Possibly preventing a horrific crime

August 27, 2023 1:07 AM

I have a hypothetical situation, and I'm curious as the the possible repercussions.

Suppose when I pull into a grocery store parking lot, I see a guy in an unlabeled tactical vest, camo, combat boots, wearing a two gun holster, and carrying an AR-15. None if this gear has any government labels or patches on them.

What's my moral position if I run this guy down with my car? I know nobody can give legal advice. He could have been a loony who wanted to shoot up the store, or just a dick-head 2nd amendment nut-case.

So, step on the gas, or call 911 and wait for shots? I'm unarmed, except for my 3000lb car.

posted by Marky to Human Relations (43 answers total)

Forget the moral high ground. Your best shot at survival is running (or driving) away. Do that, then call 911 from a safe distance.
posted by shock muppet at 1:12 AM on August 27, 2023 [20 favorites]

Call 911. Minority Report is Just a movie.
posted by 15L06 at 1:13 AM on August 27, 2023 [19 favorites]

Vigilante justice is one of the dangers of the dick-head 2nd amendment nut-cases. Don't join them, call 911.
posted by LadyOscar at 1:15 AM on August 27, 2023 [47 favorites]

You didn't state what country you're in, so I am assuming USA based on a quick look at your past activity.

There is no ethical, moral, or legal justification for doing anything in the most parts of the USA. Outside a few local assault weapons bans, AR15s are legal in the USA, especially when open carried. Also, I doubt your ability to correctly identify a weapon as being an AR15.

It is not appropriate to contact government authorities about activities that are not illegal and pose no direct threat to anyone.
posted by saeculorum at 1:21 AM on August 27, 2023 [7 favorites]

There are a lot of states that allow "open carry" of weapons. You really don't know what he's doing with those weapons. I'd recommend you hide behind your engine block and call 911 if you think he may be a threat, but if he's not holding a weapon and aiming it at anyone, he's not a threat. And what does that make you?

I don't own a gun, BTW. Never owned one in my life.
posted by kschang at 1:38 AM on August 27, 2023 [5 favorites]

Call the Police.

Don't try to run someone over.
posted by chariot pulled by cassowaries at 2:07 AM on August 27, 2023 [2 favorites]

It is not appropriate to contact government authorities about activities that are not illegal and pose no direct threat to anyone.

We're not talking about your average "open carry" jackass, having lunch at Denny's with a single holstered weapon on his hip. This is a guy who is standing around in a supermarket parking lot and absolutely bristling with weapons, a semi-automatic rifle in each hand and two pistols at the ready. If he wanted to go on a shooting spree, he'd be all set. I'd say that definitely merits a prompt 911 call, just to be safe. According to the BBC there were 647 mass shootings in the US last year. How horrible would you feel if you saw this guy, never called the cops, and then when you got home you found out he'd just killed a dozen people?

This is a strange Ask. What inspired it? I'm assuming you're not really sitting there in your car and watching this scary-looking guy while you wait for Metafilter to tell you if you should run him down or not.
posted by Ursula Hitler at 2:34 AM on August 27, 2023 [17 favorites]

Since it seems you're asking an ethical question rather than a practical question...

There are several possible arguments that it could be ethical to kill this person.
1. You think he is currently committing a crime, and you want to punish him for that, or to reduce the number of criminals in existence or deter other criminals.
2. You think his current activities are legal, but so harmful to society that he should be killed.
3. You think he might commit crimes or harmful activities in the future and you wish to prevent that.

So to cover them in turn:
1. It's hard to see how it would be ethical for a single untrained individual to be an irrevocable "judge and jury" for a crime, on a whim while going about their day. That's unethical even in respect of parking fines, never mind executions. We have courts for a reason, and even people who are subject to a legal death penalty have a right to appeal.

