A 20-year-old has been shot dead allegedly taking part in a "prank" robbery being filmed for YouTube.
Witnesses told police Timothy Wilks and a friend had approached a group of people outside a family trampoline park in Nashville, holding large knives. Mr Wilks was then shot by a 23-year-old, who told police he had had no idea it had been a "prank" and had been acting in self-defence.
Mr Wilks's friend told officers the "prank" had been for a YouTube video.
What kind of maniac would do something like that in Nashville, of all places? Even in this country you'd have to be daft because it's only going to take someone spotting you, and your massive knives, through their window, spending two minutes on the blower with the police and you end up staring down the barrel of PC Mad Daz's MP5. It's very sad he's died, but I guess it never occured to him that most prank videos are filmed in Los Angeles, where the guns are few and the heatstroke is chronic.
Is it? He ran at a group of strangers with a butcher knife and one of them rightfully shot him, he sounds like a cunt. I hope his death serves as a warning to others.
> Mr Wilks was then shot by a 23-year-old, who told police he had had no idea it had been a "prank" and had been acting in self-defence
I'm not sure if that puts him in the clear. Self-defence laws don't normally differentiate between real and fake attacks, what counts is if a victim could reasonably believe that the threat was real. But even if you wrongly believe that somebody is actually attacking you, shooting and killing a person who is wielding a knife could be seen as excessive. In Britain, it would probably count as unreasonable force. If you're good enough with guns, it'd probably be best to aim for the attacker's hand to disarm them, if all you have to defend yourself with is a gun. That way, it's very likely that the attacker will at least live.
But I guess what matters is what the law actually says in that state. In some areas of the U.S., you are allowed to shoot, and if necessary kill a burglar who breaks into your home under stand-your-ground laws.
Two of them, with 'large knives'?
The friend must be having some interesting feelings at the moment. Daft cunt.
I'm not normally of the 'it'll discourage others' approach to 'justice', but in this case, it might.
What, exactly, did they expect to happen during a robbery? Big hugs and a laugh afterwards? Sharing the youtube revenue with the unwitting victims?
>>31008 There have been numerous occasions where the right to self defence in the home has been reasserted in the UK. I can find no mention of these burglars being armed at all and the victims who shot them were not prosecuted.
>>31008 >In Britain, it would probably count as unreasonable force
I'm pretty fucking sure there's not a court in the land that would agree with that. The previous self-defence with a firearm cases all turn on firing on people fleeing, have been caught in mantraps or are already down.
>>31008 > If you're good enough with guns, it'd probably be best to aim for the attacker's hand to disarm them, if all you have to defend yourself with is a gun.
No one (to a reasonable approximation) is that good under stress.
My understanding is that in the Colonies you can just yell 'He's coming right for us' before shooting and you've got yourself an airtight legal defense.
>>31014 Yeah, no idea why they said to try and aim for the specific hand instead of just going for the legs. And even then the legs are still a dodgy target. Warning shots allowed?
>>31015 I think that is fair. All this nonsense about aiming for hands just sounds downright ridiculous. Are you lads sheltered too? Have any of you been caught up in a violent situation? A mugging? Life isn't a quick time event with a checkpoint to fall back to.
>>31008 >In Britain, it would probably count as unreasonable force
I don't know what law degree you have but it is toilet paper.
They were running at them wielding knives, what would you infer from this situation? What would the reasonable person infer? Is there any good reason why in the middle of the street someone should be running at you with a knife without an expressed intent to harm, and if there were (i.e it is just a prank bro) how would you distinguish between those 2 before it was too late? What do you think the probability would be that it wasn’t just a knife wielding thug, and just someone acting identical to one?
Consider also the following it is just a prank bro, could very well be just an alibi for if they were caught in their crimes, and even if it was genuine do you think it is a reasonable excuse for intimidation with a deadly weapon.
>it'd probably be best to aim for the attacker's hand to disarm them, if all you have to defend yourself with is a gun. That way, it's very likely that the attacker will at least live.
And what if they were to miss? or the person were to just use their other hand, or like in recent daft militant wog attacks in London they had the weapon taped to their hand to make them incapable of disarming. All of these things would have to be considered within the tiny reaction time they would have before this person might kill them or any of their friends and they might no longer have a clean shot.
Put it another way, this person has already committed themselves to running at strangers with a knife unprovoked, it is reasonable to assessment to assume they are not amenable to a mere warning shot.
No the law would very much find this reasonable self-defence and you would need an extremely racist jury (the shooter was black and the knife wielder was white) for it not just result in Jury nullification if they were presented with the argument by the court that they should convict.
>it'd probably be best to aim for the attacker's hand to disarm them
Nope. If the police ever decide to shoot you, they shoot to kill - if you can't justify using lethal force, you can't justify using a gun. If someone threatens you with a knife at close quarters, you 100% have a legitimate argument that it's a matter of him or you, unless you know that he's not actually going to use it.
On a purely practical level, it's absurdly difficult to intentionally shoot a moving target in the arm and there's a vastly greater risk of missing or over-penetrating and hitting a bystander.
