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this post was submitted on 16 Jun 2025
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Wait, so, trying to follow this: someone pulled a rifle on protestors, so a "concerned citizen" pulled a gun on that person, shot, missed, killed a bystander, and then shot again? Am I following this right? And the person being held accountable for the death is the guy who initially pulled the rifle, not the random citizen firing a weapon into a crowd?
Is this that "American exceptionalism" I keep hearing about?
EDIT - Nevermind, there's a lot more detail after the wall of ads that convinced me the article was done.
No, you are not following it right and clearly responded based on the one sentence headline and your assumptions. It was a dedicated safety person as part of a team, not some random person. They were there to defend against violence directed at the protesters.
It absolutely sounds like they stopped a mass shooting event, sorry it wasn't perfect.
~~No, I am responding based on the whole article.~~
What the fuck does "believed to be" mean in this sentence? Why do we not know? Were they hired protection? Are they a trained professional? Or are they an idiot with a gun who thinks they're an action hero?
The article is very unclear on this front.
EDIT: Ha, no I wasn't. Ad space is pervasive, and I had believed I had read the whole article when I had only read like a fifth of it.
Parker is with the organizers, and she confirmed that they were part of the safety team. Redd is with the police, and is relaying the word of the organizers but hedging the wording for PR purposes.
It really couldn't be more clear.
I did miss that bit in the full article, so fair enough. It certainly could be more clear though: they're burying the lede pretty badly by opening with the wording that insinuates we don't know.
It's not clear. So it's the person who is in the green vest and fired a trained police officer or not? "Safety team" is a meaningless term that could mean guy with gun license up to cop.
Not. Peacekeepers are civilians doing cop's jobs because cops have no requirements to protect and serve.
There's something in many US States called the felony murder rule. Utah is such a state. Essentially, if a person commits a serious crime (a felony) and someone else dies as a result of that crime, that person can be charged with murder even though they might not have been directly responsible for the death.
In this case, a man with a rifle was threatening the lives of peaceful protesters. That is a felony. The people present to protect the protesters fired on him to keep him from killing other people. Sadly, an innocent bystander was killed. Had the rifleman not committed the felony in the first place, the bystander would be alive today. Thus the guy with the rifle is being held responsible for that death.
I mean, yes? Pulling a gun on someone is functionally a declaration you intend to shoot them, so self-defense rules apply. Brandishing a weapon is also a criminal act, so it's pretty clear-cut. Without people running security and forcefully responding to threats a fascist will open fire into one of these one day. We have no idea whether that was the case in this instance, which is exactly the point.
"A person believed to be part of a peace keeping team" and "people running security" are not the same thing. At a glance this looks like the "good guy with a gun" mythos that pro-gun advocates keep spreading cost an innocent person their life.
If this is professional security who fucked up, sure, there's a discussion to be had. If this is a volunteer peacekeeper who showed up strapped, he is part of the problem, not the solution.
Okay I'll get to the point: In a situation where they and a large number of other people were credibly going to be shot at, what the fuck did you want them to do? Duty to retreat doesn't save crowds.
But what else could we have done?
What I want done is to create strong gun legislation instead of encouraging citizens to play action hero and see the civilian shot in the crossfire as an unfortunate but unpreventable casualty.
EDIT - I'm addressing everyone's comments here rather than copy-pasting the same response to everyone. I had only read the first section of the article, having been fooled by the wall of ads on mobile into believing that the first five paragraphs was the whole article. Without the additional explination and context in the remaining article I had believed that, when approached by volunteer security, the man with the rifle had attempted to flee, and the securities' response was to gun him down, and an innocent caught a stray. It was insane to me that people thought to defend that, but as people pointed out that the rifleman was running towards a crowd with the rifle in a firing position, I was wondering how the hell people got that from the 5 paragraphs. I reloaded the article, scrolled past a full screen of advertising, and discovered there was a lot more depth provided in the article than I had realized. With a rifle aimed at civilians, the security volunteer was right to take the shot, because the intent for harm was clear.
I stand by this being a systematic issue that needs solving at the root, but in the moment the security volunteer handled the situation correctly.
That does absolutely nothing to address the current situation.
