calling for help, talking down the aggressor, empathizing and explaining to them that they might be hurt if they continue what they’re doing but there is another option… all those things are classic deescalation techniques.

If I had to pick out a single brilliant move there (other than calling the cops, and running away if you feel endangered), it was when you used the key phrase: “This isn’t worth it.” That’s a powerful deescalation tool, because it (hopefully) forces the other person to stop and think, and reevaluate the situation. And getting them to stop and think? THAT IS DEESCALATION. That is the purest essence of what deescalation is about: getting someone who is (potentially) violent to stop… take a moment… and start using their thinking brain, rather than their lizard brain.

And, incidentally, if someone is in danger and you step in front of them to protect them, that is also deescalation (usually!). For example, if that woman couldn’t escape for whatever reason, then you or the other guy could have and should have (because you didn’t feel endangered) either helped her escape, or at the very least stepped between her and the attacker. This is usually a form of deescalation… it’s not if you step in with your fists raised, ready to fight of course. But if you just… move between the attacker and a potential victim… you become an obstacle that the attacker has to stop and think about how to deal with. If you’ve stepped in with a weapon or your fists raised, then you’ve kinda narrowed down their options… that would not be deescalation. But if you just become an obstacle without a clear option for dealing with, you force the attacker to pause and reconsider… and that is deescalation.

Granted, you may not have been thinking about it in terms of deescalation at the time. You may have been thinking that stepping in and speaking up the way you did was just prologue to getting bloody, rather than using your presence and your words to disrupt the aggressor’s rage spiral, and introduce a pause and calmer reassessment. But it doesn’t really matter to the end result whether you did the right thing for the wrong reasons or not. You literally used your words to convince the other person not to pursue the path of violence. I can’t fathom how you can not see that as obvious deescalation.

And another interesting point is… your knife really didn’t help, did it? I mean, other than as a security blanket. The situation ended well, with no-one getting hurt, precisely because you didn’t use it.

[Kathadon]

THAT IS DEESCALATION. You and the other guy did not feel endangered, so you talked the aggressor down, explaining to him that his actions were about to put him in danger.

I understand your thought process here, but again in my mind it is not. I am not deescalating by allowing this man personal space. Nor am I listening to his problems or diatribe. Those are tactics taught in de-escalation training. I am ordering him to leave, while making the helpful suggestion that it is in his best interest. I am threatening you if I intervene, it is implied heavily by my making myself the focus, my tone, and no doubt my body language. I have a commanding and rather loud voice. My choice in wording was because of my time in security at many local bars and clubs. So I have took actual classes on these situations. If I had to guesstimate how often aggressors backed down in such scenarios in my experience, from talk alone, I would put it at maybe under 30%. I got lucky, I will freely admit. Just as I know to allow an aggressor an easy escape route is important, or else they can get desperate. The irate man was in front of one exit, and the other was past me and the other by-stander as was the entrance to behind the counter.

As to my knife, was it a help in this situation? I do not know. Maybe the man saw it, maybe he didn't. Maybe he did not care either way. That is irrelevant as it's presence gave me options an unarmed person did not have. Laws against weapons limit the legal options of both the victims and bystanders in such situations. As does duty to retreat laws. If my only legal option in a duty to retreat state in this situation was to act as the black woman did then things may have gotten far worse. Hell, a case could be made legally that could have me charged with assault in this scenario. That is why I oppose such laws. If things would have turned violent in a duty to retreat state I would then be on the hook for not only criminal charges, but civil liability to the asshole. That is why I believe duty to retreat is bad policy.

Next your cowardice point. No. I do not expect everyone to act as I do. And concern for ones own well being is paramount, if this man had a firearm I know I would have acted differently. But my mind has always been wired with if you see something bad and can do something about it, then do. Anything less adds negatively to the world. I could do something about this, so I did. Just as I knew and accepted the risks involved in physical confrontation (Maybe I get my ass whooped. I'm not in my twenties anymore. Maybe one of us gets a knife in the gut or neck. etc.), I understood and accepted the legal liability in my state (which has SYG) to myself if things ended in tragedy ( I am in the right here. He is armed. I did not throw the first punch. etc.).