2. If you earnestly believe that a certain currently-legal activity merits death, you still ethically need to clear the same kind of high bar in order to go ahead as the courts do. Furthermore your policy (of deterring or preventing such activity) is likely to be ineffective, since you'll go straight to prison while simultaneously angering a bunch of people who like guns. If you want to rearrange the state monopoly on violence on some way, you probably need a more effective approach than running down a random guy.

3. You've said that you think the guy could be dressed in this way because he's making some political point about gun laws, so you're clear that this isn't currently a defensive situation. So we're left with the hypothesis that he is likely to commit crimes and that you can ethically kill him to prevent these crimes.

It's frequently considered unethical for the state to punish someone for crimes they might commit in the future. Actually executing people for crimes they might commit is substantially more unethical, and executing them without authority, without trial and on a whim has got to be... More unethical than that.

In conclusion, I don't see any possible ethical avenue for killing this guy.

(I'm from a country with strong gun control, and I think that having civilians legally toting firearms to the store is completely nuts)
posted by quacks like a duck at 2:54 AM on August 27, 2023 [10 favorites]

You don’t mention what might be a severe complicating factor: race.

If he’s white I’m calling 911. If of obvious latin, Asian, or indigenous descent, I’m waiting to see other signs that he’s a problem. If he’s black I’m waiting to see definite and convincing signs he intends to commit a serious crime because cops have a history of killing armed black people almost instantaneously, such as that kid with a toy gun playing in a park who was dead within 12 seconds of the arrival of the cops.
posted by jamjam at 3:35 AM on August 27, 2023 [22 favorites]

Correction: the kid was 12, and he was shot before the police car had rolled to a stop.
posted by jamjam at 3:43 AM on August 27, 2023 [4 favorites]

No, you can't ethically murder someone because you find them suspicious.
posted by the primroses were over at 4:20 AM on August 27, 2023 [52 favorites]

Perhaps it might be more clarifying to phrase it as, if you want to murder people because you find them suspicious, go be a cop.
posted by restless_nomad at 4:46 AM on August 27, 2023 [21 favorites]

So in addition to this being legal in many parts of the US, there’s also the aforementioned Tamir Rice thing. As mentioned, he was shot because the cops couldn’t determine that his “gun” was a toy. Can you determine whether this guy’s gun is a toy? It might seem implausible, but water guns that realistically resemble automatic weapons are the premise of at least one movie. It’s not hard to imagine some jackass thinking it would be funny to provoke the very outrage you’re talking about.

And while I know it doesn’t ever really happen, there is the small possibility that this guy is the proverbial good guy with a gun. It could be that someone is already inside shooting up, this guy heard it and knew the cops would be slow to respond, so he went back to his car, suited up, and is going to go take down the guy inside. You killing him would then allow the actual mass shooting to continue. Again, this is improbable, but when you’re talking about killing someone, any probability less than 100.00% seems a little dicey, eh?
posted by kevinbelt at 5:07 AM on August 27, 2023 [5 favorites]

Suppose when I pull into a grocery store parking lot, I see a guy in an unlabeled tactical vest, camo, combat boots, wearing a two gun holster, and carrying an AR-15. None if this gear has any government labels or patches on them.

Since you're in your car, that means you are at least at some distance - perhaps too great a distance to truly be able to tell that there are "no" government labels on the man's equipment.

If you call 911 and report the sighting, and it is a legitimate government-issued visit, 911 would likely have been advised in advance exactly BECAUSE citizens might call it in, and 911 would thus be forwarned so they would know "okay, this is something sanctioned going down" and would handle the report differently. And if you call 911 and it's NOT a sanctioned thing, they would be able to handle the situation in such a way that maybe the potential attacker would be caught alive, and could be properly prosecuted.

Either way, calling 911 is the best approach.
posted by EmpressCallipygos at 5:09 AM on August 27, 2023 [7 favorites]

It is more likely that this type of person would be doing this to intimidate the store owner, local people of color, local queer people, etc, so you wouldn't really be preventing a horrific crime and, for a variety of reasons, the best response to that type of person isn't immediate confrontation.

