But my statement was “a brick thrown into Your head”. If they are too far away the brick wouldn’t get to your head. Similarly, if a barrier prevented it reaching you it could not be thrown into your head. My statement precludes those situations from existing.
So, it is as simple as i stated. Nothing added, nothing deleted. Someone throwing a brick into your head is deadly force and deadly force could be used to defend against it.
In the extremely simplified situation where you reasonably believe in advance of the throw (presumably because you are so close to the thrower) that thrown brick will go “into your head” then yes, a reasonable person would consider that to be an act that is likely to cause serious injury or death, and it would justify the use of deadly force to PREVENT the thrower from carrying out the action.
Someone simply throwing a bricks isn’t sufficient justification for use of deadly force. (I know you didn’t say that, but bear with me.) Even someone throwing bricks in your direction, even if they are aiming it at you, even if they say they are trying to hit you in the head isn’t so straightforward. If they’re far enough away that you can easily dodge, or if there’s no reason to believe they can reach you with the bricks, or no reason to believe they could hit you, or if there’s something between you and the brick thrower you can use as a barrier, then a reasonable person wouldn’t believe that the only option to prevent imminent death or serious injury was to shoot the thrower.
Ok, I realize you didn’t say that someone simply throwing bricks is grounds for shooting them. The reason I made a point of responding is that the legal use of deadly force is all about prevention. If you put yourself (or allow yourself to remain) in the middle of a situation where you’re so close to a potential threat that there’s no reasonable doubt that a thrown brick will end up going “into your head”, when prevention is the goal, there’s an obvious question a reasonable person would ask. “Why, if you are so concerned about your personal safety, did you remain so close to a potential threat when a relatively minor effort would put you out of the range of thrown bricks or put a barrier between you and the brick thrower?” etc. Reasonable people understand that persons carrying bricks to throw at others are not especially mobile and are relatively easy to avoid, the range of a thrown brick is somewhat limited given the heft of a brick, and that dodging a brick when it is thrown at anything other than very close range is not that terribly difficult.
Just to be clear, I’m talking about taking a big picture view from a purely pragmatic perspective. You want to prevent injury or death from thrown bricks, keep away from people throwing bricks. Very simple. You don’t need to shoot people to avoid getting hit in the head by thrown bricks—it’s easy to just to avoid those situations 99 times out of 100--maybe even more often than that. You don’t want someone with common sense to look at the situation after the fact and wonder why you did what you did to get yourself into such a pickle. You also don’t want to look back at a situation and realize that you could have solved the problem very simply without having to shoot anyone by not putting yourself in a jam in the first place.
I'm not saying there are no circumstances under which a person with a brick would pose a deadly threat that justified responding with deadly force, I'm just saying that we need to not focus in so narrowly on specific details that we miss the forest for staring at a particular tree. It's important to keep in mind that we don't just magically find ourselves in a situation, there are circumstances that lead up to it, and if those circumstances don't pass the smell test, then maybe that's not a good situation to use as an example of when deadly force is warranted.
People pare things down to these really oversimplified and clear situations (e.g. someone throwing a brick “into your head”) and then want to pretend like that’s a reasonable outcome of a common sense approach to personal safety, and also want to try to analyze it in isolation as if anyone would agree that a person who is concerned about self-defense is likely, during a period of widespread and heavily publicized civil unrest, to unexpectedly end up confronted with a brick-throwing threat at ranges so close that the only logical conclusion is that a thrown brick will cause a serious head injury and that only deadly force will extricate the innocent defender from the situation.
It’s almost always possible to “game” a situation where deadly force will appear justified, but if the situation being set up is so oversimplified as to be meaningless, the resulting conclusion is equally meaningless. The focus needs to be on real-world situations. More often than not, as in this case, a less narrowly focused/gamed/artificially constrained situation reveals that not only are many options open, actually getting into the artificial situation in the first place is logically inconsistent with the overall stated goal of remaining safe.
