Locke did have the legal right to hold a gun and point it at an apparent intruder to where he was sleeping, according to the 2nd amendment. Locke was fully licensed to have that gun.
Apparently.
Well none we know of. I don't see that it matters if he did. Whether or not, for example, he had a bag of cocaine on him doesn't change the question of the legality of shooting him.
The fact that the police also had a legal right to enter the apartment as they did is evidence that our laws are contradictory and lead to such outcomes. That is why I do not blame the officers who entered the apartment. They were just doing what they were told. I blame the city itself for executing Locke. Unfortunately there is no means to put a city on trial for murder. By the way, Minneapolis is my city. I live here and I am disgusted by what my city has done.
You blame the city itself?
The two rights our founders saw as fundamentally intertwined are both...
1. The right to own property.
2. The right to defend oneself from attacks (physically).
If these seem badly considered, I promise that they aren't. The right to own property is considered in the 4th amendment, the right to bear arms is secured in the 2nd.
Obviously, where the "contradiction" you speak of lies in the conflicting standards by which both men are asked meet as a legally defined self defense shooting.
1. The cop has to meet a rather complicated and very uniquely defined set of circumstances that have been made clear by the courts repeatedly. In short, we need to consider that if we knew what he knew at the moment of shooting and perceived what he did....is the shooting reasonable?
I haven't watched it, but it sounds like this is probably the case. If he saw a man reaching for a pistol, in this situation, it's a reasonable conclusion that he was going to shoot it. The cop doesn't have to wait on bullets to fly past him.
The man on the other hand doesn't actually have to have any idea who he is shooting at in the least. He simply has to claim he perceived some lethal danger to himself...even if he claims that it wasn't clear what the danger was.
We can imagine how we might react to our door being kicked in....we might imagine ourselves as in imminent danger. It's justifiable regardless of who is coming through the door because it is his property (or rather it can be assumed that the intruder has violated his property to do him harm).
Of course, in this case...it isn't his home and it isn't his property. Even if it was, the warrant allows the violation of property.
For some reason, and I suspect it's too protect self defense and gun owners....we don't change his standard for legal self defense. It's the same as if he was the owner of the apartment.
One shooter....the cop....has to be reasonably perceiving a threat at the very moment of shooting.
The man shot is not responsible for correctly perceiving a threat at all.
We like this standard, because it requires so much more from the cop than the man sleeping. It's two different standards though. If you required the average citizen to correctly identify a target before shooting....well what's the fun in that?
