Quote:
Originally posted by Mouse:
The difference is that in the second example, the force I used was far beyond what was reasonable given the circumstances and in a civilised society, I believe it's the judicial system or legislature to decide what constitutes reasonableness in any particular situation, not the individual.
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Exactly. We shouldn't feel as if we automatically have a right and think that it's okay within the law to respond with excessive violence when you're trying to correct someone who in any way violates the law, while a lot less violent reaction would have sufficed just as easily.
To drag an example of this into this debate, I'd like to refer to a
post I made earlier this week (yeah yeah, I know, but I spent two hours on that post and no one bothered to respond to it so far - do I sound bitter?
), trying to explain why I think playing a judge with excessive violence of your own to correct someone who violated the law - while a more subtle approach would have solved the problem just the same - is just wrong.
With a few small differences (as the cases are naturally not entirely the same), I think the following excerpt from that post is dead on on some points in this case:
Quote:
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Standing up for one another is definitely a good thing, but it's not a carte blanche to act like a violent criminal yourself in the process - taking advantage of the situation to play your own violent judge, vent all of your bottled-up frustrations and anger on an already captured and neutralized thief - frustrations which may not even have that much to do with the thief himself, but are based on paranoia and earlier experiences - and later refer to it as "self-defense" or "just" is what I refer to as "excessive".
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[ 06-21-2003, 11:40 AM: Message edited by: Grojlach ]