Once he pointed a gun at someone, it was a moral imperative to kill him
Two thugs rob a waffle house. One CCW holder decides to introduce one of them’s inside to the outside world. He dies. Everyone claps. Good clean defensive guns use. Except the family lies:
Nineteen-year-old Dante Williams’ family said there is no doubt he entered the Waffle House in Chesnee back in January of 2012 intent on robbing it, but they say he didn’t have to die.
Yes, he did. Once he pointed a gun and threatened someone he had to die. It was the moral imperative. Period. And the headline:
Spartanburg Waffle House shooting video released, sparks new debate
It’s not a new debate and this scum’s death didn’t spark shit.
May 1st, 2014 at 9:41 pm
Loaded or empty, real or toy, yup. He chose to commit assisted suicide.
May 1st, 2014 at 10:08 pm
“Tamika McSwain is Williams’ cousin and said more training is needed before someone is given a CWP.”
And how much training did Dante Williams have?
May 1st, 2014 at 10:17 pm
There needs to be a Like button for this post! I wish you could explain that to more people.
May 1st, 2014 at 10:20 pm
These thugbastards must realize there are certain occupational hazards in their chosen profession.
Lotsa CCL’s in Texas. They should consider that.
May 1st, 2014 at 10:36 pm
He didn’t HAVE to die. He could have lived after being shot, but that is between him and his maker, not the man defending himself and others.
May 1st, 2014 at 11:00 pm
Williams actions were out of character for the Dorman High School senior who his family said had never been in trouble before.
Right. Went straight from being a young man of upstanding character who had never been in trouble straight to armed robbery with no baby steps in between. Pull the other one, it has bells.
May 1st, 2014 at 11:37 pm
I’ve never been in trouble either, but, I’ve bent (or out right fractured) several laws… never been caught. Never did anything near as stupid as the dumb shit that went and got himself all dead and shit in a waffle house.
Point is, just because he’d never been in trouble doesn’t mean he wasn’t “gansta” before.
May 2nd, 2014 at 6:18 am
Every time there is a DGU, the dead perp’s family always comes out and says the perp was a choir boy, on the verge of being a saint, and was just misunderstood or under bad influence at the time he was doing whatever it was that justified shooting him.
Just once, I’d love to see some member of the perp’s family say on camera:
“I loved him, because he was family, but to be honest, he was a POS, with a long criminal record and a violent streak a mile wide.”
May 2nd, 2014 at 8:26 am
While I have no problem at all with the outcome I have to ask. When exactly does a person go from law abiding citizen to criminal?
Reading the comments above it seems like some long drama of slowing building up to actually breaking the law. Which still means said person is not a criminal and renders some of the posts contradictory.
What I am gleaning is that somehow you are a criminal before you break the law, but just were not ever caught. Pretty thin.
Sure their are proto-criminals that come up through the ranks of their peers but that is not nearly the case as much as people suggest.
My bet is that people in general do not want to face the fact that more often than not people do get busted or killed their first time out. It gives them an air of rationalization where the ends justified the means.
People also don’t want to believe that one day THEY themselves could get up, and go rob a liquor store out of the blue with absolutely, positively no previous criminal acts.
The truth is ALL of us at any time can choose to become a criminal without any prior acts of criminal behavior…
May 2nd, 2014 at 8:53 am
Paul, there is an easy way to figure out if “more often than not” people get arrested the first time they commit a crime like armed robbery. The Justice Department and FBI keep two sets of crime figures: The Crime Victimization Survy, based upon a survey of people, and the Uniform Crime Reports, based upon arrests. So let’s look at the two, shall we?
According to the National Crime Victimization Survey, there were 741,760 robberies in 2012:
http://www.bjs.gov/content/pub/pdf/cv12.pdf
According to the FBI Uniform Crime Report for 2012, there were 103,661 arrests for robbery:
http://www.fbi.gov/about-us/cjis/ucr/crime-in-the-u.s/2012/crime-in-the-u.s.-2012/tables/29tabledatadecpdf
That’s 7.2 robberies per robbery arrest.
Even using the FBI’s “reported” crime (person reported the robbery to the police), which was 354,520 robberies, that’s still 3.4 reported robberies for every single robbery arrest.
http://www.fbi.gov/about-us/cjis/ucr/crime-in-the-u.s/2012/crime-in-the-u.s.-2012/violent-crime/robbery
I find the idea that “more often than not people do get busted or killed their first time out” a ludicrous idea not worthy of further consideration, as it’s directly contradicted by the data.
May 2nd, 2014 at 8:54 am
Of course he didn’t have to die. He could have stayed home and helped his mother in the flower garden, volunteered at a homeless shelter, sat around playing video games or any number of other activities and he would still be very much alive. Instead he chose to go thugging around and came up with the short end of the stick. If you play stupid games, you’re sure to win stupid prizes…
May 2nd, 2014 at 9:59 am
The status of “criminal” does not depend on conviction. A criminal is one who knowingly and blatantly breaks the law, and it can be some time before one is caught. Armed robberyy is, in fact a big step up from nothing, and I’m genuinely skeptical that many armed robbers are first time criminals, arrest record or not.
I also find it insulting to be told that basically any of us could just wake up one morning and go on a robbery spree. This smells of the projection the antis engage in, whereas they know they can’t handle the responsibility of a firearm, and presume that no-one can.
May 2nd, 2014 at 9:59 am
If you play stupid games, armed robbery being the game in question, sometimes you lose.
May 2nd, 2014 at 12:07 pm
“It’s not a new debate and this scum’s death didn’t spark shit. ”
One violent crime doesn’t make one scum.
He was 19, he may have been a wayward youth. Most likely that was the case.