If you had literal reason to be 100% sure that he was going in to shoot up the store (he had just leveled his semi-automatic and was charging the doors, you'd just heard him start his livestream with "I'm going in to kill people", etc, )and you felt pretty sure that you could run him down effectively, that would change things.

I think that in real life, you're going to have some cues if you have any lead time at all - someone who is heavily armed and not going to commit violence, if he's just standing there, is almost certainly going to have some signs or indicate by his behavior in some way that he's there to intimate and look macho; someone who is there to commit violence is either going to be extremely direct and fast or very stealthy and you probably won't realize what's going on in time to decide while he's just standing around. Or else he'll be behaving in some other bizarre way which would tip you off that something is really wrong.

This is why I think that this kind of hypothetical isn't that clarifying. It gets you right into a kind of unhelpful utilitarianism - "it's more useful to kill the occasional innocent gun nut if you can prevent most mass shootings" without taking you into the question of "what would it mean to have a society where everyone was looking to run each other down to prevent serious crimes".

Very near where I live, a queer and trans event was shot up two weeks ago by strangers who were totally unexpected and who seem to have gotten away completely. It appears to have been a hate crime. One person was killed and more were seriously injured. The only way to have prevented that would have been either to have not held the event at all or to have gated it off very strictly with intense security, which would have changed it so much that you might as well not have it at all. I don't know what the way to prevent that stuff is, but when you get into the details of how it happened, preemptively attacking the people who behaved like the shooters would cause an incredibly fucked up society that no one would want to live in.
posted by Frowner at 5:18 AM on August 27, 2023 [13 favorites]

I have no romanticism about this. This particular class of gun nuts needs to be eradicated. It is my sincere belief that peaceful people's lives are made worse and more traumatic by having to bear witness to these people who want to drip themselves with weapons and intimidate others. I would have no moral issue running them down.

Would I? Oh of course not, a long protracted legal battle isn't part of my 5 year plan.

But I don't think it's a morally wrong position to take, from a harm reduction standpoint. If that means I'm going to hell then neato, the rest of you will have someone cool to hang out with when you arrive ✌️
posted by phunniemee at 5:31 AM on August 27, 2023 [6 favorites]

I thought about this a lot when several years ago people were purposefully bringing guns to my workplace as a political statement. One advantage of calling 911 is that if the cops have to repeatedly show up to investigate these nutjobs, maybe they will stop siding with open carry advocates.
posted by tofu_crouton at 6:06 AM on August 27, 2023 [3 favorites]

In my country, I’d call 911 because carrying a gun like that is already a crime, and then I’d call the store to get them to lock down while waiting.

But also in my country, people have used cars as weapons to kill Muslim families out for a stroll, and to get back at women (next to my former workplace.)

I find your vigilante question disturbing…the “one good person” narrative is compelling, but dangerous - it’s the seed for violent acts. I speaking as someone who has trained in self-defence to feel stronger speaking up for others. But a part of that discipline is to not start things.
posted by warriorqueen at 6:46 AM on August 27, 2023 [7 favorites]

When I have gone into the suburbs recently, I have sometimes seen a type of guy who hangs around shopping center parking lots as “volunteer security” dressed up in full battle rattle and armed to the teeth to provide “protection” to the public.

I’m not sure if the main point of this cosplay is to justify that guy’s purchases of all his gear, intimidate people of color from coming into suburban shopping centers, or other, but I agree with jamjam that if he’s white you should call the cops on him, because maybe being hassled by the cops often will discourage this type of behavior, if he is not, wait and see.
posted by Jon_Evil at 6:53 AM on August 27, 2023 [4 favorites]

Assuming you are in the US, the vast majority of people you might see dressed up like that are basically in cosplay. They posture a lot at demonstrations (first always by the right, but now there are more frequently counter demonstrators also in tactical gear with long guns), and you get the "second amendment activists" who make their you-tube videos of them having encounters with store employees and local cops, trying to provoke a response.

