[MaggieL]

Originally posted by Joe
As a gun owner you will be held to a higher standard than someone else, because you will be responsible for making snap life-or-death decisions during times of stress.

Of course.

But there are limits. Look, everybody who gets behind the wheel of a car is required to "make snap life-or-death decisions in times of stress". I do the same when I climb in the cockpit of an airplane.

But *here* we have people who piled into a car, who weren't under stress at all, and had all *kinds* of time to decide *not* to do something stupid and dangerous to other people.

Of course, if they figure out it might be dangerous to *them*, they're a bit more disinclined to do it. That's why this crap happens in states like California and New Jersey, where the citizens have been disarmed.

The pinhead in Utah (where the right of self-defense is still preserved somewhat) thought he was safe; he said he shot at a victim who looked too young to be armed. As it turned out, he was wrong, and somehow he's having trouble interesting the police in finding his victims.

Isn't *that* a shame? Not.

In the video mentioned earlier (have you seen it?) , the vicitims (especially the ones riding bicycles) could very well have been killed in the resulting accidents. And shooting someone wearing no vision protection with a paintball can blind them; that's why paintballers wear vision protection.

The legal standard here for justified use of deadly force in self-defence is "the actor believes that such force is necessary to protect himself against death, serious bodily injury, kidnapping or sexual intercourse compelled by force or threat" I'd consider being blinded a "serious bodily injury". I bet dham agrees. He lost vision in one eye when someone shot him with a "toy gun".

If you cannot tell a paintball gun from a real gun, may I suggest some additional firearms safety classes and maybe some time on a paintball range getting shot with paintballs.

Nonsense. It's not my job in life to anticipate *every* idiot thing someone might do, and train to protect them from the consequences of their actions.

If there's any lack of training or responsibility here, it's on the part of the shooter. Maybe paintball guns should have a warning label: "Caution: people you shoot at may shoot back". I doubt it would have helped though.

Someone who assaults me, or anybody else, is by their actions just plain assuming the risk that their victim is not armed, or that they might not figure out that the paintgun is (probably) nonlethal, or that the victim might reasonable belive that they were in danger of serious bodily injury. There's just no fricken excuse for shooting at some random person in the street. Not even adolescence.

That way when some complete idiot shoots you with a toy gun in a spasm of stupidity...

A paintball gun is not a toy.

It is perhaps unrealistic to hope that someone more mature might be able, in a split second, to do enough thinking for two people at once, and save the day.

*Hoping* for such a thing is not unreasonable. Hope doesn't have anything to do with "being realistic"; you can hope for all sorts of improbable things.

But *expecting* it, and basing your behavior on those expectations, is not. We're all responsible for doing *our own* thinking. Somebody who's going to go through life relying on other people to do his thinking for him is both deluded and dangerous.

"Spasms of stupidity" frequently *are* lethal in the real world. What *I* hope for is that most "spasms of stupidity" are lethal mainly to the person *being* stupid, rather than to the innocent people around them.

That happens too often.