I generally like spiked online magazine, but I've now seen two articles about the Good shooting calling on the right to be nicer about things and admonishing people criticizing Good for her actions, and I have to disagree.
For those living under a rock, Good was a woman living in minneapolis who was shot by an ICE officer during an arrest. Sources say she was trying to block ICE but allow protesters through, and two ICE agents left their vehicle to arrest Good. Once they reached her vehicle, she put the vehicle into reverse. One officer was at her window, one was in front of the SUV. While the police were telling her to stop the car and get out of the car, her wife yelled "drive baby, drive!" and she slammed the gas. The front wheel spun on the ice. The officer in front of the SUV started bolting to the side to try to get out of the way of the vehicle whose wheels were now spinning. After a few tenths of a second, the tires grabbed and the vehicle began to move forward, and the officer in front of the car began pulling their firearm. As the vehicle began to move, the officer in front changed direction with both feet slipping backwards. The officer is pushed aside, and the officer, while in physical contact with the vehicle, shot the driver first from in front of the car through the windshield, and then through the open window. Good died later at hospital of her injuries. The officer who was struck by the car was hospitalized, though that may have just been prophylactic because of contact with the car.
One thing that isn't important, but could be treated as important by some people, is the race of the driver. Good was a white woman. Statistically speaking, white women are the least likely to be shot by police of any demographic, so if racial impact was doing anything here, it would have likely been in her favor. That could be why she felt empowered to act as she did.
A couple points that matter. First, the question of whether the vehicle "made contact" with the officer isn't really up for debate. The only question there is whether it made offensive contact with the officer. There were two officers, one at the window touching the vehicle, the other clearly the officer was close enough that there was contact, and the officer in front changed direction sideways because he was being pushed by the moving car. They were touching. Second, at least two of the bullets entered the vehicle through the windshield, meaning that at the very least the gun would need to be in front of the windshield.
There is a big difference between Charlie Kirk and Good. Kirk was killed in a premeditated murder caused by political speech. Good was killed because she hit the gas while she was under arrest while police were actively touching her vehicle.
The judgement and catharsis on the right isn't necessarily because Good disagreed with the right (Most people in Minneapolis do according to polls), it's because she did something which was obviously going to result in her getting killed, and then she got killed.
I've been comparing it to behavior around a black bear. If you see a black bear, there are things you do, such as looking big, making lots of noise, keeping your distance, never getting in between a mother and her cubs, and if you treat the dangerous situation with the proper respect you have an overwhelming chance to make it through the interaction in one piece. Likewise, if you are under arrest by law enforcement personnel, there are certain things you do, such as following orders from law enforcement such as "stop the car" or "get out of the car", and not making sudden or aggressive moves. People survive being around bears and police on a daily basis.
Bears have the power to kill you just like a cop, let's not mince words. And sometimes bears abuse that power. Sometimes innocent people get hurt by bears despite doing everything right. All that is true. But if you see a bear and start manhandling her cub and then get hurt, it's hard to blame the bear, even though the bear was the one who took the action.
If someone mistreats a black bear and gets mauled, is it a tragedy? Of course. But it's also an understandable consequence of that person's immediate actions. The same goes for someone who gets shot after gunning the gas in their SUV when federal law enforcement are telling you to stop the car and are already at your car.
One can definitely argue that there's more complexities with cops than with black bears, and that one is a wild animal and the other a human, but at the end of the day, most of those complexities come later. The big question here is: Do you catch a bearclaw or bullet, or not?
I saw the video and heard analysis from multiple lawyers, one of whom was Andrew Branca, whose specialty is this field, and Branca in particular sees it as cut and dry. There was no conflicting directives here, the officer told her to get out of the car, and to stop the car. The cop was already at her window giving these orders, and in spite of that, she first backed up the car in such a way that the vehicle turned towards the officer, then put the vehicle in gear and jammed the gas. This is a textbook way to get shot by law enforcement.
To law enforcement, especially law enforcement during an arrest (which this had become when she was ordered to get out of the car), a vehicle is a lethal weapon and she had just pulled the trigger.
