See, this is the thing I can't wrap my head around. This whole idea of the "citizen's arrest."
Put yourself in the shoes of the person being arrested. Forget about race, what you might have done, all of that. Just imagine an abstract person, being chased down by two guys in a truck, neither of them in uniform, one of them gets off the truck with a gun trained on you. How do you respond?
The number one thing is probably to run. You don't know that they are performing an arrest. They are not uniformed police officers. For all you know they are coming to kill you. But they are in a truck so you probably can't outrun them. So I think it would be in self defense to try to wrestle the gun away from them. It's probably not smart and will probably get you killed, but if you are desperate and believe they are here to kill you, what could you do?
Now put yourself in the shoes of the person performing the citizen's arrest. You believe you are doing something legal, but then the person you are trying to arrest turns on you and tries to wrestle your gun. So now you have to defend yourself or you might get killed. So you have both parties trying to do self-defense to avoid being killed at this point.
How can this happen? How can both people be in a position of self-defense? Something is wrong here, and I don't just mean legally. Also wrong in sort of a philosophical sense. In self defense there should be an aggressor and a defender. But it seems here we have arrived at a situation with two defenders. So what is going on? I have so much trouble wrapping my head around this.
See, this is the thing I can't wrap my head around. This whole idea of the "citizen's arrest."
Put yourself in the shoes of the person being arrested. Forget about race, what you might have done, all of that. Just imagine an abstract person, being chased down by two guys in a truck, neither of them in uniform, one of them gets off the truck with a gun trained on you. How do you respond?
The number one thing is probably to run. You don't know that they are performing an arrest. They are not uniformed police officers. For all you know they are coming to kill you. But they are in a truck so you probably can't outrun them. So I think it would be in self defense to try to wrestle the gun away from them. It's probably not smart and will probably get you killed, but if you are desperate and believe they are here to kill you, what could you do?
Now put yourself in the shoes of the person performing the citizen's arrest. You believe you are doing something legal, but then the person you are trying to arrest turns on you and tries to wrestle your gun. So now you have to defend yourself or you might get killed. So you have both parties trying to do self-defense to avoid being killed at this point.
How can this happen? How can both people be in a position of self-defense? Something is wrong here, and I don't just mean legally. Also wrong in sort of a philosophical sense. In self defense there should be an aggressor and a defender. But it seems here we have arrived at a situation with two defenders. So what is going on? I have so much trouble wrapping my head around this.