The lack of moral reprehensibleness on the part of his character does not excuse even a singular lapse in judgment of this magnitude…just saying he might not have been an intrinsically bad person.
May 2nd, 2014 at 12:22 pm
Paul Kisling – This is several years old, but I doubt the trends have changed.
http://www.bjs.gov/content/pub/ascii/vfluc.txt
“Seventy percent of violent felons had a prior arrest
record, and 57% had at least one prior arrest for a
felony. Sixty-seven percent of murderers and 73% of
those convicted of robbery or assault had an arrest
record.”
You really want to bet that people don’t want to accept that most criminals are caught or killed on their first attempt? I’ll take that bet.
May 2nd, 2014 at 12:27 pm
Unlike the good Samaritan in the prior post who could easily have died twice playing Captain Vigilante over a purse, this guy did what he had to do when the lives of he and others were directly threatened.
And I’ll bet he also had sense enough to drop his tool and go hands up when the popo belatedly arrived.
And I’ll further bet that he’s sick at heart while clear of conscience for saving lives either here or in future endeavors of this choir boy.
May 2nd, 2014 at 12:34 pm
And for mikee and other commenters from the purse post, that thing on your hip is for last-resort life-threatening scenarios, and even then its lifesaving use will result in lifechanging aftermath; ask GZ about that. I hope you don’t have to learn that lesson the hard way.
May 2nd, 2014 at 12:42 pm
He was 19, he may have been a wayward youth.
That means absolutely jack shit to the people who had their lives endangered.
May 2nd, 2014 at 2:31 pm
“A Critic”, horse manure. He threatened innocent people with deadly force. At that point, he announced to the world he was amoral scum.
May 2nd, 2014 at 2:33 pm
Paul Kisling,
Criminality does not work that way, it is learned behavior.
Along with the data already provided, sociological data on delinquency also supports that criminals tend to have criminal associations in their lives prior to their own criminality.
It is a safe statistical bet to state that, barring head trauma or mental illness, few, effectively no, people lacking prior criminal associations will suddenly “choose to become a violent criminal with no prior criminal behavior on their record.”
Nurture and environment are key factors in anti-social behavior, not determinative, but heavily correlated. The aberrations from that are notable by their rarity and pretty much prove the rule.
May 2nd, 2014 at 3:56 pm
Criminality is a learned behavior? Sounds very Freudian. The problem is there are plenty of people raised in a highly criminal environs that never learn to become criminals. In fact many do not commit crimes at all. Then we have the very opposite of the spectrum of people whose upbringing and association have no criminal mischief yet they become criminals,lawyers and politicians.
Trying to say that right and wrong are solely based on what one has learned is a fallacy. (It takes away the fact that people have the innate ability to think for themselves.)
What it comes down to is personal responsibility.
People who become criminals choose to do so. Its rather rare for someone to have a gun put in their mouth and be forced to rob the local liquor store.
May 2nd, 2014 at 4:08 pm
There is always a line one has to cross to become a criminal.
Does learned criminality bring us to cross that line or do the decisions we make on our own bring us to cross the line???
When you come to the line does it really matter what you have learned, good or bad??? One way or another it is still your choice..
May 2nd, 2014 at 6:20 pm
Paul,
I said everything you did in two sentences and apparently you didn’t read for content. Find the “solely” in anything I wrote.
“Nurture and environment are key factors in anti-social behavior, not determinative, but heavily correlated. The aberrations from that are notable by their rarity and pretty much prove the rule.”
The point is that your choices are occur within the framework of your experience, your context, which is heavily dependent on upbringing. Not Freud, Aristotle. Someone brought up in a moral environment lacks the context to *easily” or reflexively choose anything other than moral behavior.
Can they do so? Sure, but the numbers who do so, particularly when it comes to the topic at hand, *violent* criminality, are so small as to be statistical outliers. That’s what all the extant criminological and sociological data, and common sense, support.
May 2nd, 2014 at 6:23 pm
See, there was another group of folks in a pancake house, an IHOP in Harry Reid’s state, apparently no one was armed, or had politely left their firearms in their car…….
911 didn’t “rescue” them, but eleven “enforcement” agencies investigated, after the fact.
May 2nd, 2014 at 6:57 pm
Another ‘choirboy’… Not…
May 3rd, 2014 at 12:33 am
If “it just went off” (i.e. He panicked and pressed the trigger), or he was just a hot tempered prick and fired, his age would have been of little consequence to anyone in the path of that (those) round(s). And, for chrisake, why do you think they called Billy the Kid billy “the Kid”?
May 3rd, 2014 at 2:48 am
People forget that, historically, armed robbery was a capital offense.
May 3rd, 2014 at 9:57 am
Very true, Crunkomatic.
In fact, it wasn’t too long ago that criminals caught stealing a man’s horse were convicted to be hanged.
The next time someone tells me that Waffle House food will kill ya’, I’ll just reply that one has a much greater chance of dying at a Waffle House trying to commit armed robbery than eating the food; and of course, I’ll refer ’em to the above video link as proof.
May 3rd, 2014 at 11:59 pm
Trying to say that right and wrong are solely based on what one has learned is a fallacy. (It takes away the fact that people have the innate ability to think for themselves.)
If one hasn’t learned anything yet, what does one think about?
Does learned criminality bring us to cross that line or do the decisions we make on our own bring us to cross the line???
In what sense can we make any decisions without having learned something about which to make those decisions?
May 4th, 2014 at 7:26 pm
@SPQR
““A Critic”, horse manure. He threatened innocent people with deadly force. At that point, he announced to the world he was amoral scum”
You can’t judge a person’s character accurately based on one violent felony when they were a teenager.
You are inferring a message that doesn’t exist from his actions.
I would have shot him too…and not regretted it…probably not even if he was just a young and dumb kid. Should have been smarter.