Some people have focused on "the wheels were turned in this direction so he wouldn't have gotten hit", but there's major problems with that. First, the officer wasn't looking at the tires, he was looking at the driver, who had just put the vehicle in drive and hit the gas. Second, the vehicle did in fact contact the officer. If you're any reasonable person, and you see a vehicle pointing generally at you and you hear the engine revving, it is fully reasonable that you would take that as an imminent threat to your life, and in many places in the US, even if you weren't law enforcement you'd be justified in using force to protect your life.
Even objective reasonableness isn't about whether he's right either. It's about whether a reasonable person with the same knowledge could come to the same conclusion. Seeing things from 100 feet away vs. living and breathing the moment, the objective facts can change a lot -- for example, by letting you see where the wheels are turned. The objective conclusions from subjective data can lead one to incorrectly but objectively reasonably believe something that isn't true. In that case, it's tragic, but legally and morally defensible.
In the days since, we have seen situations that prove that the threat isn't academic. In one situation, a man rammed a police car with this SUV, then ran over the police officer after they left their vehicle, and after running them over went back to run over them three more times. That also happened in a very short period of time.
Generally, law enforcement officers are trained to consider vehicles lethal weapons and to treat potential for harm during interactions that way. This means that not only is the individual officer's decision to treat the moving vehicle as a threat internally reasonable, it matches the training such an officer may be given.
Another thing that's important is empathy, in the sense of being able to put yourself in the officer's shoes. The video was taken from 100 feet away, and we're watching it on a computer monitor perhaps thousands of miles away. There's a world of difference between watching a video on your computer or phone and experiencing a vehicle you are presently touching and next to moving when it's supposed to be stopped, and it's your body parts on the line right now if you make the wrong call.
One of the arguments made in the spiked article was "There should not be a death sentence for fleeing from police", and I think that's asking the wrong question. Of course we can all agree that there should not be a death sentence for resisting arrest or for fleeing from police. The question here isn't about that. It's about an officer opening fire on a vehicle that they perceived (rightly or wrongly) as a threat of serious injury or death in that moment.
I'm focusing on the legal argument here, but that's because it's a more straightforward one to make. The moral argument, however, is similar. Both parties have a right to life, but if one party believes the other is threatening that right and is imminently going to attack them with lethal force, typically morality allows someone to fight back with equal force. There's another moral argument to be made that ICE shouldn't have been there at all, but I don't think there's a good moral argument that'll hold up under scrutiny here. Ok, so you don't believe in immigration enforcement so you think federal law enforcement shouldn't be in your city. How about food safety standards as administered by the FDA? How about drug safety at pharmacies? How about abolishing slavery which was once pushed against using similar arguments? I don't think you can make a universal moral argument that federal law enforcement should leave, so that leaves the idea that federal immigration should not be allowed to enter. If you just believe that immigration enforcement shouldn't be allowed, do you believe that so strongly that it overrides one's right to not be killed, or rather, their right to defend themselves if they think they should not be killed?
Of course, one could make the argument that civil disobedience ought not to have a death penalty. However, if one is engaging in civil disobedience such as blocking ICE, then getting peacefully arrested is part of that process. You block ICE, get arrested, and your punishment is accepted as part of demonstrating the unjustness of the law.
Which brings us to another point: The officer doesn't need to be correct that they are at risk of serious injury or death. Let's say the twitter keyboard warriors are correct and there's no way she could possibly have used the SUV as a weapon. It only matters that in the same situation an objective reasonable person would feel like there is a threat, and that subjectively it appered that the officer felt there was a threat. You can't charge people for lack of omniscience. Really, we don't know how else this would have played out even with the third party video footage.
There's a question of proportionality, but if a vehicle is considered a weapon with a threat of lethality or serious injury, then lethal weapons are the proportionate reaction. The officer met potentially lethal force with potentially lethal force. If the officer was able to use less lethal means that would have been preferable, but what is preferable is not the same as what is proportionate.