[TheGlyphstone]

If you had been carrying a pistol, though, would you have felt the need to put half a clip into his chest instead? That was the original focus of the episode this week, at least - not specifically the existence of SYG, but how it interacts with guns and the ease of taking a life in response to fear. Carrying a knife for self-defense is an entirely different story, and even here it's not like you drew steel and flung yourself in a-stabbing.

[Kathadon]

If you had been carrying a pistol, though, would you have felt the need to put half a clip into his chest instead? That was the original focus of the episode this week, at least - not specifically the existence of SYG, but how it interacts with guns and the ease of taking a life in response to fear. Carrying a knife for self-defense is an entirely different story, and even here it's not like you drew steel and flung yourself in a-stabbing.

What you describe is what I call cowboy syndrome.

Every tragedy that results from cowboy behavior is in the news, but how often are experiences like mine? Slim to none? Even if the bystander is armed with a firearm, does that even make a police report? I was armed with a lethal tool and nothing happened, yet the police were called. I just completed my purchase and left without waiting for them to arrive. So which is more common? Could such statistics even be possibly assembled?

[TheGlyphstone]

What you describe is what I call cowboy syndrome.

Every tragedy that results from cowboy behavior is in the news, but how often are experiences like mine? Slim to none? Even if the bystander is armed with a firearm, does that even make a police report? I was armed with a lethal tool and nothing happened, yet the police were called. I just completed my purchase and left without waiting for them to arrive. So which is more common? Could such statistics even be possibly assembled?

Not as long as the Dickey Amendment remains in place, at least.

[Oniya]

Not as long as the Dickey Amendment remains in place, at least.

As a matter of fact...
Some Big Health Care Policy Changes Are Hiding In The Federal Spending Package (dated Dec 18, 2019)

It's kind of buried about halfway down the page, so I've pulled the relevant paragraphs.

First funding for gun violence research since 1996

The budget provides $25 million for research on preventing deaths and injuries from guns, split equally between the National Institutes of Health and the Centers for Disease Control and Prevention.

"This is a very meaningful, small step in the right direction," says Christian Heyne, vice president of policy at Brady, an organization focused on ending gun violence. He notes that these are the nation's two preeminent public health agencies. The CDC has shied away from gun violence research since 1996, when legislation known as the Dickey Amendment first prohibited the agency from using federal funds to advocate or promote gun control. In 2018, language added to instructions accompanying a spending bill made it clear that the CDC was allowed to conduct research on the causes of gun violence. At that time, Congress provided no funding.

Now, lawmakers have not only allocated money, "they're actually naming that this money needs to be spent to research gun violence," says Heyne.

[TheGlyphstone]

As a matter of fact...
Some Big Health Care Policy Changes Are Hiding In The Federal Spending Package (dated Dec 18, 2019)

It's kind of buried about halfway down the page, so I've pulled the relevant paragraphs.

Well that's interesting. Surprised that the NRA didn't stomp all over that, especially since it was still a GOP-led Congress at the time.

[Kathadon]

Not as long as the Dickey Amendment remains in place, at least.

I mean sure more money for research could help, but how would you quantify numbers for experiences like mine? Estimate by percentage of recorded violent crime to the total number of the estimated armed population in a state?

Like I said before, if as many Americans are armed as we are lead to believe in the country, and a violent crime happens every 21 seconds, why are there not scores of dead criminals now?

Florida was patient zero for SYG laws, and only saw an increase in murders (how they factor in legal self defense from "murder" here is a question also) of 150 total in the year the law changed. And the numbers have remained fairly constant since. While the number of violent crimes has fallen year over year. A trend that is mirrored across the U.S. Correlation does not equal causation, but that is hard to argue against as a case for SYG laws and violent crime deterrent.

