How often do you hear from gun banners that people shouldn’t carry guns and just “Settle Things Like Men” with their fists? First up, I don’t condone fighting, and the whole point of having a gun is to END fights, hopefully before they ever start, and both the power of a firearm, and the gravity of that power (as well as the legal implications) help stress avoidance as well as reluctance to use it except in the gravest extreme.
With fist fights, it’s still illegal. It’s still assault, and it could be considered assault with a deadly weapon depending on how things play out. Still most street brawls go unpunished if the end result is just bruised bodies and bruised egos. That being said it isn’t always the case:
Two years after Isteak Quadir, 51, was seriously injured trying to quell a brewing bar fight, the Queens man has died from his wounds, his family said.
The Bangladeshi immigrant’s life took its tragic twist on Sept. 13, 2012, as he played some pool with friends in The Hillside Inn in Jamaica.
… After Quadir’s friends scattered, the peace-loving immigrant stuck around to try and “smooth things over,” a police source said.
But he was the only one in the bar trying to problem-solve.
… One of the men punched him in the face, flooring him.
The other, believed to have been REDACTED, stomped him with repeated kicks to the head, according to cops.
Quadir, a waiter in Manhattan, was rushed in critical condition with severe brain damage to Jamaica Hospital.
On Christmas Eve, he was transferred to a rehab center and connected to a ventilator so he could breathe.
Nurses said he was brain dead and in a semi-comatose state, with virtually no chance of recovering.
“Half of his brain was bashed in,” said Donald Morris, the center’s administrator. “You could put your whole fist in his head.”
…After nearly two years in a vegetative state, Quadir died May 14 at Long Island Care Center, in Flushing — and his death has been classified as a homicide.
Now this was in Queens where guns are essentially banned, but this man was so brutally killed with nothing but hands and feet. Further he was killed trying to STOP a fight, which makes it all the more sad.
Not a “Gun Death”, so New York should be proud!
Yeah, you have to wonder what advance in American society would be achieved if perfect confiscation of firearms were possible? I’m imagining a drug gang enforcing its rules or street gang defending its turf pretty successfully with edged weapons, lead-filled pool cues, baseball bats, force of numbers, “iniquitous initiative”, surprise, exemplary abduction and torture, arson, etc. Evil finds its own depth. Meanwhile the rest of us are supposed to pretend we’ve achieved that gun-free utopia by rendering the law-abiding without a definitive means of self-defense?
Have any of those anti-gunners been in a street fight between unarmed (without a handgun) combatants? There’s no such thing. The assailant gets the drop on the victim, and that’s it. Back in the early 1980s, a crazy guy on the edge of my peripheral vision attacked me on the street. I won, by beating his head against the curb until he relented after the briefest scuffle. I was scared, and I also got lucky.
I think there may be some sort of case to be made that if I’d been armed, and had successfully presented my weapon, I may have deterred his attack completely, sparing both of us our minor injuries.