[JohnKSa]

what would you do if the same thing happened except he wasn't fully unconscious his gun laying safely at your feet and he looks up and says the cops can arrest me now but ill get out in a couple years pleading insanity and when I do ill come back and kill your wife and kids while you are at work one day.....are you going to roll the dice and see if the system works..or commit cold blooded murder and shoot him..because you and I both know it would be a shaken house owner found robber laying on floor and executed him.....in my opinion ersland pretty much did the latter...if that guy with the head wound ever recovered he would have probably wanted revenge for being so messed up and stuff...so no I say it was his call to make and he did...you can say this is all some wild theory but nobody knows what was going on through his head that night...was ersland scared of retaliation or not..idk but I say it was his call

1. I have made a decision to live my life within the law. That means I am not a criminal and that means I would not murder someone regardless of the circumstances.

2. I am not a moron, so even if I had made different life choices and actually were a criminal, I wouldn't be stupid enough to admit publicly that I would murder someone if the circumstances made it "desirable" and I thought I could get away with it.

3. Ersland did nothing of the kind. There was no threat made by the juvenile robber because he was unconscious and he was unarmed. Whatever Ersland did, he did because he wanted to, not because of anything the unconscious robber did or said or threatened.

4. People are very good at rationalizing to come up with "reasons" to do what they already want to do anyway or what they were already going to do or what they've already done. Maybe Ersland was able to rationalize killing an unconscious person who posed no threat the same way you rationalized a scenario where you would feel it would be reasonable to murder someone. That doesn't indicate that Ersland was justified any more than it indicates you would be justified if you murdered someone in the scenario you describe.

the only time I ever seen the system working first hand I was about to be getting screwed by it...and only saved not from the system but because my brother woke up and was able to tell them...

I've seen the system work both ways. This case is a case where it worked the way it should have, but that doesn't make it perfect.

More to the point, the fact that it's not perfect doesn't give people the right to murder people if they feel like they can rationalize the act of murder to themselves.

that's the lesson I learned about our law and I am a quick learner...nothing anyone can say to me will change what I got to witness for myself...

Whatever happened, if the lesson you learned was that it's OK to murder someone if you can justify it to yourself, then you really came away with a mistaken impression. An imperfect legal system doesn't come anywhere near to justifying murder.

In some sense I feel like a citizen who protects himself or herself - is acting like my agent to deter potential crime in the future.

I feel somewhat the same. But when a fellow gun owner murders a fellow human being like Ersland did, besides feeling bad like I do any time I hear about a murder, I also feel like it hurts all gun owners.

AND, it's important to remember that while deadly force self-defense may deter potential crime in the future, that is NOT a legal justification for shooting someone. The legal use of deadly force is to stop or prevent certain very serious crimes that are immediately about to begin or that are currently in progress. We can think of the possibility that deadly force self-defense may deter potential crime as a happy side effect, but we can NOT use that side effect as a justification in and of itself if the immediate justification for the use of deadly force doesn't already exist.

And I am left with my anger over the fact that we have laws and policies in place in this country that seem to perpetuate and protect – even nurture criminality in this country while hindering and hampering citizens from protecting themselves.

Except that Ersland WAS able to protect himself. Quite effectively, in fact. And the prosecutor has made it plain that he did nothing wrong by protecting himself.

And just because someone logically comes down on the side of the verdict in this case – I have to tell myself – they’re not giving validity to all the wrong-headed thinking that we have going on in society the thought that it’s somehow morally better to be a victim than to use a firearm to protect one’s self…

Sorry, this is a major load of crap. NO one is suggesting that Ersland did anything wrong by using a firearm to protect himself. No one here on this forum, not the prosecutor, not the laws of OK. What he did wrong was that AFTER he successfully and legally defended himself he returned to his shop and executed a helpless human being lying unconscious on his floor. That's got NOTHING to do with "protecting one's self".

But it leaves a bad taste in my mouth. This whole case is a disgrace.

Mine too. Instead of another successful case where a CCW holder protected himself and others and turned out to be a hero, we have good incident turned bad by the CCW holder's decision to commit murder after the incident.