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Literally sharia law honor killings.
We have lost texas
They don't see sharia law as evil or unjust, they see it as competition to their own authoritarianism. Right idea, wrong religion (barely lol)
You give them way too much credit. Most of them don't know what Sharia Law actually is.
Right cult, different sect.
I don't think that's necessarily the case. This is also just as well the end result of doublespeak.
"Unlawfully killed"
"Shot dead"
"Possible manslaughter"
It's MURDER.
"Unlawfully killed" is some backbreaking doublespeak.
Imagine a headline that reads "Health insurance company CEO unlawfully killed by a nearby armed pedestrian."
How much did you actually read about the case?
The killer claims it accidentally went off.
Even so, this is the kind of thing you need a proper trial to determine culpability. “He said it was an accident” after they had gotten in a heated argument and he lead her away to the gun room. His testimony absolutely not be taken for truth. And even if it was an accident theres definitely a case there for reckless endangerment/manslaughter. So I think the outrage at this news is justified
Reckless endangerment / manslaughter is a bare minimum. You'd have to violate multiple basic safety rules for this to happen even following his story
You can't just load and chamber and fire a gun by fucking accident. Oh whoops the slide pulled back by accident, and I accidentally had my finger on the trigger, then I accidentally pulled all the way past the resistance of the firing pin. Nope. You murdered her.
Very bold assumption that this isn't the type of guy to keep several loaded and chambered guns lying around ready to fire. Almost certainly is
Accidentally picking up, pointing and firing however seems less than believable
He didn't accidentally pick it up. He said so himself (according to the BBC article linked in the OP).
He was drinking, and it's a Glock.
Glocks have a "passive" safety. There's no manual safety, just this little extra thing in the trigger, which does not require an extra step to fire.
Negligent discharge is much easier with guns like these, in my opinion (because apparently there's significant debate on this, somehow).
A drunk guy accidentally pointing a gun is plausible (I've had it happen to me before, probably more than once). Add the negligence of a drunken idiot and possible shitty trigger discipline, and I could easily imagine a negligent discharge here.
There's also the possibility that it wasn't even his finger that pulled the trigger. He could have snagged the trigger on something, being a fumbling idiot. Some people have accidentally shot themselves when trying to holster guns like these. This condition is commonly known as "Glock leg".
Still, regardless of intent, the gun was pointed at his daughter, the trigger was pulled, and she's dead — a sum of his own decisions, accident or not. It is WILD that he gets to walk free.
Yes I'm familiar with firearms.
You do not accidental raise a gun, point it at someone, and pull the trigger. Total bullshit to say otherwise.
Also get out of there with that trigger nonsense. It takes a conscious amount of force to pull back a trigger. They're designed that way to prevent accidents. They don't go off because someone has their finger on it ( which is intent to fire anyway)
He may have been very drunk and in an altered state. He probably did something his sober self never would. But he still chose to do it.
The only thing you said that's even plausible is it could have snagged on something. Which of course he still chose to do a lot of illegal actions leading up to that
Correct. AFAIK, he did not claim that lifting the gun was an accident.
Any experienced RSO (range safety officer) would easily disagree.
Yet somehow, triggers get accidentally pulled sometimes 🤷🏻♂️. There's a term for this: Negligent discharge (not to be confused with accidental discharge).
"A trigger"? You mean in general? Like as a universal rule that applies to all triggers? That's not how it works. There's a very wide range of trigger pull weights, travel lengths, etc.
IIRC, most Glocks have a trigger pull weight of around 5.5 lbs (depending on model). It's not nothing, but it's definitely not a lot. Negligent discharges can and do happen.
Anyway, sounds like we pretty much agree on the rest.
And even if you could somehow accidentally fire a gun, that's the definition of manslaughter anyway, so the guy is still guilty either way.
Wait up, he accidentally had the safety off and accidentally pointed it in direction of his own daughter. They do say for an accident lots of things have to line up perfectly.
