Cannoneer: When I was raised in SC I was told there was a state law that required anyone who happened upon a crime to do whatever they could to stop it, even if that included screaming as loud as possible.
Similarly there were laws in many sates that required medical personnel to stop and render assistance to a injured person. I imagine the lawyers managed to put a stop to that practice via lawsuits.
Back around 1974 there was a holdup at a bank in Tenn. The crooks took some hostages and sped off in a car, running over a policeman who tried to stop them. Enraged at this, a guy from a local TV station took their station wagon and floored it into the side of the crooks’ car. The hostages escaped as a result of the collision and one of the crooks committed suicide when he saw he could not get away, the rest were captured.
Around the same time period a couple of crooks held up a store in Oklahoma City and ran off. The store owner took out a rifle and began shooting at them. A nearby cop saw what was happening and began shooting at the crooks. A guy passing by in a pickup truck with the usual gunrack in the back window opened up too. Needless to say they got them. The surviving crook was irate, “We were just trying to knock over a store and we came outside and it was WWIII.”
Contrast all that with more recent experience. A Dominos pizza deliveryman was held up and responded by producing a Model 1911 and running the crooks off. The company fired him. A man in Columbia SC surprised a burglar, who shot at him, and he managed to shoot the crook with one round from a .22 rifle. The crook sued him and he lost his house. The man in Dallas who killed two burglars in the midst of robbing a neighbor’s house received numerous death threats
Lawyers and PC make cowards of us all.
Someone #44: Do you doubt for an instant that if the bystanders had come up with a ladder, or a stack of crates or a UPS truck to rescue those people that the police would have stopped them anyway? Whythell weren’t the police frantically looking for a ladder?
