tacticool wrote:Excaliber wrote:Nor can I recall a situation where a knife was used in legitimate self defense in any situation other than family violence when it happened to be the nearest object that came to hand when things got nasty in the kitchen.
Correct me if I'm wrong, but your experience was in the same state that prosecuted
Goetz for defending himself.
Maybe it's possible there were times a knife was used for legitimate self defense and the GG was prosecuted/persecuted by the system, or maybe the GG didn't report the DKU because they were afraid of unjust prosecution by a system with a reputation (deserved or not) for harshly penalizing those who refuse to be a victim.
Maybe also implies maybe not.
New York is a big state, and I can't say for sure there wasn't an isolated case of legitimate knife defense outside of a family violence situation somewhere that escaped my attention. In view of the fact that everything you can imagine happened there, including lots of things we couldn't imagine together, I'd even say it would be a better than even bet there was such an instance or even several instances somewhere that I simply didn't hear about.
I can also say it for sure there weren't enough such instances to be described as anything other than extremely rare if they occurred at all. I worked in a big city located among several other big cities, and we saw almost everything NYC did, including terrorist bombings and shootouts with radical groups that would be called terrorists if they did the same things today. We even shared NYPD's clientele due to the wonders of modern transportation which put our city only about a 30 minute ride by train, bus, or highway away from theirs, and averaged somewhere around 50,000 calls for service per year. If I didn't come across a particular type of activity or offense in 20 years of police work in that environment, it's a pretty good bet it wasn't something that happened very often.
The Goetz case involved a citizen who didn't have a carry license but did have and use a .38 revolver. He carried that gun in violation of the law at that time, and used it to successfully defend himself against a clear criminal attack on a subway train. Mr. Goetz was a Caspar Milquetoast type of character, and the attack by multiple thugs would, in all likelihood, have resulted in serious or fatal injury to him if he had not responded as he did. However, he didn't manage his actions as well as he might have, and, after he had shot and disabled one of his attackers, he fired another apparently gratuitous round into him in full view of the rest of the passengers. (Does a certain pharmacist from Oklahoma come to mind?)
The prosecutor who had to figure out what to do with that bowl of kimchee had a prosecutorial nightmare on his hands. However, to his credit, he initially determined he wasn't going to prosecute Mr. Goetz as a matter of justice under the circumstances - until Mr. Goetz violated the principle that it's better to keep one's mouth shut and be thought a fool than to open it and remove all doubt. For reasons best known to himself he voluntarily made inflammatory statements that caused a public uproar and left the prosecutor no viable option but to file charges. I doubt the prosecutor was any happier with that than you may be, but he had to work with the hand he was dealt. Sometimes you just can't save people from themselves.
You are correct that I did indeed work in the same state where that case took place, but I don't see it as a miscarriage of justice and I have to admit to being puzzled by the applicability of that reference to the current thread here.