There's also the question of de-escalation. The event took place over a few seconds. Perhaps there's a method of de-escalation that could have taken place, but in that moment it was also an arrest, whereupon the officers intended to escalate to arrest. If they had reasonable cause to believe a crime they could make an arrest for had been committed, it was a solid arrest. The situation went from warm to hot so quickly I don't see how any reasonable action could be taken. The car was moving, the officer was clinging to the car, the time to take action was that moment.
New footage came out yesterday from the phone, and it showed how quickly the escallation happened. Good and her wife were jeering the officers with smiles on their face but otherwise compliant, and in a fraction of a second, you hear "Drive baby drive!" and the car moving and the officer's phone flying in the air. That detail matters, it shows that there wasn't time for much. In a fraction of a second, everything changed.
Older studies from the 1980s and 1990s found that law enforcement officers who are involved in a shooting in the line of duty tend to leave the field within 5 years at rates between 70-85%, though there isn't great newer data and there have been advances in terms of the counselling available for officers. Regardless, only about a quarter of officers ever need to fire their weapon. Using lethal force is less common than you may be led to believe, and at least in the past it was traumatic for the officer who used it as well.
Tragic or not, her actions are the sort that would put her at risk in most countries on Earth, including countries generally considered to be less prone to use of force such as Canada, The UK, or Japan.
On the other hand, even if it wasn't a solid arrest, even if it was totally wrong and illegal, that still doesn't make fleeing the right choice. Attempts at arrest must be presumed to be legal, and if it turns out it wasn't, then your lawyer can deal with it afterwards and make a 1983 civil rights claim later. Gunning the engine and trying to escape, even if you're in the right, is a situation that can lead to death, and did in this case.
Apolitically, doing what she did is a good way to die. If you're left or right, male or female, latino or white or black, gay or straight, don't mess with cops or you might die, and lots of people do die every year from interactions that go bad. Incidentally, so do many cops.
Beyond even this, calls to "not politicize the death" are going to be futile. The left was always going to politicize a video of an ICE agent shooting a car that goes viral regardless of the facts. One thing the Trump administration has done in his second term that he didn't do in his first is get much more aggressive about maintaining narratives. That does mean that in this situation, which is probably more complicated than either narrative would suggest, they have to call her a terrorist committing sedition and personally attack her. To do otherwise is to let the left entirely define the narrative, and we've seen that such narratives have no basis in reality.
Her death was political. Political second (practical first), but still political. She was actively in the act of opposing ICE agents in the commission of their duties. She was in the vehicle so she could block ICE vehicles travelling down the road. She wasn't an innocent bystander quietly driving home after dropping her kids off from school. She was about to be arrested because of her activities (which were unlawful at that point, arguably), and then she decided to try to gun the engine instead of be arrested. Immediately afterwards, her death was made political by local officials. The mayor of Minneapolis told ICE to "Get the fuck out". Governor Tim Walz threatened to use the national guard to eject ICE (Apparently none of these people have read up on the US civil war and its implications). Establishment news articles all rushed to paint the now dead woman as a martyred saint for the cause of opposing the Trump administration. Latenight comedians have all rushed to politicize the situation.
Given that the press literally took a press conference where Trump said "White supremacists and neo nazis should be condemned completely" and twisted it into him saying the thought they were very fine people, it makes sense they'd be much more aggressive this time around, because losing those narrative skirmishes really reduced what his first administration was able to get done.
"Independent fact checkers" didn't bother fact checking the very fine people fraud until 2024, years and years after it occurred. Joe Biden used the line to run for president, and he won. I'm sure that moments like that showed the Trump administration that they had to get in front of political issues like this, and even if conservatives find it distasteful (because it is), it's politically expedient.
As for others, Laura Loomer called Good a "commie" "Rug muncher", which is in poor taste for certain for someone whose body is barely cold. By way of explanation, she's got an audience because she found a niche who like that sort of behavior.
It's political, and that's a further tragedy for what's certainly a tragedy for her child who as I understand it has lost both birth parents (first the father died, now the mother died). Friends, family, and children are grieving the loss of their friend, wife, mother, sister, child, and all they see online is reminders. I can't imagine how tough it must be.