I have looked at a few current studies/reports advocating against SYG laws. The ones I read use weaselly language and deceptive statistics. Like "Three out of five SYG cases were committed by convicted criminals. One in three of those were violent crimes." Both statements are technically true. But do we really care if the SYG case was committed by someone with a DWI, vandalism, weed possession, or parking tickets? Does that make them automatically in the wrong? No. Or the 150 murder increase above. That was from the same case report. The next sentence without explaining how or if the 150 increase in firearm homicides was entirely from SYG laws then said, "This included a 75 percent increase in monthly justifiable homicide rates, and an estimated 22 percent increase in monthly unlawful homicide rates after the passage of Florida’s Stand Your Ground law." Wait what? What percentage is the 150 then? Any time a study goes from hard numbers to percentages I give it the side eye, and so should you. Switching to percentages can be used to mislead or shock without outright lying. For example: if a 75% increase is 4 more justifiable homicides per month then whoop-dee-do. They are justified homicides, after an investigation, where they were found to be in the right. And if the 22% increase in unlawful homicides is entirely SYG related where the perpetrator was in the wrong then, yes, lets take a look. But again this can be misleading without outright lying.

By the way the study this report linked to states justifiable homicides account for an average of 8.7% of all homicides in Florida since 2006-2015. Which is up from 3.4% for justifiable homicides before SYG law, but, duh, now it is easier legally to defend yourself and property. Of coarse their data sets are behind a paywall, and Florida's publicly available records on homicide just includes violent crime statistics which list flat murder making no distinction. Which makes looking at hard numbers difficult.

https://everytownresearch.org/report/stand-your-ground-laws-are-a-license-to-kill/
http://www.fdle.state.fl.us/FSAC/Crime-Trends/Violent-Crime

So lets have more research, but not just advocacy for 2nd amendment repeal. Keep both the Brady groups and the NRA away from the science. And be sure to dig into numbers and watch language from groups that are advocating for something. Even if you agree with them, you might be mislead.

[TheGlyphstone]

And now for something completely different!

https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=sIi_QS1tdFM


Sponsored Content in Local News.

[Humble Scribe]

So much snake oil.

I'd like to say I've never given space to advertorial, but no one is 100% pure. But basing your regular programming, maybe even your business model around it, with no quality control whatsoever, strikes me as incredibly pernicious. That's no longer journalism, it's becoming a shopping channel.

[TheGlyphstone]

A shopping channel in disguise, no less.

Must be nice to have 6000 you can spend for a single elaborate punchline though, John.

[TheGlyphstone]

https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=29lXsOYBaow

Asian-Americans. A very broad-ranging topic, John barely skims all the issues involved in this particular aspect of American history and culture, and says so too.

[TheGlyphstone]

https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=6fiRDJLjL94

Prison Heat. Not the sexy kind, the deadly heatstroke kind.

[TheGlyphstone]

https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=zv8ZPFOxJEc

PACE (Property Assessed Clean Energy) home improvement loans, and how its privatization ends up screwing people over.

Anyone who was born after 1985 can skip watching this episode because you'll never get to own a house to improve.

[Cuttlephobia]

Well, if property can be charged with crimes, surely it can pay property taxes, right?

[TheGlyphstone]

What amuses me is seeing all the comments below the video from Europeans, talking about how their country has a very similar program that works just fine and wondering what the difference is...then "oh, it's run by private companies without any regulation, that's why."

[Oniya]

I could probably write a whole episode on the struggles of renters to get repairs done. 
Contractor: 'Oh, you're renting?  We need to clear it with the landlord.' 
Landlord:  'I'm not paying that much to get it fixed.  Here's my buddy, Cletus.  He's done something like this before.'  Or 'That's expensive.  Gonna have to raise your rent for the rest of your life to cover this one fix.'