Guest post: Nobody asked for this tragedy
Originally a comment by Der Durchwanderer on Reward.
Indeed, there is an awful lot of armchair generaling and Monday morning quarterbacking going on, not just in this thread but all over, almost all of it from people who have never been placed in mortal peril by another human being and who have no training in self-defense. I freely admit that I have relatively little experience with such peril, and have thus far only had the merest physical training, though I have read fairly extensively on the philosophy of self-defense and had discussions with people who’ve trained much more thoroughly than I have.
The first duty in any altercation where you believe your life or health to be in jeopardy is to retreat and escape. Running should always be your first resort, if it is at all possible to flee.
Failing that, the second duty is to de-escalate, to use any means of rhetoric and persuasion, or simple compliance (e.g., giving up your money or valuables without resistance to a mugger) to convince your assailant to back off or otherwise leave you in peace.
Failing that, the third duty is to intimidate your assailant; to present them with a counter-threat such that, if they are rational, they will think twice before pursuing an attack. This can include brandishing a weapon (with the caveat that you should never, ever, EVER draw a weapon you are not prepared to use), confidently squaring off against the assailant, or screaming and making a racket to intimidate them and hopefully draw some attention from passersby (though in crowded cities almost everyone ignores such rackets).
Failing that, however, your last duty is to survive a physical altercation with someone who is intent to do you harm. This generally means you have to subdue the assailant with overwhelming, sudden, decisive force. Most real physical fights are decided in seconds and by centimetres, with one wrong move dooming one of the participants to defeat.
In a real physical altercation, one can run through this four-part checklist in a fraction of a second. And if you are not being directly threatened yourself but are instead acting on behalf of others, people weaker and more vulnerable than you, retreat and flight become much more complicated still.
Life is not a video game; there are no do-overs, no power rankings or levels, no way to tell with certainty how strong or trained or be-weaponed an assailant is until it is quite probably too late and you wind up with a shank in your gut or a bullet in your skull. There are many martial arts such as Brazilian Jiu-Jitsu or Aikido which emphasise non-lethal detention of an assailant, but these arts require years of dedicated training to confidently employ.
Neely’s death is a tragedy, as was his life, and Penny is certainly no comic-book superhero. The fact that he is being fêted by the MAGA crowd, who are just using the both of them as cultur-war pawns, is moderately disgusting — Penny is himself just as much a victim of circumstance as was Neely, and I doubt he relishes or revels in having taken a human life…or, at least, I like to think he doesn’t.
Nevertheless, given a sober account of the facts of this case (not unlike a sober account of the facts of the Rittenhouse case a few years back), there is no other conclusion than that Penny acted in a legally (and morally) defensible manner when he intervened in an altercation between a raving lunatic and a terrified mother and child, and the death of the assailant was a tragic contingency of the altercation. It should not have happened, but the chain of causation and culpability stretches a long way back and does not deserve to fall squarely on Penny’s shoulders. Yes, Penny and his fellow intervening passengers might have been able to subdue Neely without killing him, but it is also quite possible that if any of them had relented, at least one of them could be dead. Nobody asked for this tragedy, not even really Neely — or at least, not a Neely who hadn’t been ravaged by homelessness and drugs and despair.
Both Penny and Neely are symptoms of a diseased society which is obviously mouldering from the inside, where technocrats craft algorithms into the future whilst living hand-to-mouth in shoebox apartments that should’ve been condemned decades ago, and walk through streets and ride on trains and buses evermore crowded with the cast-offs of this brave new world.
Yes, people are starting to get sick of mentally-ill homeless people turning their commutes and their recreation into harrowing affairs. They are sick of economists and politicians telling them they live in the best, richest, freest, most democratic societies the world has ever known even as the ostensible governing bodies of those societies seek to impoverish and perhaps even imprison their citizens if they dare to claim otherwise. They are sick of having to pay forty percent of their take-home pay on rent for a squalid tenement in neighbourhoods constantly reeking of human urine, where the likelihood of getting accosted or assaulted by a deranged drug-addict only seems to be going up, and where nobody seems to have any idea how to make any of it better but by God they’ll call you a fascist if you point out that this state of affairs is unacceptable.