The point being, just seeing someone dressed like that doesn't tell you if they are a crackpot mass shooter, or not. If you were to run over everyone dressed like that, mostly you'd kill assholes and activists, not wanna-be murderers.
posted by Dip Flash at 7:14 AM on August 27, 2023 [2 favorites]

I’m in the US but in a saner state (MA). If I saw someone dressed like that carrying weapons in public I would absolutely call 911. I don’t care if it’s legal or not, I’m not doing my part to normalize violent guerrilla cosplay. Let the cops deal with it.
posted by lydhre at 8:03 AM on August 27, 2023 [9 favorites]

I don't think that using a car to kill someone is any more or less justifiable than a gun (though the law sometimes seems to disagree). So to me this is the same hypothetical that fuels the tacticool cosplay. These hypotheticals can always be turned around - if your target saw you driving towards him at high speeds, hypothetically he would be as justified if not more in killing you. So we are back to the same "kill or be killed" mentality that fuels modern second amendment thinking.
posted by muddgirl at 8:12 AM on August 27, 2023 [5 favorites]

Call 311 (police non-emergency line), explain the situation omitting the race of the individual, and let them make the decision on what to do. I'm pretty sure "hit him with your car" will not be the result. "Oh, that's just Bob" is more likely.
posted by Tell Me No Lies at 8:53 AM on August 27, 2023 [1 favorite]

What's my moral position if I run this guy down with my car?

You would be a murderer.

loony ... nut-case

That's two ableist slurs in the same sentence.

My advice to you is to stop engaging in violent fantasies. If you want to be a hero, volunteer, join your local mutual aid group, carry Narcan and learn how to administer it, etc. You don't have to kill people.
posted by splitpeasoup at 8:59 AM on August 27, 2023 [27 favorites]

This isn't some kind of interesting or complicated hypothetical, as far as I can see it. No, of course you're not justified in killing someone based on this. You'd be very justified in calling the store to warn them about what you saw and they might choose to activate whatever lockdown protocols they have. You would arguably be justified in calling the police, depending on a lot of things like open carry laws where you are and whether you live somewhere like the US where the police may make a situation like an armed asshole much worse.

You have zero moral justification for just running the armed asshole down yourself when he is not an active, immediate shooter threat.
posted by Stacey at 9:13 AM on August 27, 2023 [4 favorites]

And then there is always the chance that the guy in question is an idiot with a TikTok channel, and he is about to break into a song and dance routine in the parking lot on the theme of feeling unsafe in public...

There is a good chance you'd get away with it, if you ran him down because of the stand-your-ground laws. You end up in jail briefly before you went to trial and were acquitted, and you'd get marriage proposals and death threats from a bunch of unstable people before finishing up being a large feature on the third page of People magazine - unless he was a member of some law enforcement agency in which case, even if he had just killed his three children who were under the age of seven and was on his way into the store where his wife worked, you would end up with a very large and rapidly deploying swat team riddling you with bullets.
posted by Jane the Brown at 9:48 AM on August 27, 2023 [2 favorites]

There’s a third route no one’s discussed, which is to take the guy’s picture and put it up on Nextdoor to let people know he’s out there and potentially find out if anyone knows him (who could possibly intervene). Nextdoor is its own wretched hive of scum and villainy, but it can be pretty active in some communities and depending on the situation, community involvement can be a better way to de-escalate than cops. And could even potentially give someone inside the store a heads up.
posted by Mchelly at 10:36 AM on August 27, 2023 [2 favorites]

I would absolutely call 911. I don’t care if it’s legal or not

At the very least, calling 911 on someone behaving legally is a waste of resources. More broadly, it’s the same principle that has gotten a lot of unarmed people killed. You probably shouldn’t legitimize it.
posted by kevinbelt at 11:06 AM on August 27, 2023 [2 favorites]

Morally in an absence-of-law world I would say you are less justified by the lack of government patches than you would be by the presence of government patches. Statistically, people with government patches are more likely to kill people than otherwise. (MOVE bombing, anyone?)

