Culpability for the deployment of lethal force in a situation ultimately has to rest with the individual who introduced the possibility of lethal force in the first place.
If I shot someone who drew their gun on me first, that's probably their fault.
If I shot someone who I had no reason to suspect was armed, that's probably my fault.
If I hold someone at gunpoint and they then attempt to assault me in self defence and I shoot them in return, that's still my fault, because they wouldn't have assaulted me without me threatening them first. The fact that I shot them to protect myself is not relevant because it was my action that instigated violence.
Right, so what happened before he shot the first guy in the head, was that someone else had a pistol and fired in the air, and then the guy who got shot in the head ran towards the kid aggressively moments after the shot was fired. I don't think it's domestic terrorism to fire back after someone else already started firing.
You have two armed groups in this scenario, not just the kid who introduced the gun. Both groups introduced guns here. And we don't know the specifics of whether or not the guy who fired in the air owned his gun legally or not.
If someone is brandishing guns aggressively, but doesn't shoot, and you start shooting first, you are more wrong than they are, even if they were trying to terrorize you.
Yes, but because I wouldn't do those dumb things, I wouldn't be in that situation.
That situation is then so incredibly extreme, and so beyond the experiences of just about anyone here, it is effectively beyond our capabilities to predict how we would respond. Would we panic? Would we try to escape? Would we try to talk them down? Would we surrender? Would we curl up in a ball and hope they go easy? Would we try to fight back? Could we really bear to pull that trigger and end someone's life?
Who the fuck knows. No-one knows - except maybe those few here who may have been caught by a hostile mob in real life, or have relevant military / law enforcement training and experience to prepare them.
The other thing is, they're not just "dumb decisions". This wasn't like taking a short-cut down a dark alley and accidentally getting mugged. This was proactively seeking confrontation: people need to take a lot responsibility for that.
Yes, agreed, nobody knows really what they'd do. So we can agree that the things that lead up to that situation were the kid's fault and he should be punished, but after this situation was as it was it's a different deal and not the same as just a school shooter or something like that, which is the position I maintained here from the start.