That's great and I agree, but that's not what we have now. What would you have them do differently in this particular situation with the resources, challenges, and restrictions we actually have, not what we want to have?
So did you want the shooter to instead walk up to the potential mass shooter and preach the benefits of gun control? Because otherwise you did not answer the question.
You need to get yourself an ad blocker.
Yeah I saw a grand total of zero ads in that article lol.
Yeah i dont get it either. In a normal country the guy who shot the other person dead would be under arrest for manslaughter, or grievous bodily harm (or equivalent) at best. It'd be the job of the DA to decide if a charge would proceed, or a jury to decide if the charge is valid.
They killed a guy by firing unsafely into a crowded area, and they are from what I can read - a volunteer in a green vest, whom was asked by event organizers not to carry a gun. Not law enforcement, not hired security, no guarantee they have any weapons training - yet they're apparently fine to shoot people they deem a threat and walk off home-free, even if they accidentally shot someone else dead. "Oh, that was your dad? My bad - I missed".
Exactly. The level of cultural brainwashing in this thread is insane. You don't just let any random volunteer perform jobs like this.
Volunteers were told not to carry a weapon because of outcomes like this. They're not trained professionals, and they're definitely not action heroes. And now someone has to explain to a child, a parent, a partner, etc., that the civillian death here was just an unfortunate outcome of a wonderful American citizen protecting his country. It's actually fucking despicible.
Let's try out the counterfactual: the assailant pulls out a rifle, aims it into the crowd, and nobody else in the immediate vicinity is armed. What happens next?
There's a small chance he was just trying to scare people and disrupt the protest, but that sounds like the prelude to a mass shooting to me. It's likely many more people would have died in that case. We can't know of course and neither could the security volunteer; he had to make a hard decision in a split second in an emergency. He had to weigh the risk of shooting when he did against the risk of waiting, and he had the disadvantage of fighting a rifle with a pistol; it's much easier to shoot accurately with a rifle, and the ammunition is more deadly.
The dude with the rifle was running. That whole argument is fine when someone is draw weapons and making threats, but they shot at someone trying to flee the scene after causing no harm and killed an innocent. Everything else is imaginary justification.
EDIT: Wondering where the hell everyone else got so much more information, I reloaded the article, scrolled past the ad wall and found the rest of the text, which makes clear that the dude with the rifle pulled his gun into a firing position on the crowd. Fair enough, I was wrong and the citizen was right to have taken the shot. I blame the ad wall for convincing me that the news article was over.
According to the reports I've read, including in the toplevel article here, the sequence of events is:
It's easy to conflate running with fleeing, but running toward a group of people with a rifle pointed at them is charging, not fleeing.
He was running ... TOWARDS the crowd.
That explains the confusion. Do you need a recommendation for an ad blocker?
Apparently using an adblocker and reading an entire article is American exceptionalism now.
Christ up a tree, that was an untrained volunteer who fired and killed an innocent bystander? And was told not to carry? I had assumed police were doing security. I hope the idiot gets charged with at least manslaughter. That was entirely irresponsible. I'm sure the charge is going to land on the arrested guy but honestly the volunteer is responsible for unsafely firing.
Police do this all the time. None of them ever get charged.
Yeah, I know, but they're also heavily protected by unions. This guy maybe not so much
He's also responsible for preventing a mass shooting. It's a complex situation and I don't really know at the moment what's right.
Yeah don't let those bystander deaths get in the way of a good thing now. Ok I do hear what you're saying but I'm angry about it and can't bring myself to disagree.
I'm not from Utah but it is weird even for the USA. They keep saying the "believed to be a peacekeeper". This makes me think maybe they had hired security of some kind who were allowed to be armed but no one else at the protest was? Again I'm not familiar with gun laws in Utah.
I think it was volunteers who had taken on the responsibility of responding to threats to the protesters. They weren't specially blessed to be armed, just wearing vests to let other people know they were friendly and carrying for defense. The guy with the rifle was probably also legally allowed to carry a weapon but was doing it in a way that seemed threatening.
That is police talk trying to avoid being declarative before they confirm the facts, it doesn't imply they disagree.