But in seriousness, no, you're never morally justified in killing people you don't think are an imminent threat to your life or the lives of others, which the question you actually asked. If you want to hang around in your car until you feel they're an imminent threat, that's a different question.
posted by corb at 11:12 AM on August 27, 2023 [1 favorite]

At the very least, calling 911 on someone behaving legally is a waste of resources. More broadly, it’s the same principle that has gotten a lot of unarmed people killed. You probably shouldn’t legitimize it.

To put it simply: driving is also legal but if someone is driving erratically it is justified to call the police and have them checked out. Someone walking around with an AR-15 and body armor at the grocery store is the equivalent.

To put it even more simply: what’s the line for you? Carrying the weapon? Handling the weapon? Drawing the weapon? Firing the weapon?

Mine’s at armed displays intimidating folk in the parking lot.
posted by lydhre at 11:23 AM on August 27, 2023 [10 favorites]

You are asking what is moral while presenting a hypothetical where nearly everything about the object, the subject, and the context are unknown.

Your hypothetical is missing so much, it makes me want to ask you if you are OK.
posted by zippy at 12:39 PM on August 27, 2023 [4 favorites]

The answer is no. Do neither. You need to have a strong reason to call police. You need to have a really strong reason to run somebody over. The fact that you’re able to jump to conclusions about the person you see is really, really far from a strong reason.
posted by PaulVario at 1:27 PM on August 27, 2023

At the very least, calling 911 on someone behaving legally is a waste of resources.

Good thing that disturbing the peace is illegal then.
posted by Tell Me No Lies at 1:45 PM on August 27, 2023 [3 favorites]

I think some of these answers are being a bit harsh - the tragic shooting today in Jacksonville with an AR-15 started in a parking lot before the gunman entered a store. In America, it's sadly all too possible that one might find themselves in such a situation.

But like the OP suggests, there are different potential reasons that might be behind someone dressed that way - they might be undercover, you might have mistaken something else for the gun, they might merely be about to do a non-lethal robbery, etc.

Think of it in terms of worst case scenarios. The worst case for not killing the person is that you fail to prevent a mass shooting. That would feel pretty bad, but I bet you could forgive yourself for that - after all, you're not trained in this sort of thing, the ultimate responsibility rests on the shooter, etc. Meanwhile, the worst case scenario for killing someone is that they turn out to be innocent. That's an outcome that would be much, much, harder to live with.

I would at least call 311 in that instance though.
posted by coffeecat at 2:20 PM on August 27, 2023 [1 favorite]

if someone is driving erratically it is justified to call the police

Because reckless driving is illegal. In an open carry state, open carry is not.
posted by kevinbelt at 3:16 PM on August 27, 2023

if someone is driving erratically it is justified to call the police

Because reckless driving is illegal. In an open carry state, open carry is not.

Laws have little/nothing to do with morals in the USA at this point.
posted by MexicanYenta at 4:07 PM on August 27, 2023 [3 favorites]

If he was not attempting to commit murder at that instant, if your goal is to save lives, then calling 911 is appropriate.

If this particular individual was aiming or firing his gun at (unarmed) people, and you wished to save lives, you would likely be within your moral rights to attempt to disable him using all means available to you — including using your car.

Unfortunately, laws in the United States enable mass murderers to easily obtain and use assault and assault-style weapons, so the legal system of the state you are in would almost certainly and subsequently be directed to attack you, if you did this.

But if you are asking about the morality of such an action in that moment, you would be saving lives in the balance and there is a strong moral argument in defense of disarming a violent person who can quickly end a great number of lives.

It is unfortunate that mass shootings, such as the latest such gun-facilitated massacre in Jacksonville, make it necessary to consider these kinds of actions.
posted by They sucked his brains out! at 5:53 PM on August 27, 2023 [2 favorites]

Is a person dressed like that behaving in a moral way?
• No, they're clearly dressed like that in order to intimidate and threaten people.

