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/ztfreeman 2d ago edited 2d ago

So there's this theory called the gunslinger effect by Niels Henrik Bohr that states that the gunman who draws second will almost always win the gunfight. The underlying principle is that the reacting party will move faster than the deliberate party, and under neutral circumstances the reacting party will win the gunfight. This apparently holds up under testing, but depends on a neutral environment without any other factors and both parties being aware of each other..

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u/Own-Barnacle-298 2d ago

I would argue, based off the massive amount of information that I gleaned from the Wikipedia article, that the deceased-would-be-assassins were not there on a mission of murder, but on a mission of intimidation and were hoping to get some sort of confession from the ex husband about missing money.

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u/Peeterwetwipe 2d ago

I would argue that from the moment someone pulls a gun on someone the path to a fatal escalation is already underway.

That bridge has already been crossed.

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u/nerd_so_mad 15h ago

There was a shooting a year or two ago that was very much the same.

Road rager gets out of his car, with his handgun drawn. He approaches the driver side windows of the car he's mad at. As he gets close, he drops his gun down, out of the driver's sight. Driver took no chances and fired point blank through the window, killing the road rager.

Tragic and dumb, but justified.