Most of these people still consider themselves quite progressive, at least for now, and most of them probably hate Penny and Trump (and Rittenhouse and Musk and Rogan and all the other progresive bug-bears, past and present). But people can only take so much cognitive dissonance, and society can only take so much shrugging disdain for the very concept of order or the rule of law or the social contract. Eventually even these direct victims of the rot of modernity will not be able to square their ideology with the reality they must wade through on a daily basis, and they will demand that something be done.
We had better hope that liberalism can do that something, because we do not want to see what the other guys have in mind.
I don’t dispute hardly any of that… My only niggle is that the state failed to enforce its monopoly on legitimate violence. That is why Penny should have faced sanction; you’re not allowed to kill people unless you’re the police. If you are in fact allowed to kill people if you’ve got a sympathetic jury (dunno how you go from a hung jury on manslaughter to them acquit on the entirely appropriate charge of negligent homicide, but people are stupid and fickle after all) then the state’s monopoly doesn’t actually exist and more disorder is inevitable.
The Punisher shouldn’t be welcome (but I see his T-shirts fucking everywhere).
I will urge anyone who really thinks “decisions” are something that happens during a stressful, quickly unfolding situation to try playing a competitive first person shooter at some point. Doesn’t map 1:1 with real life but it’s at least a facsimile of what that’s like.
This one was decided with grappling. The assailant was wrapped up, immobilised, defeated. He stopped struggling, and some time afterward stopped living. Unconsciousness takes only seconds when a choke is locked in, death minutes. Plenty of time to notice the man limp and unresponsive, plenty of safety in relenting the choke and checking for vitals.
Penny was brave to intervene, but claiming all that followed was inevitable is silly, and lauding the guy as Trump is doing is lunacy.
Eli Steele has just written a piece on this in Quillette, and it is well worth a read.
[For anyone unfamiliar with Eli Steele he is best known for the documentary film made with his father, Shelby Steele, about the death of Michael Brown in Ferguson. The film “What killed Michael Brown?” is now available in full on Youtube. When it was first released, at the height of the George Floyd moral panic, Amazon refused to host it, claiming (ludicrously) that it didn’t meet their standards; what they meant was that it wasn’t in line with the prevailing woke viewpoint.]
“you’re not allowed to kill people unless you’re the police.” Every “justification” or “self defense” statute that I know about permits the use of deadly force by civilians under prescribed circumstances (such as when necessary to repel the use or imminent threat of of deadly force against oneself or others).
@ 3 –
Or to put it another way, “Oh look, I’ve found a pretext for sneering at what I call ‘the George Floyd moral panic’ yet again.”
I don’t know about all this series of duties. It doesn’t make a lot of sense to me. I’d list duties in the face of physical threat differently, and more simply:
1. Protect you and yours.
2. Protect innocent bystanders.
3. Protect the person who is causing the physical threat.
Yes, one has an affirmative moral as well as legal obligation not to harm someone who is attacking them if that is avoidable. In a sane, peaceful society, a lot of aggression originates from people who are non compos mentis, whether because of alcohol, other drugs, or mental illness. Other times, aggression may come from people who are overwrought about some sort of dispute which may wane in importance over time. If you can avoid hurting them, you have a better chance of resolving things later.
I recommend grappling training (specifically, BJJ) as a less lethal form of self-defense training than all the kicky-punchy sorts. If you are a large fellow, like I am, one punch may actually kill a person, either by direct or secondary impact. For that reason, I do not recommend ever punching other people, especially if you are very large. This is what I have taught my kids, and it is the rule I have followed in physical altercations since I was fifteen and unintentionally broke some guy’s ribs. Broken ribs suck, and I should have been more careful in defending myself.
It’s correct that #1 can frequently be accomplished by the simple expedient of running. In the case we’re talking about, that was impossible. Penny may not have felt at immediate physical threat from Neely, as he is a large and capable man. He did, however, have an affirmative moral obligation (#3) to protect bystanders from the clear physical threat Neely was presenting. Other passengers were terrified; a mother was protecting her child from Neely physically. Penny and other passengers did right in using grappling techniques to restrain Neely. They may have saved lives by doing so. He was an upstander, not a bystander; well done there.
