Israeli PM Benjamin Netanyahu has claimed that a heroic Jewish bystander saved Jewish lives during the Bondi Beach massacre by tackling one of the gunmen. In fact, the man who made the heroic intervention is a Muslim of Levantine descent who was shot twice in the process.
Ahmed El Ahmed, from Idlib in Syria according to a relative, went up unarmed against one of the attackers, wrested his gun away and turned it on the terrorist, forcing him to flee, as footage shown by Al Jazeera demonstrates…
Read the article or watch the video. He tackled him, took the gun but let the shooter flee
If he had fired there is a very real chance the police might have mistaken him for an active shooter. He was brave and/or foolish to tackle the terrorist but having disarmed him I think he did the right thing.
I would also argue that he should be allowed a breather after being shot twice and securing the gun. He did all that and you want more?
Have we considered that Australian police may have better trigger discipline than American ones?
Also, real talk: why are we armchair analyzing a shootout? Are we cooked?
You don’t have to, if you have something better to do. 😀
Ngl there is a lot of philosophical questions you would have to answer before even deciding to shoot or not.
“I am holding a gun for first time in my life what do I do”
“What if they were just recording a movie? The gun wouldn’t be real tho.
What if I just misunderstood in general?”
“I don’t want to kill someone but it’s self-defense but they are disarmed do I just shoot in ankle?”
“Is this even legal? Will I get in jail?”
“Overall panic thoughts”
Like I can’t know how situation feels but surely it’s not as easy as “point the nuzzle and just fucking kill someone on your lunch break.”
I was thinking the same thing when watching that video. The other thing I thought is what if they have another gun on them?
I thought this too. Like he points the gun at the guy but “I don’t know how to use this” and “I don’t know if I should use this” are clearly going through his mind ALL WHILE THE OTHER SHOOTER SHOOTS HIM TWICE (In the hand and the shoulder.)
Overall I think it’s better that he didn’t shoot him, in terms of “morals” or whatever, you got the gun off him, and thats all you were there to do. He was clearly fleeing after the incident, even though the shooter is an evil man, in that moment, he was unnarmed, pointing the gun at him was all that was needed.
Mission was accomplished by disarming him. Its not like he had a knife of was a kung fu master. He wasn’t going to continue on a mass punching. If he was running; even better.
Shooting the other shooter might’ve been smart, but if you aren’t kind of an asshole who’s lived a life of violence; that could, yes, be really hard to execute or conceptualize in the moment.
Exactly. Shooting someone is hard. You have to train people to do it. This guy clearly was mostly concerned with saving life. It’s really easy to imagine a scenario in which he charged and had no idea what to do when he got there
We watched the video of him pointing the gun at the gun man and debated about the fact that he could have just shot the guy and the public would have praised him for it.
But the debate was that … what would YOU have done? Most of us agreed that we would not have wanted the guilt of killing someone on our conscious, even if it were justified.
So the thing we settled on was … he should have shot him in the leg or the foot.
Leg shots aren’t any “better,” there’s arteries in there. Foot shots are better for not killing the guy, but they’re also better for missing and having a ricochet kill an innocent bystander. And both are still AWDW at best, attempted/successful murder at worst.
If you’re going to shoot (legally) it’s because you or someone else’s life is in immanent danger to the degree that if you don’t shoot the guy someone else will die or have permanent injury as a result of his actions, aiming for his feet can be argued by prosecutors as you “knowing” your life itself wasn’t in immediate danger, people have been convicted on that before. More importantly, the reason you’re trained to shoot for center mass is A) Aim small miss small, you’re more likely to actually hit center mass than a tiny moving foot and B) shots that hit center mass (with the appropriate ammo that you should be carrying for exactly this reason) are more likely to stay inside the attacker instead of over penetrating and endangering bystanders.
This situation would fall under the “protecting others” part, even having disarmed him, and would likely be covered by continuance of action. The shot would be legal.*
In any US state without a Duty to Retreat™, that does have Stand Your Ground®. Lord knows for AUS, idk their self defense laws at all.
Or he thought he was gonna face serious time if he shot the guy
He didn’t need to shoot him. He had a gun, which is a rather big leverage. He could threaten or in other way force him to stay there. There are other options.
Ah ok.
So… Like, I don’t want to split hairs here, but… it seems not much was accomplished then.
Kudos for the brass balls for sure, but best to follow through when you get the chance, otherwise, you know, a job half done…
Fuck off lol. The guy disarmed an active shooter for several minutes. Saving lives and letting people flee.
I don’t know.
