A lot of people have ideas of what self-defense actually means, and a lot of people have a very wrong idea.
Usually, this doesn’t matter all that much since it’s largely confined to internet discussions between people who, thankfully, will never need to act in self-defense. Many of those who do find themselves in situations where the actions are clear, so their wrong ideas about the edges of what’s legal and what isn’t don’t come into play.
Now, I’m not an expert on defensive gun uses. I’m more knowledgeable than many, less knowledgeable than many others, so I my word on where those edges are isn’t gospel by any stretch of the imagination.
But I do feel like I need to talk about this a bit because of the murder of Austin Metcalf at a Texas high school track meet.
We haven’t talked about this case, mostly because this was a stabbing and guns didn’t come into play. We could have, of course, because there are other aspects that I find relevant, but there wasn’t a lot of information at first, then a lot of misinformation, and I wanted as close to the full story as possible before getting into it.
A lot of people have tried to say that Karmelo Anthony, the 17-year-old who is accused of killing Metcalf, acted in self-defense.
But let’s look at what happened, and thankfully, we have the story from the arrest report.
I am literally receiving death threats for doing my job as a journalist and releasing an arrest report.
This in particular destroys their narrative. If you attack a journalist for revealing the truth, you’re on the wrong side. https://t.co/auIE2peBAM pic.twitter.com/xZz7EP6J2K
— Sarah Fields (@SarahisCensored) April 8, 2025
So Austin didn’t just politely ask Anthony to leave and got stabbed for it, and now we know why Anthony was asked to move.
Let’s understand that nothing Metcalf did remotely justified what happened. His initial request was legitimate because Anthony had no business in that tent, but then he escalated the situation. Metcalf didn’t back down, and while he might have pushed him, there was no reason to believe Anthony’s life was in danger as a result. Therefore, lethal force wasn’t warranted.
There’s no case for self-defense here from what I can see.
Yet a lot of people who don’t understand the law claim it is. Why? Because they don’t know what they’re talking about and this fits their own narrative.
Meanwhile, many of the same types of people are questioning the police response to a recent incident.
Seventeen-year-old Victor Perez, who also has cerebral palsy, remained hospitalized in critical condition Tuesday after having nine bullets removed from his body and having his leg amputated, Ana Vazquez, his aunt, told The Associated Press. Doctors were planning tests on his brain activity.
“We don’t know if he’s going to wake up,” she said.
The shooting Saturday in Pocatello outraged the boy’s family and neighbors as well as viewers online who questioned why the officers opened fire within about 12 seconds of exiting their patrol cars while making no apparent effort to de-escalate the situation or use less lethal weapons. Dozens of protesters gathered outside the police department Sunday, eastidahonews.com reported.
Now, that framing does make the officers look pretty bad.
The problem is that the framing is meant to do just that. It’s not until much later we get the story.
Perez was still on the ground when police arrived at about 5:25 p.m. Four officers ran to the fence – three pulling out handguns and another pointing what appeared to be a shotgun. They ordered him to drop the knife. Instead, the boy stood up and began taking steps toward them with the knife in his hand. The officers shot repeatedly.
Andres said the police “appeared to be like a death squad or a firing squad,” adding: “They never once asked, ‘What is the situation, how can we help?’ They ran up with their guns drawn, they triggered a mentally disabled person to react and when he reacted … they shot him.”
Yes, they did, as they should have.
See, when someone is armed, their mental disabilities are irrelevant. I get that autistic people may have communication issues and such, but when someone has a knife, refuses to drop it when ordered by police, then take a step toward them–an action that suggests aggression against the officers–then they’re going to light him up.
As they should have.
While Andres seems to think the police should have done everything differently, the truth is that they were acting in self-defense at that point. All this other stuff is irrelevant. The 911 caller said they thought the teen was drunk. They said nothing about them being autistic, having a mental health episode, or anything of the sort, but it wouldn’t matter if they had. Autistic people can hurt you just as much as anyone else.
In fact, let’s look at another incident that popped up in my news feed this morning, involving the wife of the bassist for the band Weezer.
Jillian Shriner, the wife of Weezer bassist Scott Shriner, was shot by LAPD and arrested Tuesday for attempted murder during a search for a hit-and-run suspect.
While searching a home in the Eagle Rock neighborhood of Los Angeles on Tuesday afternoon for a hit-and-run suspect, authorities spotted Jillian Shriner in the front yard of her house, located next door, holding a pistol. Police asked her to drop the weapon multiple times, but she refused, instead turning it on the officers, per the LAPD’s report on the incident. LAPD then opened fire and she was hit in the shoulder. No officers or members of the public were harmed during the incident, according to the LAPD report.
Now, Shriner wasn’t killed. She ran back inside her home and came out later with her babysitter.
Let’s think about this one for a moment. The police show up and see someone armed. They order them to drop the weapon, but rather than do so, the individual makes an aggressive action.
Shiner got shot for it.
The fact that she survived is actually irrelevant to this discussion. If the police are justified in using force, whether the suspect lives or dies doesn’t matter. They’re to shoot to stop the threat, and whether that also involves stopping the heart and brain activity is beyond their control.
These actions by the police, though, are clearly self-defense. An armed person acted aggressively toward them. The police have to order someone to put the weapon down whereas private citizens generally don’t–other requirements might come into play, though–and they not only failed to comply but moved in a way that suggested they wanted to hurt someone.
Shriner, for the record, is charged with attempted murder for her actions.
Austin Metcalf, though, didn’t do anything of the sort. A kid who wasn’t where he was supposed to be was asked or told to leave. When he refused, it escalated into a physical altercation between near-peers, and rather than leave or engage in a fistfight that would likely have been stopped by school officials before it got out of hand, Anthony allegedly decided to draw out a knife and stab Metcalf in the chest.
That’s not self-defense.
You can’t kill someone because they push you. “Texas is a Stand Your Ground state!” someone might try to respond, but that only means you don’t have to retreat from a threat a reasonable person believes could be deadly. What happened at that track meet didn’t meet that definition at all.
Don’t believe me? Ask Michael Drejka of Clearwater, Florida.
He got pushed. He was pushed down on his butt, even. He then drew his weapon and shot and killed a man. He’s now serving time for manslaughter.
Self-defense doesn’t mean that you can just wantonly kill people because they scare you. It doesn’t mean that you can escalate to lethal force simply because you don’t want to take a butt-whooping.
Yes, the two counterexamples I gave were police shootings, but the point still applies. Reasonable people have to be able to look at the situation and say, “Yeah, there’s a good reason someone thought they were going to die or be seriously harmed if they didn’t shoot.” That’s at a minimum. In Duty to Retreat states, you also have to show that you couldn’t escape from the attack via some other means, but that’s a whole other story.
Stop saying Anthony acted in self-defense. While he’s only accused of killing Metcalf, it seems pretty clear no one is disputing that he stabbed him in the chest. The only point of contention is that some people don’t understand what is and what isn’t self-defense.
Read the full article here