So I can see why the jury saw that his daughter accidentally having the opposite political views to her dad was immaterial to their judgment.
Dude still has to process completely pushed away grief though, so he’s got to be fun to be around for the rest of his life.
You assume he didn't leave his weapons loaded. And that he hadn't modified them with a hair trigger, etc.
This is the type of person that has an entire gun room, not just a safe or two, an entire room dedicated to guns.
Enough to know he pointed a loaded gun at his daughter with the safety off and pulled the trigger, incidentally just after having an argument with her about trump; and that the maga fascist jury of peers in bumfuck texas decided to acquit him without a trial because "it was an accident" is apparently a reasonable explanation to them...
Honor killing is not part of Sharia. It belongs to tribalistic culture and societies.
Yeah. I remember discussing this with non-Arab Muslims.
They talked about how annoying Arab cultural dominance can be, how they export Arab values and culture, while pretending it's all Islam inspired rather than simply Arab traditions.
But I suppose that's not a stunning insight. Don't even need to leave the middle-east, to find Muslims who don't agree with other Muslims on what it means to be a Muslim.
Honor killing was prohibited by Islam. Read about female infanticide prohibition in Islam, for example.
Arabs are also incredibly diverse. It's not a single culture or ethnicity.
They should still get the fuck out of Africa.
Literally a drunk and completely incompetent gun owner. He should be punished and made an example of. Your statement makes this sound completely intentional. The court appears to believe the claim that her death was accidental. I don't doubt that he had no intentions of killing his daughter.
This should be a textbook example for gun licensing and requirements of safe storage. This man's negligence cost him his daughter and the court decided this was enough. I don't think the court went far enough and I think this should be the basis for further legislation, but let's not turn this case into a bogeyman about honor killings.
He wasn’t indicted. The Texas jury didn’t care about the murder enough to punish him whatsoever, that’s the problem.
Worth noting that indictments are laughably easy to get, because there is no defense lawyer. An indictment isn’t a conviction, it’s just the prosecution going “yeah we probably have enough evidence to bother with a trial.” The old joke is that a grand jury will indict a ham sandwich for murder if the prosecutor wants them to. The prosecutor has full control over what evidence the grand jury sees, and the rules around evidence are a LOT more relaxed than they are in court. The prosecutor could basically scribble out a “yeah I did it lol” note on a napkin and present it to the grand jury as evidence. It wouldn’t stand up in court, but it doesn’t need to if the prosecutor just wants the indictment.
The grand jury is just an arm of the prosecutor, and is used as a political tool whenever a trial would be politically inconvenient. Because the district attorney is typically elected, which means they need to pander for votes. So if it would be politically inconvenient to prosecute someone, they can simply refuse to bring any evidence to the grand jury. Because (again) they have full control over what evidence the grand jury sees.
For example, let’s say a cop murders someone in the street. It’s on video. The public is out for blood. But the prosecutor has to work with the police to do their job, and the police union is threatening to stop collecting any evidence at crime scenes if they prosecute this cop. Prosecutor is between a rock and a hard place, because they’d be torching future trials just to appease the public. So instead, they simply don’t bring any evidence to the grand jury. The grand jury is a faceless shadowy organization that can’t defend itself. It’s the perfect scapegoat. So when the grand jury refuses to indict (because they weren’t presented with any evidence) the district attorney can jump in front of the news cameras and go “I tried to prosecute them, but that big mean grand jury refused to indict. But remember, I did my best! Vote for me!” Cops are happy because the prosecutor didn’t indict, the public is placated because the prosecutor “tried” to indict them, and the cogs of the legal system keep grinding away as intended.
So with all of that being said… If he wasn’t indicted, it’s because the prosecutor didn’t want to bring it to trial.
Thank you for sharing this information.
Hey, always glad to see the MECFS guy in the wild. My wife is suffering from major chronic fatigue, (it’s seriously life-altering), so I wanted to let you know that your posts don’t go unnoticed.