Is a person dressed like that behaving in a legal way?
a) Yes, this is a clear display of their 1st and 2nd Amendment rights to speak freely and bear arms
b) No, this is a clear breach of the peace, but
c) Yes, in reality a breach of the peace needs law enforcement in the moment to agree that the person is breaching the peace, and involving law enforcement most likely means the police come for a quick rideout, go up to the person and say “that person over feels threatened by you, so don't threaten them directly, but we can't [unsaid: don't want to] stop you from doing this” and they both end up feeling validated and justified.

Are you right to feel angry?
• Yes, it's an outrageous situation.

Are you right to express anger?
• No, there's basically no outcome where that improves the situation at all.

Are you right to resort to thinking of your car as a weapon?
• Fuck, no. This is part of a much larger industrial system which profits massively from promoting its (far more actually useful) products as tools of intimidation and domination of public space, leading to the US having double the OECD average per capita number of killings by this method, just like it has double the murder rate.
posted by ambrosen at 9:21 PM on August 27, 2023 [2 favorites]

Jane the Brown: there is no chance that stand-your-ground laws would provide anything like a defense in the case discussed here. To rely on SYG law, the automobile driver would have to be pursuing self-defense in an objectively necessary way. Neither of those conditions are met here; subjective anxieties related to seeing people wearing costumes or carrying weapons are not enough.
posted by PaulVario at 5:41 AM on August 28, 2023 [3 favorites]

I have an acquaintance with an adopted daughter; they are of different races. Occasionally, some busybody witnesses the two of them together and calls the police; I think the caller typically suspects abduction, sex trafficking, or something similar. I am inclined to think that this illustrates one of the many, many large problems with “if you see something, say something” culture. On my more misanthropic days, it sometimes occurs to me that people who worry about child molestation but apparently cannot imagine transracial adoption should face some sort of consequences, but outside of shunning I am not sure what those could be.
posted by PaulVario at 5:51 AM on August 28, 2023 [1 favorite]

I actually saw some wacko open carrying like this in Needles CA at a grocery store. He even had those bullet suspenders things. Bunch of long guns. I got the heck out of there. I checked the news online - no mass shootings in the area thank god.
posted by The_Vegetables at 7:33 AM on August 28, 2023

So to me this is the same hypothetical that fuels the tacticool cosplay.

Cosigning. This sort of response to fear by fantasizing about being a hero and saving lives - specifically by TAKING lives - is exactly the same impulse that led your hypothetical person to walk around armed to the teeth. The only difference is he is fantasizing about killing people with some small high-speed pieces of metal, while you're fantasizing about doing it with one larger and relatively low-speed one. And it ignores so much - things like, unlike the movies, you won't know if the person intended to hurt someone, and you may indeed never know that. Things like, who else you might hurt when you find out that hitting someone makes you lose control of the vehicle. Things like, what additional violence might ensue as a result, because he jumps away in time, or because he has similarly armed friends you didn't see, or because the police now see you as a murderous threat, or because a day that would have ended sanely now ended with one person dead and another entering our violent prison system.

What actions would you take if you WEREN'T armed with an astonishing piece of weaponry that will allow you to hurt and kill others with minimal immediate risk to yourself? I would suggest that doing that, instead, is the moral act.
posted by solotoro at 1:32 PM on August 28, 2023 [1 favorite]

None if this gear has any government labels or patches on them

Private security is really common in the US, in your scenario it seems like you are grouping private security in with "no government patches". So no, I don't think you should run over someone who might be a security guard.

If you think there is a safety threat you should call 911, if possible from a place where it is safe for you to call. Not make things more complicated by committing a crime yourself. As to the idea of whether calling 911 is ethical based on whether or not there is a crime being committed, first of all we don't know in this scenario what the laws are in this location. There's also a lot of different things you could say when you call 911, for example if you are having urges to run someone over and having trouble resisting those it might be best to explain THAT situation to the 911 dispatcher as well.
posted by yohko at 4:00 PM on August 29, 2023