Did Penny’s chokehold lead directly to Neely’s death through overdoing it? The question of timing on a chokehold is complicated by the fact that Neely kept struggling and breaking free, and by the fact that Neely switched among different types of restraint – a wind choke (compressing the windpipe and preventing breathing), a blood choke (compressing arteries and inhibiting bloodflow to the brain), and just a headlock. The assertion that Neely applied a blood choke and then held it too long is plausible, but cannot be proven. Alternative explanations for Neely’s demise are also plausible, and in a criminal trial the bar is well above plausibility.
Penny deserved to be acquitted, and he acted rightly in restraining Neely. Where he went wrong is possibly (not provably) in holding on too long. Where he demonstrably went wrong is in allowing himself to be politically coopted by appearing in photos with Trump and crew. That seems (as everything Trump does) too much like gloating. It was inappropriate and ungentlemanly, and foolish, as it may complicate his civil trial.
I’ve introduced several people to basic trap shooting. One thing that often happens is they’ll shoot once and then find that the shotgun won’t fire the second shot, no matter how hard they squeeze the trigger. Some of them even try to turn to me, and I have to physically hold the muzzle downrange. There’s nothing wrong with the gun or the ammunition—they simply were so overwhelmed by the pressure that they couldn’t release the trigger enough to allow it to reset for the second squeeze. This has even happened when it’s just me and one other person in a field out in the middle of nowhere. That’s how little pressure it takes to fluster an adult to the point of being unable to perform simple motor operations and almost pointed a loaded shotgun at a person three feet away with a finger squeezing the trigger. It’s not a scored competition, not a pheasant hunt, and certainly not a life-or-death defensive situation in which any action or inaction can be suddenly lethal. Nothing is hidden, nothing unknown, no need to worry about whether someone has a weapon that could kill you or someone else before you have time to fumble with your safety.
I’ve personally seen grown men wrestling and one not realize that he cut off the other’s breathing until a third party broke them up—because he saw the second man’s shorts go dark with urine.
One of the most common causes of car crashes is that drivers get flustered and put their feet on the wrong pedal. They try to stop, but instead of slamming the brakes, they floor the throttle. And they don’t even realize they’re doing it. The trap shooters are the same way. They aren’t even aware of what they’re doing. The stress of the moment shuts off the executive function required.
Stress impairs performance, awareness, and decision making much more easily, quickly, and severely than most people realize. Sure, we have the phrase “armchair quarterback”, but few really understand the depth of the advantage afforded by the armchair or why athletes (and police, and soldiers, and surgeons, and debaters, and on and on) train so much, repeat the same prescribed series of actions so often. You do on the field what you train in the gym. If your range training requires that you immediately raise your hand and set down your weapon whenever you have a misfire or some other mechanical failure, then that’s exactly what you’re going to do in an actual firefight—and you’re going to get shot. Everyone has a plan until they get punched in the face, which is why boxers have their coaches in their corners constantly reminding them of the plan.
BKiSA:
The State has never had a total monopoly on violence. Self-defense has always been a potential justification for violence, even lethal violence, and the legal principle applies not just to the self, but to others nearby whom one may defend.
[…] a comment by Nullius in Verba on Nobody asked for this […]
The word “legitimate” is a word doing some heavy lifting for me here; I’m willing to make a lot of allowances for self-defense, but freedom from legal consequences for killing someone not brandishing a weapon (and thus not presenting a clear and present danger) just because you get a sympathetic jury isn’t one of them. I’m not making an argument that Penny “should’ve known better” because I don’t believe thinking was something you do in that kind of situation.
This is why I’m making my argument on principles, not people. Lawless behavior must be seen to be sanctioned. Be kind to the man at the sentencing hearing, but convict him of negligent homicide thus preserving the state’s legitimacy as an arbiter of the law.
If that were true he would have foregone the opportunity to be photographed grinning like a MAGAhat loon with Trump and Vance at a sporting event.
Penny is grabbing his 15 minutes and will take as much out of it as he can.
The jury’s verdict on Penny is probably correct in the circumstances. But I don’t think that anyone who had a shred of honour or self-respect would allow himself to be feted by such as Trump & Vance. The lack of a sense of honour and self-respect seems common nowadays, both among the people who accept being feted and among those who provide it. The spectacle of the right grovelling before that pathetic, grifting boy, Kyle Rittenhouse, or scurrying to absolve Derek Chauvin was not a pretty one.
That, and also being photographed looking all footbally and festive and happy…ugh.