In an article I read about Good, her former brother in law through her deceased husband said she was a nice and friendly woman, even if they disagreed on things. I could honestly believe it. I can also imagine that she had a lot of scars from what sounds like a life that got tough at times. My wife often wonders what she'd do without me, especially now that we have a kid. It's not something we like to think about, but it is something we have contingency plans in place for. Unfortunately for this young woman, she won't get a chance to build more memories with her child, and she'll be mostly remembered by history as a footnote in an era of political strife.
One more thing I'd like to note before I conclude, is that the questions here are not about whether a better outcome was possible. Honestly, if you were God and had unlimited knowledge about the universe, then it probably would have been the better move not to shoot. In that case, the woman wold be alive (and charged with assault with a deady weapon), and it's unlikely that we'd get a repeat of the white SUV which went back to run over the cop 3 more times. However, we are not like God, and we can't be expected to make decisions that are infallible, only reasonable. The shooing was justified, even if it might have not been the optimal outcome. Consider two video games: One where you can save and load at any time, and another where you have one save that is deleted after you die and you can't load except when you quit the game and come back. In the former, you can go back and replay decisions that have outcomes you don't like, but in the latter you have to live with bad outcomes. In the former you can take risks like not shooting someone who might have let you go, but in the latter you have to be much more careful because in the former you can reload your save, in the latter you just die (or go to the hospital, perhaps have lifelong disabilities).
Tying this back to my introduction, you can see here, the shooting was a justified self-defense action based on the driver's stupid actions and not a political assassination, it's not the same. And while it would be nice if we could all turn the temperature down, it's the prisoner's dilemma in game theory terms -- Either everyone does and things get better, or one side does and one side does not and the side that turns the temperature down loses, or both sides do and everyone is better off. Until we start to see more John Fettermans out there trying to be reasonable, unfortunately it's off the table.
For those living under a rock, Good was a woman living in minneapolis who was shot by an ICE officer during an arrest. Sources say she was trying to block ICE but allow protesters through, and two ICE agents left their vehicle to arrest Good. Once they reached her vehicle, she put the vehicle into reverse. One officer was at her window, one was in front of the SUV. While the police were telling her to stop the car and get out of the car, her wife yelled "drive baby, drive!" and she slammed the gas. The front wheel spun on the ice. The officer in front of the SUV started bolting to the side to try to get out of the way of the vehicle whose wheels were now spinning. After a few tenths of a second, the tires grabbed and the vehicle began to move forward, and the officer in front of the car began pulling their firearm. As the vehicle began to move, the officer in front changed direction with both feet slipping backwards. The officer is pushed aside, and the officer, while in physical contact with the vehicle, shot the driver first from in front of the car through the windshield, and then through the open window. Good died later at hospital of her injuries. The officer who was struck by the car was hospitalized, though that may have just been prophylactic because of contact with the car.
One thing that isn't important, but could be treated as important by some people, is the race of the driver. Good was a white woman. Statistically speaking, white women are the least likely to be shot by police of any demographic, so if racial impact was doing anything here, it would have likely been in her favor. That could be why she felt empowered to act as she did.
A couple points that matter. First, the question of whether the vehicle "made contact" with the officer isn't really up for debate. The only question there is whether it made offensive contact with the officer. There were two officers, one at the window touching the vehicle, the other clearly the officer was close enough that there was contact, and the officer in front changed direction sideways because he was being pushed by the moving car. They were touching. Second, at least two of the bullets entered the vehicle through the windshield, meaning that at the very least the gun would need to be in front of the windshield.
There is a big difference between Charlie Kirk and Good. Kirk was killed in a premeditated murder caused by political speech. Good was killed because she hit the gas while she was under arrest while police were actively touching her vehicle.
The judgement and catharsis on the right isn't necessarily because Good disagreed with the right (Most people in Minneapolis do according to polls), it's because she did something which was obviously going to result in her getting killed, and then she got killed.
I've been comparing it to behavior around a black bear. If you see a black bear, there are things you do, such as looking big, making lots of noise, keeping your distance, never getting in between a mother and her cubs, and if you treat the dangerous situation with the proper respect you have an overwhelming chance to make it through the interaction in one piece. Likewise, if you are under arrest by law enforcement personnel, there are certain things you do, such as following orders from law enforcement such as "stop the car" or "get out of the car", and not making sudden or aggressive moves. People survive being around bears and police on a daily basis.
