Not going to say any names here but am I the only one who gets the feeling that someone in this thread kinda thinks that the pharmacist is the real evil dude...
I do! And I'm not ashamed to say so.
I don't think Ersland started the situation. Not at all. But I do think he
planned for it. I think he fully intended to kill (not stop, but kill) anyone who robbed his store. That makes him a bad guy in my book.
A good guy would intend to
stop the threat and save human lives if someone attacked him. A good guy would be
willing to risk killing an intruder if that was what it took to save innocent lives. A good guy would rather find
any other reasonable way out of the situation than to kill, and would do almost anything to avoid killing unnecessarily.
But that wasn't Ersland's mindset. His mindset was that he would
kill the intruder. He would
shoot to kill. He would
shoot the bad guy to the ground and he would
keep shooting until the intruder was dead, dead, dead.
One story, end of story. That was his mindset.
So when the situation
did come up -- a situation entirely of someone else's doing, not his -- Ersland acted out his criminal mindset. He planned to kill and he did. He carried out the act he'd planned in his mind. And he thought everyone would consider him a hero for doing it, since all good people would agree that the intruder was nothing but a scumbag and a slimedog and criminal filth and garbage.
When Ersland took that first shot, the one that struck the intruder in the head, Ersland was 100% in the right. The intruder was immediately threatening Ersland's life and the lives of innocent others. That threat needed to be stopped and deadly force was an appropriate level of force given the severity of the threat. The intruder -- though unarmed -- was part of an attacking group that
was armed and that
was aggressing upon innocent people without provocation. Courts have repeatedly ruled that
each member of such group jointly contributes to the fear experienced by the victims and thus
each share the danger created by the victims' use of force in response. Regardless of Erland's almost-certainly criminal mindset at that point, his action of shooting the intruder in the head was
not criminal -- not because Ersland intended to do the right thing, but because the action itself was a reasonable one under the circumstances.
When Ersland followed the armed intruder out the door and shot at him as he retreated, that action was probably not technically legal (it was a bit on the reckless side as far as bystanders were concerned). But it's the sort of thing anyone might do under the circumstances; excusable if not justifiable. Nobody was harmed by it, but it was dangerous and perhaps reckless. That's the point at which good people could make allowances for fear and stress. Even though chasing the criminal out the door at shooting at his back as he retreated wasn't technically legal, it could be "an understandable mistake" from a man who "went too far" under the influence of stress and fear and adrenalin.
But that's not all that happened.
What Ersland did next was not a mistake. It wasn't simply "going too far." It was pure evil. It was wrong, it was bad, and it showed his criminal mindset to the world. Instead of staying safe and keeping others safe, here's what Ersland did. He
- walked back into the store with an empty revolver
- glanced at the downed intruder
- transfered the revolver to his non-shooting hand
- held the revolver in a non-shooting grip
- turned his back on the intruder
- retrieved his keys
- unlocked a drawer
- got a second firearm out of the drawer
- walked (not ran, not stayed behind cover and leaned out, but walked) back over to the intruder
- and fired repeatedly at the unconscious and unmoving man.
In other words, long before this situation unfolded, Ersland formed the intent to kill.
When the situation presented itself, Ersland did kill. Ersland wasn't acting to
stop the robber, but to
kill him. And he did so even though the intruder was no longer a threat to Ersland or to innocent others.
And then Ersland lied about it. Repeatedly.
He's in the right place.
pax