>>31023 > If the police ever decide to shoot you, they shoot to kill
For police in the UK that's definitely the procedure, but if you're in a position where a firearms unit has been called in then the fact that you're a 100% legitimate threat is (usually*) established.
I don't know if their procedure has changed in the last decade or so but when I lived there the Dutch police were trained take a shot at the legs of a knife wielding attacker if they had the space to do so; if that shot missed or failed to stop the assailant then they would shoot for the centre of mass, as most police units are trained to do.
* Except when you're just carrying a table leg in a plastic bag, or guilty of being Brazilian while on the tube or something.
As far as I understand Yank law, perspectives, gun safety education and so on (I watch a fair bit of gun YouTube)- There's no such thing as a warning shot. A shot fired is a shot that is considered, for all intents and purposes, intended to kill. Firearms are a lethal weapon and therefore using one in any way, beyond just pointing it at someone and saying "fuck off, I have a gun" is considered an act of lethal force.
From the perspective of the law it's just so people can't say "I didn't mean to hit him/only meant to his his leg!" or whatever predictable shit if they're found to have acted unlawfully, and from a safety perspective to gun owners it's about not playing silly buggers when you could injure or kill somebody you didn't mean to.
In the case of 'reasonable force' to defend one's home, there are two notable cases - Tony Martin, who shot a teenage gyppo in the back with an unlicensed shotgun and served three years for manslaughter before going on to join the BNP; and Munir Hussain, who incapacitated a burglar and then proceeded to inflict such a beating with a cricket bat he gave him brain damage and ended up (on appeal) with a suspended sentence.
After that David Cameron changed the law to "grossly disproportionate" force, and I can't think of any prosecutions since.
I can't give you legal rationale behind it but in the US firing a gun, without intending to actually hit anything (e.g. a warning shot) would come under reckless use of a firearm / unlawful discharge of a weapon. You are absolutely correct about what it boils down to, though: No warning shots.
>>31026 I can understand the reasoning behind it, it just sounds absolutely mental in practice considering that actually hearing a gun go off will certainly make some people stop, and avoid a potentially fatal incident. Unless I'm making a fundamentally incorrect assumption about how most people operate...
Presumably could just say your aim was affected by adrenaline if you're charged with an unlawful discharge?
This all seems so dodgy, like the safest possible way for it to end is to make sure that someone gets unambiguously shot.
What do you think a warning shot communicates that brandishing a gun doesn't? You could just as easily say it indicates a reluctance if not unwillingness to injure.
I know it's Texas but I'm still a little taken aback by how the police weren't interested in even talking to the guy who brandished a gun to defend his vehicle from a bumper magnet.
You say warning shot, the law says negligent discharge. As >>31045 says, it doesn't actually achieve anything. It also creates a huge risk to bystanders. Bullets can ricochet unpredictably and with lethal energy off any hard surface, they can penetrate thin walls and a bullet fired into the air will fall back to earth with lethal energy, potentially several miles from where you fired it.
A wedding party in Serbia once accidentally shot down a light aircraft.
>>31051 Fire directly into the ground. At a steep enough angle the ground will take the force of the bullet rather than deflect it and you'll just get a deformed chip of metal bouncing a short distance into the air in front of you.
A single gun bullet will not normally cause the fuselage of a passenger plane to fail catastrophically like you see in some action movies. You'll have a hole either in the fuselage skin or a window, and there might be loads of wind noise, but unless that one bullet damages vital wiring or hydraulics in its path, it should be possible to land the plane safely.
Anybody who's stupid enough to take the chance would probably have to fire a semiautomatic weapon or a machine gun directly at vulnerable areas inside the plane to cause parts of the fuselage to tear off in mid-flight. But weapons of that size will realistically be many times more difficult to sneak past security than a small handgun already is.
Even if the hole did somehow cause explosive decompression, any vaguely modern passenger jet is designed to survive such an event; only one person died when the roof came off on Aloha Airlines Flight 243.
Shooting through wiring or hydraulic tubing shouldn't have any serious effect, because those systems are fully redundant.
>>31070 It doesn't matter if there's an explosion in one of the wings because just like the wiring they're fully redundant and there'd be a fully functional wing on the opposite side.
The plane will just lose a bit of fuel. The aircrew would call an emergency and divert to the nearest suitable airport as a matter of precaution, but it's basically no big deal.
The person who died was sucked out of a very small hole, got stuck halfway out (which caused the whole thing to fail) and got their head smashed in on the side of the plane. You can see the blood in pictures, as well as the dent made by her skull.
The flight was between two islands in Hawaii, where that plane was in daily operation. There was a documentary about it on TV once, and they said that because the plane was serving those short-distance routes several times a day, it did many more takeoffs and landings than other planes, and that therefore the structural wear and tear was much greater than anybody had considered.
It was specifically corrosion in the epoxy seal on the fuselage that caused the initial failure. Stress was put into the rivets instead, which caused microcracks in the fuselage. This was missed due to hurried and lax safety checks by the airline.
The FAA concluded it was just that which caused the explosion, but I still favour the fluid hammer theory.
If the whole ten minute video was played back at actual speed, it'd be over in 0.015 seconds. If you played it on a loop, you'd miss at least twenty repeats every time you blinked.