Bears have the power to kill you just like a cop, let's not mince words. And sometimes bears abuse that power. Sometimes innocent people get hurt by bears despite doing everything right. All that is true. But if you see a bear and start manhandling her cub and then get hurt, it's hard to blame the bear, even though the bear was the one who took the action.
If someone mistreats a black bear and gets mauled, is it a tragedy? Of course. But it's also an understandable consequence of that person's immediate actions. The same goes for someone who gets shot after gunning the gas in their SUV when federal law enforcement are telling you to stop the car and are already at your car.
One can definitely argue that there's more complexities with cops than with black bears, and that one is a wild animal and the other a human, but at the end of the day, most of those complexities come later. The big question here is: Do you catch a bearclaw or bullet, or not?
I saw the video and heard analysis from multiple lawyers, one of whom was Andrew Branca, whose specialty is this field, and Branca in particular sees it as cut and dry. There was no conflicting directives here, the officer told her to get out of the car, and to stop the car. The cop was already at her window giving these orders, and in spite of that, she first backed up the car in such a way that the vehicle turned towards the officer, then put the vehicle in gear and jammed the gas. This is a textbook way to get shot by law enforcement.
To law enforcement, especially law enforcement during an arrest (which this had become when she was ordered to get out of the car), a vehicle is a lethal weapon and she had just pulled the trigger.
Some people have focused on "the wheels were turned in this direction so he wouldn't have gotten hit", but there's major problems with that. First, the officer wasn't looking at the tires, he was looking at the driver, who had just put the vehicle in drive and hit the gas. Second, the vehicle did in fact contact the officer. If you're any reasonable person, and you see a vehicle pointing generally at you and you hear the engine revving, it is fully reasonable that you would take that as an imminent threat to your life, and in many places in the US, even if you weren't law enforcement you'd be justified in using force to protect your life.
Even objective reasonableness isn't about whether he's right either. It's about whether a reasonable person with the same knowledge could come to the same conclusion. Seeing things from 100 feet away vs. living and breathing the moment, the objective facts can change a lot -- for example, by letting you see where the wheels are turned. The objective conclusions from subjective data can lead one to incorrectly but objectively reasonably believe something that isn't true. In that case, it's tragic, but legally and morally defensible.
In the days since, we have seen situations that prove that the threat isn't academic. In one situation, a man rammed a police car with this SUV, then ran over the police officer after they left their vehicle, and after running them over went back to run over them three more times. That also happened in a very short period of time.
Generally, law enforcement officers are trained to consider vehicles lethal weapons and to treat potential for harm during interactions that way. This means that not only is the individual officer's decision to treat the moving vehicle as a threat internally reasonable, it matches the training such an officer may be given.
Another thing that's important is empathy, in the sense of being able to put yourself in the officer's shoes. The video was taken from 100 feet away, and we're watching it on a computer monitor perhaps thousands of miles away. There's a world of difference between watching a video on your computer or phone and experiencing a vehicle you are presently touching and next to moving when it's supposed to be stopped, and it's your body parts on the line right now if you make the wrong call.
One of the arguments made in the spiked article was "There should not be a death sentence for fleeing from police", and I think that's asking the wrong question. Of course we can all agree that there should not be a death sentence for resisting arrest or for fleeing from police. The question here isn't about that. It's about an officer opening fire on a vehicle that they perceived (rightly or wrongly) as a threat of serious injury or death in that moment.
I'm focusing on the legal argument here, but that's because it's a more straightforward one to make. The moral argument, however, is similar. Both parties have a right to life, but if one party believes the other is threatening that right and is imminently going to attack them with lethal force, typically morality allows someone to fight back with equal force. There's another moral argument to be made that ICE shouldn't have been there at all, but I don't think there's a good moral argument that'll hold up under scrutiny here. Ok, so you don't believe in immigration enforcement so you think federal law enforcement shouldn't be in your city. How about food safety standards as administered by the FDA? How about drug safety at pharmacies? How about abolishing slavery which was once pushed against using similar arguments? I don't think you can make a universal moral argument that federal law enforcement should leave, so that leaves the idea that federal immigration should not be allowed to enter. If you just believe that immigration enforcement shouldn't be allowed, do you believe that so strongly that it overrides one's right to not be killed, or rather, their right to defend themselves if they think they should not be killed?
