AndyH wrote: Fri Sep 07, 2018 12:11 am
Feel free to cite sources for all of the times he supposedly pulled guns on people. Then tell me what they have to do with this case. Finally, compare/contrast his claimed work to clear hurdles with the teachings of self defense classes that admonish a carrier to do just that. You seem to know more about what's inside his head than mere mortals - what's up with that? Your prejudices are showing, I'm guessing.
Here you go. This is just one of many media stories that have listed his previous incidents of threatening people and precipitating confrontations over minor slights. If you need more, just let me know. I'm sure I can find a dozen more on just the first page of a simple Google search:
https://www.cnn.com/2018/08/14/us/flori ... index.html
I didn't claim to know what he was thinking. But given his clear history of actually pulling guns on people (given that multiple unassociated people have made identical such claims against him, making a pretty convincing case that they were telling the truth) over such offenses as 'going too slow through a school zone', and when he characterizes the law as 'putting hurdles in front of me' to keep him from shooting someone, it's a pretty reasonable interpretation that he seems to go around looking for an opportunity to use a gun, and was just waiting for someone to give him an excuse to do so.
I've been involved in self-defense training for 40 odd years. I've never heard anyone in that field admonish students to 'work to clear hurdles' in order to justify using force. That sounds like telling people to make an effort to escalate a situation to the point of making the use of force legal when it initially isn't. Are there legal hurdles to using force in self-defense? Yes, as there should be. But as the person claiming defense, you don't 'work to overcome them,' you work to avoid the need to use force, to keep those hurdles (such as a lack of an imminent threat of serious injury) in place, and if your attacker still removes those hurdles then you are justified in using force. If you're working to remove those hurdles, then, by definition, you're being the aggressor by escalating the situation. Telling students that they should work to clear those hurdles is saying that shooting someone is the goal in any confrontation, and one should manipulate the situation to make it legally permissible. What you tell students is that those hurdles need to be removed by the actions of the aggressor before you can legally use force.
What all this has to do with this case is that, as I posted earlier, these incidents, and his statements, are all admissible in his coming legal proceedings to establish motive, plan, preparation, or intent. It becomes relevant because the prosecution can legally use all of these things to show that his motive in engaging McGlocton's girlfriend might have been to create an excuse to bring his gun into play as he has in the past, that his motive for using his gun was anger and not self-defense, that he may have intended to create such a situation, that such an interpretation fits his pattern of behavior. When it is all considered together, it paints a picture of a man who goes through his day with a hair trigger, looking for an excuse to commit felony aggravated assault in order to put people in what he sees as their proper place, and just happened this time to get his wish. I'm guessing your prejudices keep you from seeing the obvious given his well-documented history of doing exactly that.
As for my prejudices, I have none in this case. I'm an ardent supporter of armed self-defense, and the laws that support it here in Florida. For example, I argued from the very beginning that George Zimmerman was unquestionably justified in shooting Travon Martin, and should never have been prosecuted. I would say my views on this are probably more permissive than most people here. And I don't even think that there's convincing evidence that this case was racially motivated. Some of the people he's had run-ins with before were apparently not minorities, since the press seems to go out of its way to make the point in the cases where they were. So even if I were to hold some bias in cases involving race, I don't consider that an convincing issue here. It's just that from my years of experience and training in the legal use of force, I don't believe this particular case is one, because too much evidence points to something else, something I see as a dire threat to legal self-defense by trying to abuse those laws to justify a killing that wasn't. I always considered the anti argument that carry laws and SYG were just excuses for unbalanced angry people to commit murder to be idiotic BS. But this guy actually appears to be a real-life example of that.
