‘Please proceed, governor Mr. Trump’

Please do not go buy a lottery ticket or play the stock market today ;-)

Update: https://www.huffpost.com/entry/youtube-prankster-shot-tanner-cook_n_65172885e4b0a69113b4c9ce

https://www.huffpost.com/entry/youtube-prankster-shot-tanner-cook_n_65172885e4b0a69113b4c9ce

OH! NO!

Anyway.

That’ll be for a jury to decide.

[shrug] I guess not. Then again, you can be shot in many parts of the body, recover, and live normally. But a solid crack(s) to the head can fuck you up for life, or just kill you. Same for stabbing. Get suck in the right place, “ouch”, get stuck in the wrong place and you bleed out in pretty easy. Read up on the stabs to the abdominal descending aorta. Or don’t, you might be more freaked out hahaha

Bottom line, I’ll pass on them all thank you very much

Yup, you figured out the math. That’s what we’re all saying.

Wrap it up everyone, we’ve been outed.

Or maybe, and I know I’m a broken record at this point, but maybe it’s one threat for one attempt to eliminate that threat.

You REALLY need to stop focusing on the intent of the fucktard prankster and put yourself in the shoes of the victim threatened with assault.

https://www.law.cornell.edu/wex/assault

ASSAULT

Assault is generally defined as an intentional act that puts another person in reasonable apprehension of imminent harmful or offensive contact. No physical injury is required, but the actor must have intended to cause a harmful or offensive contact with the victim and the victim must have thereby been put in immediate apprehension of such a contact.

“Intention” in the context of assault, means that the act is not accidental, but motive is immaterial.
    It does not matter if the goal of the tortfeasor was merely to scare the victim or if the act was meant as a joke.
    The tortfeasor need not have intended for the contact to be harmful or offensive, only to have intended the actual contact.
“Reasonable apprehension” in the context of assault, refers to the victim’s reasonable belief that the act will lead to imminent harmful or offensive contact.
    The victim does not need to prove fear, only that they were aware that such a contact might occur. If the victim and the tortfeasor do not know each other, then the legal standard is what an ordinary reasonable person under the same circumstances as the victim would have believed.
    If the victim and tortfeasor have special knowledge of each other, this special knowledge may be considered when determining whether the victim’s apprehension was reasonable.
“Imminent” in the context of assault, means the threatened harmful or offensive contact must be certain or likely to occur very soon.
“Harmful or offensive” in the context of assault, is an objective standard referring to touching that is likely to or capable of causing harm or offending a reasonable person by violating prevailing social standards of acceptable touching.
    However, an otherwise inoffensive contact may be deemed offensive if the tortfeasor knew the victim was unusually averse to such a contact.
    There is some disagreement among jurisdictions in regard to the role of consent.

haha [shrug] yeah I dunno. it was an interesting diversion I guess. But really the problem is pistol whipping means staying close to the target; it puts you at risk of losing your weapon to your attacker. It is, to put it bluntly, counter to good advice and training. If you pull your weapon you’re escalating the situation. You pull it, you better be prepared to use it. And you better put distance between yourself and the target to avoid them grappling and putting you at risk of being shot. You simply do not pull a gun out with the intent to swing it at the threat. It isn’t a baseball bat.

If we’re talking “ideal” situations here, an argument could be made to pull your weapon while backing away and warning your attacker to stay back. The problem is that requires a LOT of training to stay calm enough to do that. For most people it’s just going to be, “fuck fuck fuck fuck BANG fuck fuck fuck fuck” and assuming the threat was reasonable (I’m talking generally now and not debating this situation) then it would be understandable and defensible. Someone turning around in your driveway is NOT “fuck fuck fuck fuck” defensible in my own personal opinion. If someone’s THAT scared of the world, they don’t need a gun, they need therapy.

Nope, 51yo average sized male with a military career and enough life experience to know it doesn’t take very long for things to escalate very quickly. 30 seconds is an ETERNITY if you feel threatened.

He isn’t annoying, he’s threatening. Big matters because it amplifies the threat. If Cook was 5’ 70lb 16yo female that would be an entirely different dynamic. Of course if a 5’ 70lb person had their own weapon then we wouldn’t be talking about their size we’d be talking about their weapon. In this case being 6’5" is it’s own potential weapon in the eyes of someone who feels threatened.

I guess I do need this explained to me. I need it explained to me how you don’t understand “phone in your face” is not all that happened. Cook was told to stop, didn’t. Cook was retreated from, for THIRTY FEET (from the news video), and continued to approach Colie. How do YOU not get that can be very threatening to someone? Cook’s own admission that his goal is to “confuse” people is an admission that Colie could have been confused about what was happening and what Cook’s intent was. At that point self-defense = what’s needed to eliminate the threat.

Yes any reasonable person can feel threatened by a 6’5" adult male approaching them, being told to stop, not stopping, and continuing to be pursued while trying to back away from the situation.

But here’s the good news. You and I clearly disagree about what can reasonably be considered a threat that warrants self-defense to eliminate the threat*. And it doesn’t matter. A judge and Jury will get to decide which one of us has the more cogent argument.

• note that I am intentionally not naming the method used to eliminate the threat. The fact that a gun was used is actually not the point here. If Colie picked up a baseball bat sitting on the floor and beat Cook to death with multiple strikes while he lay on the ground I’d be agreeing it was excessive force and might need a closer look. Just like if he had taken a 2nd shot while Cook lay on the ground. But he didn’t. He fired one shot to eliminate the threat. That might not have been a rational thought in his mind at the time, but it’s what happened. Odds are he scared himself from the actual shot; but I don’t know.