Of course, one could make the argument that civil disobedience ought not to have a death penalty. However, if one is engaging in civil disobedience such as blocking ICE, then getting peacefully arrested is part of that process. You block ICE, get arrested, and your punishment is accepted as part of demonstrating the unjustness of the law.
Which brings us to another point: The officer doesn't need to be correct that they are at risk of serious injury or death. Let's say the twitter keyboard warriors are correct and there's no way she could possibly have used the SUV as a weapon. It only matters that in the same situation an objective reasonable person would feel like there is a threat, and that subjectively it appered that the officer felt there was a threat. You can't charge people for lack of omniscience. Really, we don't know how else this would have played out even with the third party video footage.
There's a question of proportionality, but if a vehicle is considered a weapon with a threat of lethality or serious injury, then lethal weapons are the proportionate reaction. The officer met potentially lethal force with potentially lethal force. If the officer was able to use less lethal means that would have been preferable, but what is preferable is not the same as what is proportionate.
There's also the question of de-escalation. The event took place over a few seconds. Perhaps there's a method of de-escalation that could have taken place, but in that moment it was also an arrest, whereupon the officers intended to escalate to arrest. If they had reasonable cause to believe a crime they could make an arrest for had been committed, it was a solid arrest. The situation went from warm to hot so quickly I don't see how any reasonable action could be taken. The car was moving, the officer was clinging to the car, the time to take action was that moment.
New footage came out yesterday from the phone, and it showed how quickly the escallation happened. Good and her wife were jeering the officers with smiles on their face but otherwise compliant, and in a fraction of a second, you hear "Drive baby drive!" and the car moving and the officer's phone flying in the air. That detail matters, it shows that there wasn't time for much. In a fraction of a second, everything changed.
Older studies from the 1980s and 1990s found that law enforcement officers who are involved in a shooting in the line of duty tend to leave the field within 5 years at rates between 70-85%, though there isn't great newer data and there have been advances in terms of the counselling available for officers. Regardless, only about a quarter of officers ever need to fire their weapon. Using lethal force is less common than you may be led to believe, and at least in the past it was traumatic for the officer who used it as well.
Tragic or not, her actions are the sort that would put her at risk in most countries on Earth, including countries generally considered to be less prone to use of force such as Canada, The UK, or Japan.
On the other hand, even if it wasn't a solid arrest, even if it was totally wrong and illegal, that still doesn't make fleeing the right choice. Attempts at arrest must be presumed to be legal, and if it turns out it wasn't, then your lawyer can deal with it afterwards and make a 1983 civil rights claim later. Gunning the engine and trying to escape, even if you're in the right, is a situation that can lead to death, and did in this case.
Apolitically, doing what she did is a good way to die. If you're left or right, male or female, latino or white or black, gay or straight, don't mess with cops or you might die, and lots of people do die every year from interactions that go bad. Incidentally, so do many cops.
Beyond even this, calls to "not politicize the death" are going to be futile. The left was always going to politicize a video of an ICE agent shooting a car that goes viral regardless of the facts. One thing the Trump administration has done in his second term that he didn't do in his first is get much more aggressive about maintaining narratives. That does mean that in this situation, which is probably more complicated than either narrative would suggest, they have to call her a terrorist committing sedition and personally attack her. To do otherwise is to let the left entirely define the narrative, and we've seen that such narratives have no basis in reality.
