Tag Archives: Links

Vigilante Justice?

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There was a shooting somewhere between Cedar Park and Lago Vista on Monday afternoon, and the news stories about it are making me have thoughts and questions.

The timeline of events is as follows:

1. Man gets money out of a Cedar Park bank.
2. Man drives to Lago Vista and stops at a gas station.
3. Man goes into the gas station, leaving money in his car.
4. Two other men break into said car and steal the money.
5. First man calls 911 and informs them he is following the car of the other two men and intending to stop them.
6. First man pulls in front of the other car and stops it.
7. First man claims the people in the other car brandished a gun, so he pulls out his gun and shoots the driver in the mouth, and then fires a second time.
8. The suspects’ car drives away.
9. One suspect is arrested at the hospital, and the other is located in Houston after taking a Lyft.

The biggest question I have is has the “stand your ground” Castle Doctrine changed in Texas to make chasing down and shooting someone who stole from you okay? Nowhere have a read that the guy who had his money stolen was detained or is in custody.

My understanding of the situation in which one is allowed to attempt to murder someone else legally does not include following people and putting yourself in a situation where you fear for your life. I have found nothing in the law that seems to have changed recently, and I feel that following someone, even if they are thieves, pulling in front of them and stopping their car would fall under “provoking” which is very clearly listed as being a nullifying factor for standing your ground.

This story just contains a lot of weird and dumb, and I’m hoping it doesn’t fall off the news radar entirely, because I need to know more. Mostly what I need to know is that the guy who did the shooting receives some consequences. Right now it seems that someone who thinks it’s okay to chase people down, put himself into a dangerous situation, and then shoot his way out of it is apparently walking around free. If this is going to be considered an okay thing to do in Texas now, I feel like that should be bigger news.

I question why other news outlets aren’t digging into this a bit more. Here’s the link to the story all the others seem to use as reference for their own stories, and if I’ve not heard more about this in a week or so, I’m going to poke the news people to see if they wouldn’t like to follow up on it.

Links of Note

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Matthew Inman, of The Oatmeal fame, has put out a list of Ten Eight Marvelous and Melancholy Things I’ve Learned About Creativity. Well, not so much of a list as a series of delightful and educational comics. Funny and smart and so very true. Worth looking at whether you are a creative sort or someone in your life is. Love it so much!

Next up … Getty Images is suing Stability AI for copyright infringement! It’ll be interesting to see how this case turns out, but it’s undeniable that images were scraped from Getty, so you’d think they’d win. Guess we’ll find out eventually, and maybe AI outfits will finally have to stop just sucking up everything on the internet without care for ownership or copyright.

And in closing, a year old story about how Facebook got the way it was (and still mostly is) that explains the reasons why I ditched that place years ago, though I didn’t know the behind the scenes stuff going on, I definitely knew things were swirling a drain. Now I know why, and you can too.