And yeah, the whole “jury vs grand jury” and “indicted vs convicted” thing is a pet peeve of mine. Because authorities prey on the public’s lack of knowledge about the legal process, to shift blame away from themselves. Once you know the difference (and understand the relationship between a prosecutor and the grand jury) you’ll consistently see news stories of prosecutors hiding behind grand juries to shift blame away from themselves. But it’s always framed by the news as “the prosecutor brought the case to the grand jury, who refused to indict” because the news is complicit in keeping the cogs grinding.
:)
That's a problem, yes. That's the main reason why this man wasn't given any sort of punishment in this specific case.
This isn't the first time someone has shot a family member without the intent to kill, and it won't be the last. Something needs to be done about it at a fundamental level. I realize that isn't going to happen, especially in Texas. But that doesn't change the fact that we need common sense gun laws in this country. This is a fucking travesty and a miscarriage of justice. It's doing nothing to deal with this specific scenario nor the larger problem that too many idiots have too much access to deadly weapons.
If you don't have inside knowledge on the case, "not having doubt" on either intentions or no intentions is an incredibly moronic take.
Also, the job of a court of law is to establish innocence or guilt (and the degree thereof). This grand jury failing to indict is that grand jury refusing to do its duty to the people. While Germany is also going to shits, I am kinda glad that for now, our country is civilised enough to not have juries. Although we have the next worst thing, which is laypeople judges, for some cases.
Ya when people say Dems have a chance of winning Texas. Call that person a moron and go on with your day
Like nearly all the US, the cities are heavily blue and the rural parts are heavily red. The only difference between blue states and red states is which side of the halfway line it’s tipped towards. And nearly every state is close to the halfway mark—including Texas.
Texas has more dem voters than some states have people.
We have loads of left-leaning people who are eligible to vote. If more of them would actually vote, we'd get somewhere. Fortunately, the primary turnout numbers this year look good. More Democratic voters than Republican in the Senate race, and pretty close to even for the Governor. Compare to 2024 when over 2/3 of primary ballots cast were Republican. Polling looks better than 2018 with Beto v Cruz.
And yet not once have they even been close to winning
Beto came pretty close against Cruz. But that was basically it in the last 30 or so years. Every other time has been a route basically. The Texas Democratic party is beyond incompetent.
You aren't even close to being right about that
Nah, pretty close.
not for any longer. trump has won the right to throw out any mail-in ballot he wants.
If we had 100% voting population Republicans would never win again anywhere, especially in texas. That is why Republicans are so eager to disenfranchise voters. They're trying to take away voting rights of women by making voters who change their name ineligible. They love the apathetic idiots who never vote.
Right now trump seems to have killed mail in voting for this year. Unless something changes the new usps system is sure to disenfranchise millions.
It’s a perfect storm for Dems this year in Texas. They have a good candidate for that state - a likable, charismatic young man who talks about his Christian faith a lot. The Republicans are fielding a particularly bad candidate - a corrupt attorney general who was nearly impeached by his own party for fraud, whose wife recently divorced him for cheating, and who narrowly won a closely contested primary. Beto came within 2.5 points of Cruz in 2018, and Cruz was/is popular in Texas, and Republicans in general weren’t as reviled back then. It’s still no better than a coin flip, but Talarico could win this year.
I HATE all this Christian bullshit. Why the fuck does xianity have ANYTHING to do with the document? I hate it here
Political scientists estimate there are about 8 million consistently-Democratic voters in Texas and 6 million consistently-Republican voters. Out of a population of 30 million where everyone else flip flops and/or doesn't vote.
The only reason the Republicans ever win in Texas is due to voter suppression/gerrymandering.
This is consistent with national estimates that there are roughly 1.5x as many Democrats as Republicans in the USA.
The only reason the Republicans ever win anywhere is due to voter suppression/gerrymandering.