He could probably get sued in America by people who the shooter hurt after the event…
I’m just spiting balls here. Doesn’t mean I mean it. There is something to it though, just enough…
The man is a hero sure.
We collectively agree (in principle at least) to give a monopoly on violence to a police force so that assholes don’t run around shooting whoever they think is a bad guy.
Judge Dredd is a fucking dystopia, pay attention.
Probably this sounded way cooler and made much more sense in your head than it does now that’s out 😀
Nah, I stand by that. Watch the video. The hero probably survived by not becoming another shooter, don’t trust cops not to overreact.
Also if he had it would have been a vigilante shooting at that point.
I still don’t know what you mean with anything you’ve said. Except the last part that cops might have shot him. But on the other hand two civilians actually got to the downed shooters before police. One was even mistakingly taken as a shooter and there was quite a mix-up there at the end. Still, police didn’t shoot.
The guy could have knock the guy in the head out something.
I’ve never heard the term spitting balls.
In this context I could see the use of the term spitballing. But maybe the former works too?
I thought I heard it on tv, maybe i misheard.
I’ve never used it like this before. Did it work like this, what do you think?
I would have used the term “spitballing” not “spitting balls.” I have never heard of the latter term.
I’ll do that thx.
It should be noted that unless you are actually properly trained/properly supervised on how to use the firearm you really shouldn’t be using it.
If the gentleman had any doubts about using that weapon for a lethal purpose, he was 100% correct in not pulling the trigger.
Even if his actions meant more people died?
Hopefully you aren’t ever put into such a situation where a split second choice means no matter which you pick someone says you were wrong. He should be praised for acting, period, and the discussion should then move to the incident itself. Not some, “well, actualllllyyy…”
Sure sure, he’s a hero.
But it’s a social media with mostly shitposts, so why not say stuff out loud if for nothing else than to sort these thoughts that are kind of presenting themselves. And they are.
I mean, it would be a way cooler story of the guy went all Rambo and dispatched both of them instead of just caused a short pause for one of them.
If you mean try and prepare all the readers for when they get into such a situation, that’s really stretching the purpose. It’s fine to question what you would have done in the same situation, it’s absolutely something everyone is thinking when they read it. But don’t critique the person who was there, they did what they did, regardless of the “best” options after days of reflection.
If this was a trolley problem, he only saw a trolley screaming down the track and a lever. How do you make a “good” decision in seconds when you don’t even know the results later? You see some guy with a gun, you either try to protect yourself or you see a brief opportunity to stop him. When you get the gun away, there’s another mystery trolley with all sorts of variables. He must be a peaceful person, as he chose the least aggressive choice. Is that bad?
I’m just saying there’s a fine line on a discussion board between speculation and judging. The real discussion should be why regular people are getting caught in such situations in the modern era. We should be better than this. But that’s a far broader talk than whether or not he should should have shot the guy.
I’m approaching this from another angle.
Like, we all know what happened was bad and there is 300 news networks praising this guy for tackling the shooter and everybody is saying thoughts and prayers and ,…
That’s all there. It’s been said many times and it will be said many more times by smarter more eloquent people than myself and anyone else that ever installed Lemmy.
Nothing anyone writes here will be read by more than a handful of people and it is completely and utterly inconsequential on an inconsequential social media platform.
So why not go for something a bit more original and have a “drunk” philosophical debate about a “trolley problem” like this without some self-righteous outrage at a person for starting it.
No one has stopped you from making your points. We just disagree on them. There’s your discussion. The caveat of free expression means others can tell you you’re wrong, or even that you shouldn’t be saying such things. Your best defense is to show why they’re wrong. I’ll leave it to everyone who reads this thread to determine if that goal has been met.
Yes. Better to have one crazy guy shooting than one crazy guy and one untrained guy shooting.
Your equation doesn’t work. It’s more like:
It’s better to have a crazy guys shooting at everyone than one untrained guy shooting at the unarmed crazy guy…?
I think you will agree that it’s better to have three untrained guy shooting at the unarmed crazy guy.
But it’s not really about shooting. The armed person has incredible power over the unarmed one. They don’t need to shoot, they have other options.
Not really, an untrained shooter is almost as much a danger to the very people they are trying to protect if they do not know how to properly control the weapon.
I beg to differ. I don’t think it could have gotten any worse than the shooter going back to their stack of weapons and continuing the murder spree.
Can you describe your worst scenario?
The untrained shooter loses control on their weapon and fires into the crowd thus doubling the amount of damage done. The weapon fails to function properly and in his attempts to clear the stoppage the untrained shooter ends up misfiring into the crowd or he injures himself. Under stress, the untrained shooter has no idea what to do and continues to fire.