> Under the new law, an Oklahoma driver will no longer be liable for striking — or even killing — a person if the driver is “fleeing from a riot ... under a reasonable belief that fleeing was necessary to protect the motor vehicle operator from serious injury or death.”
Super disingenuous to characterize that as "it's legal to run over protesters".
> The person you drove over doesn't get to give an alternative story to this necessity, nor do they have to be somebody that you're fleeing from.
Agreed. This is one of many reasons why rioting is awful—it creates these dangerous scenarios where ordinary people have to make split second life-or-death decisions. Frankly, I wish rioting was prosecuted more aggressively rather than blaming people who are stuck in situations where they have to defend themselves (“but they don’t need to be there!” <- people have the right to assemble in public, but rioters don’t have the right to create dangerous situations).
> I don't think it's reasonable to defend yourself from somebody by going up to a passer by and shooting them
This is an embarrassingly obvious straw man. No one is arguing for the right to kill a third party to defend oneself against another, the argument is that people should be given a pass if they accidentally hit someone while fleeing for their life. It’s one thing to disagree with that, but it’s an entirely different thing to lie about the law or the argument.
Occasionally self-defense laws protect guilty people, but that doesn't imply that the law isn't a self-defense law. I'm sure there's lots of good criticism of this law, but characterizing it as the OP did is patent dishonesty. Even Vox wasn't willing to go that far ffs.
For the purpose of your claim that the law legalized killing protesters, it doesn’t matter.
That said, per my previous comment, there may be lots to criticize about this law, including that it may have been superfluous. I’m not a lawyer, but my best guess is that existing self-defense law didn’t clearly absolve the victim of injury or death to bystanders as she pursued her own safety. But again, none of that has anything to do with what’s going on in Canada.
Sleep deprivation and continuous noise is considered torture under Geneva Convention and by the U.N.[1] and Canadian law[2]. U.S. and others have been condemned heavily for using such techniques and U.S. has since stopped (at least officially) even in black ops places like Gitmo.
Protests and blockade are one thing, continuous noise in areas where people live and work is not peaceful .
It seems super disingenuous to imply that noisy protests are "violent" by citing laws and regulations which pertain to the treatment of detainees.
Our media entertained a serious debate about whether looting or burning a neighborhood to the ground was "violence" or not, and the many preferred to refer to these events as "fiery but mostly peaceful protests". How did we go from that to tenuous analogies of torture?
If your noisy neighbor was setting of a blowhorn with a high duty cycle for multiple days with the express intent to cause harm to you, it would probably be fair to call that some form of assault.
Good grief. Yes, a disturbance can refer to noise or violence, but that doesn't imply that a noise is violence. This is the lowest quality argumentation I've seen on this site for a while.
I'm giving a definition that applies to my own words. That's the way I meant distrubance. Also, it's not because something isn't violent that it isn't harmful.
You specifically likened it to assault. A noisy protest is annoying and it can disturb the quiet but it isn’t harmful in any sense that could be considered assault.
It sucks that your neighbor has gathered many large trucks and is honking them for 18 hours a day in order to compel you to do something. Why isn't anyone doing anything about it? Now that you know you're being tortured what are your plans?
That's fair, yes. Economically disruptive, but largely peaceful.
I'd wager the left isn't going to pass "it's legal to run over protesters" in response to these, though. https://www.vox.com/2021/4/25/22367019/gop-laws-oklahoma-iow...