Yes he was.

replace “pistol whipped” with “used whatever means available to neutralize the threat” and the answer would be “yes, legal”

I don’t know if there are laws that say striking someone in self-defense with a hunk of metal fashioned into a gun is less allowable than the nearest heavy object. But I could be wrong, maybe there really is a weird law that says you can’t legally hit someone with your gun when you could have otherwise legally hit them with something else in self-defense.

“but they had a gun, how threatened could they have felt?” would fail to recognize the scenario when someone is clearly being threatened and then has a choice to pull their weapon and fire or swing. But I also think that’s just so much hollywood, pulling out your gun and then pistol whipping someone with it. That would also go against any gun training.

He eliminated the threat. That I can agree with. Training says shot center of mass until the threat is gone.

Unlike you and all your upvoters, I’m glad the shit bag is still alive.

I’m glad the real victim didn’t so something stupid (but maybe understandable in a high-enough threat posture) of shooting again; that would have made his defense much more difficult.

One shot was all that was needed. Heck even if he had missed, that would likely have been all that was needed since I assume (a risk I know) fuck bag prankster has at least enough self-preservation brain cells to un-ass from the scene once the loud bangs start to happen.

The difference here is this isn’t someone stealing a TV, and this isn’t someone being shot / almost killed just for a prank. You have the order of operations and perspective wrong. Colie and what he intended literally doesn’t matter.

What matters is this was someone who felt threatened by a 6’5" menace who approached him, engaged him in an aggressive manner, who didn’t stop when asked, and who continued to pursue when backed away from. Result: the threatened person did what they needed to eliminate the threat. If they intended to kill they could have shot again, but didn’t. If they didn’t have a gun they would have been equally justified in beating the shit out of the attacker until they felt safe. How easy that might be for most of the “prank” victims against a 6’5" male is an open question.

Someone stealing my TV isn’t a direct threat, and so no of course I wouldn’t shot them for that. Take the TV and leave. But that’s a false narrative. It isn’t someone stealing my TV. It’s someone who has broken into my house, is in the act of committing a crime, and who I have no idea how they are going to react now that they’ve been caught. They may very well see me as a juicier target. And for that reason I would feel the need to neutralize the threat by whatever means necessary.

For the record, I do NOT own a gun, and I do believe in gun control. So let’s not bring up any gun-fetish/revenge-fantasy retorts. I’m not saying there aren’t people that have those, but right here right now they are a distraction from an honest assessment of what is going on when a person feels legitimately threatened to a “reasonable person” standard. Also, no, someone turning around in my driveway isn’t a reasonable reason to feel threatened either.

Yup. I’d love to see an analysis of his victims. How many 6’5" grown adult men of reasonable physical build does he try this shit on? Maybe a nice histogram of height vs. prank count. I wonder where the data points will end; hmmm?

what does lasting 30sec have to do with it? how long would it have lasted if Colie hadn’t pulled a gun? how many more times would have have been threatened? And yes he was being threatened by a 6’5" man continually advancing on him.

Remove the gun from the equation; what if Colie had beaten Cook instead until he felt safe again and put him in the hospital ? Would that be justified since it didn’t involve a gun? Same result either way.

you need to forget about the fact that this was a prank or what Cook’s intent was. They have no baring. Only what the real victim (Colie) perceived; and Colie felt threatened and had every right to defend himself. The fact that the means he used was a gun is an entirely different topic of conversation. He felt under threat as any reasonable person would in that situation.

I guess you didn’t read the part in the summary above (no link clicking even needed) where it says the victim (yes Colie is the real victim here)

says “stop” three different times and tries to back away from Cook, who continues to advance. Colie tries to knock the phone away from his face before pulling out a gun and shooting Cook in the lower left chest.

Does Cook “deserve to be killed”? No, but “deserve” is not the right word here. “Expect” is more like it, and yes he should expect to be at risk of serious bodily harm for approaching a stranger, with unknown intent (to the stranger), and a failure to back off when clearly told to stop and retreated from.

In an ideal world Colie wouldn’t have had a gun and Cook would have just been beaten until the perceived threat was eliminated. But regardless of your political/philosophical feelings about gun ownership in the US, it is the current fact of the land and if you Fuck Around you better be prepared to Find Out. Then again, at 6’5" Cook probably feels like he’s safe from a beating and I’d be very surprised to find out he’s tried these stunts out on grown men of equal size; even this dolt can do that math.

I am glad he’s not dead. I hope he has learned his lesson to not be a piece of shit human being too selfish to understand we are not here for his amusement. My hopes are likely to be left unfulfilled.

It was a risk not adding /s especially since I tried really hard to not be too absurd as to be obvious. I will take your unease as a compliment :)

A common misconception. Take the so called “light bulb” for instance. People think they emit light. They do not. They ingest darkness. They are dark suckers. They pull in all the darkness around them, but objects get in the way, and that’s why there are shadows. And when they’re full, they stop working. That’s why they have a brown spot when they stop working, they are full of dark.

Don’t fall for the light emitting conspiracy. LONG LIVE THE DARK SUCKERS!!!

[face palm] that is an amazingly important point I hadn’t thought of / not heard discussed before, about the service fee vs actual increase hourly wages. I mean it’s totally obvious now that you said it.

And I really do agree with owners taking the risk if they want the reward. I will only say that there IS a place for balance, and reward for performance. I think the current tip system is tilted WAY WAY WAY too much to the server’s risk and needs to go away. I also think restaurant margins are actually too thin to go 100% wage based and put all that risk on the owners. I fear the bankruptcy churn in restaurants would be too much.

And yet it seems to work out in Europe so I’m probably wrong.