Her death was political. Political second (practical first), but still political. She was actively in the act of opposing ICE agents in the commission of their duties. She was in the vehicle so she could block ICE vehicles travelling down the road. She wasn't an innocent bystander quietly driving home after dropping her kids off from school. She was about to be arrested because of her activities (which were unlawful at that point, arguably), and then she decided to try to gun the engine instead of be arrested. Immediately afterwards, her death was made political by local officials. The mayor of Minneapolis told ICE to "Get the fuck out". Governor Tim Walz threatened to use the national guard to eject ICE (Apparently none of these people have read up on the US civil war and its implications). Establishment news articles all rushed to paint the now dead woman as a martyred saint for the cause of opposing the Trump administration. Latenight comedians have all rushed to politicize the situation.
Given that the press literally took a press conference where Trump said "White supremacists and neo nazis should be condemned completely" and twisted it into him saying the thought they were very fine people, it makes sense they'd be much more aggressive this time around, because losing those narrative skirmishes really reduced what his first administration was able to get done.
"Independent fact checkers" didn't bother fact checking the very fine people fraud until 2024, years and years after it occurred. Joe Biden used the line to run for president, and he won. I'm sure that moments like that showed the Trump administration that they had to get in front of political issues like this, and even if conservatives find it distasteful (because it is), it's politically expedient.
As for others, Laura Loomer called Good a "commie" "Rug muncher", which is in poor taste for certain for someone whose body is barely cold. By way of explanation, she's got an audience because she found a niche who like that sort of behavior.
It's political, and that's a further tragedy for what's certainly a tragedy for her child who as I understand it has lost both birth parents (first the father died, now the mother died). Friends, family, and children are grieving the loss of their friend, wife, mother, sister, child, and all they see online is reminders. I can't imagine how tough it must be.
In an article I read about Good, her former brother in law through her deceased husband said she was a nice and friendly woman, even if they disagreed on things. I could honestly believe it. I can also imagine that she had a lot of scars from what sounds like a life that got tough at times. My wife often wonders what she'd do without me, especially now that we have a kid. It's not something we like to think about, but it is something we have contingency plans in place for. Unfortunately for this young woman, she won't get a chance to build more memories with her child, and she'll be mostly remembered by history as a footnote in an era of political strife.
One more thing I'd like to note before I conclude, is that the questions here are not about whether a better outcome was possible. Honestly, if you were God and had unlimited knowledge about the universe, then it probably would have been the better move not to shoot. In that case, the woman wold be alive (and charged with assault with a deady weapon), and it's unlikely that we'd get a repeat of the white SUV which went back to run over the cop 3 more times. However, we are not like God, and we can't be expected to make decisions that are infallible, only reasonable. The shooing was justified, even if it might have not been the optimal outcome. Consider two video games: One where you can save and load at any time, and another where you have one save that is deleted after you die and you can't load except when you quit the game and come back. In the former, you can go back and replay decisions that have outcomes you don't like, but in the latter you have to live with bad outcomes. In the former you can take risks like not shooting someone who might have let you go, but in the latter you have to be much more careful because in the former you can reload your save, in the latter you just die (or go to the hospital, perhaps have lifelong disabilities).
Tying this back to my introduction, you can see here, the shooting was a justified self-defense action based on the driver's stupid actions and not a political assassination, it's not the same. And while it would be nice if we could all turn the temperature down, it's the prisoner's dilemma in game theory terms -- Either everyone does and things get better, or one side does and one side does not and the side that turns the temperature down loses, or both sides do and everyone is better off. Until we start to see more John Fettermans out there trying to be reasonable, unfortunately it's off the table.
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@sj_zero Long post, but I liked that you approached it from a full investigative angle on the various presuppostions and assumptions. I fully agree. My own point of critique of the situation is that she, as a mother, shouldn’t be putting herself near dangerous confrontations because, as a parent of young children, her life and consequences affect more than just her. Activism has different rules for people who can’t afford to easily be arrested or worse, and a responsible person knows that. It’s very sad even if I don’t agree with her and the results are obviously a consequence of her actions.
I appreciate you reading the whole thing.
I came home from a business trip last night, and my boy just squealed in delight that I was home. The idea that I would want to put his smile and his future at risk so I could engage in some abstract protest against an intangible thing, just really feels nuts.
I came home from a business trip last night, and my boy just squealed in delight that I was home. The idea that I would want to put his smile and his future at risk so I could engage in some abstract protest against an intangible thing, just really feels nuts.