Ugh, not watching that video. I'll take your word for it that it's abhorrent. I'd guess that the reason for the relative indifference of the people involved to the horror of what's taken place is somewhere between those second (religious idiocy) and third (the pervasive culture) options, leaning heavily toward the third. What a sad story.

John Oliver did a Last Week Tonight show just recently on Stand Your Ground laws, which is what enables this crap. Worth a watch...

https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=vTF-Kz_7L0c

I definitely hope she takes the kids away

So on the one hand, yeah: this is a great example of how mass firearms ownership makes it trivially easy to escalate any random argument into a fatal one.

On the other hand...man. Carruth went to someone else's house to try to bully a physically smaller man into doing something that he was not, as far as I can tell, under any obligation to do. I'm not feeling a great deal of sympathy here.

(Excuse me, Read went to the house of, etc...)

@5 there was no physical confrontation UNTIL the gun arrived.

In-person custody disputes like this happen all across America every day a hundred times a day.

They get deadly when there are weapons involved. And the probability of a fatal encounter escalates dramatically if there is a gun.

Otherwise 90% of them are at best brief wrestling matches. This fatality ONLY happened in the presence of the gun.

In America, like in many backwards societies, being “bullied” ie: feeling humiliated or having your fragile masculinity threatened, is an excuse to murder someone.

@6: Yep hundreds or more likely thousands of times a day. There might be some yelling, but they are not particularly scary events. Until Carruth brings out the gun, there's no real danger in the situation; Read is threatening to sue, not to kick Carruth's ass! After the gun comes out, Carruth feels, reasonably enough, that he is in real danger -- what if Read takes his gun? With the gun out, it is indeed a very dangerous situation. In Texas, because Carruth had a real sense of danger, he is allowed to shoot Read. So the court, the jurors, and most of the citizens of texas will all agree that Carruth was in real danger after he brought out his gun. Which he was! But an overwhelming number of those very same Texans, doubtless including Read, buy their guns in order to "be safe". Definitely a weird disconnect there.

@7 I meant: "doubtless including *carruth"

Texas gonna Texas. guess it's just part of that Texas pride you only know if you live there or some such bs I always see people from Texas talking about.

America is a shit hole

@12
Every channel is Dumbass+ !

I wonder if it was suicide, like 'suicide by cop', despair over his family situation and maybe more. The folks in the car may have subconsciously realized, or been anticipating, this too and hence the muted reactions.

Meanwhile smash and grab thug flash mobs with guns and crow bars are wiping out retail stores across the country and there's all this ruminating over one tragedy as if that makes America a s##thole country.

@17 We can actually contemplate two pathologies at once. False choices make America a shithole country.

This reminds me of another recent homicide--the shooting death of Sara Nicole Morales by Andrew Derr following an alleged hit-and run by Morales. In Florida. Surprised Mudede hasn't written about that one yet, since it implicates both car culture and gun culture.

“What are you going to do, you going to shoot us? Is that what you wanted?” said Seattle resident Nicole duFresne on a NYC street before dawn on January 27, 2005. “What are you going to do, shoot us?” And then she was killed. Many people draw gins as their trump cards, and then their opponents don’t back down. Instead they defiantly shout “OK asshole, go ahead and shoot.” Guns don’t shut down confrontations, they make them deadly.

@23:

As @14 points out, with 40,000 gun homicides and 650 mass shootings so far this year (about 120 and 2 per day respectively), even Mudede can't be expected to keep track of all of them...