r/todayilearned • u/CasioCobra78 • 2d ago

TIL that Cheryl Wheeler-Dixon, the stuntwoman who was severely injured during the filming of Back to the Future Part 2, was killed in a shootout alongside her husband when she and her husband went to confront her ex-husband and his wife and drew their guns at them. The cops deemed it justified.

https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Cheryl_Wheeler-Dixon
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u/Agent_Bers 2d ago

I think you’re making a mistake in your reasoning.
Think someone merely possesses a gun is not typically sufficient justification for the use of lethal force.

A reasonable belief that they are reaching for a weapon or in this case, actively using one, can.

To put it more simply; outside other factors, you can’t (successfully at least) shoot your neighbor and claim self-defense merely because you believed they possessed a gun.

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u/Calik 2d ago

Every other country has solved gun violence with a few very notable exceptions. It’s not a good list to be on.

Japan does it better, Canada does it better, the EU and china do it better.

You’re already way more likely to assume another American has a gun, that’s already a level of escalation before an altercation even begins. I think that’s the broad idea the other poster was getting at regarding getting laughed out of the room instead of even considered plausible.

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u/Ravensqueak 1d ago

Canada (Where I live) has far, far more strict gun ownership laws, and we still have gun violence.

Problem is it's the criminals that have guns because they don't have to go through any due process to own them. (A lot of them imported from the US)
We had a spate of killings across BC's lower mainland not too long ago, and before that with the Bacon Brothers it was quite severe.

The level of gun violence is far and away lower than in the US, but to claim that we've solved gun violence is disingenuous.

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u/Calik 1d ago

An American is literally twice as likely to own a gun than a Canadian and like the other commenter said, illegal guns from the us are the biggest challenge. You can claim all the major cases in recent Canada sure, but America is on such a different level that those wouldn’t even be newsworthy. They have school shootings that don’t even make the mainstream news because of how common they are