Wednesday, June 04, 2008 Rama: A speculated peril By Karlon N. Rama Stage Five
SOME people were piqued by the Supreme Court’s ruling in the Santiano case (Stage Five, May 2); and rightly so.
If we apply the ruling, a person already engaged in grappling with an armed assailant to try to grab the latter’s gun is deemed to be no longer under imminent danger.
Wrote the Supreme Court: “There is aggression in contemplation of the law only when the one attacked faces real and immediate threat to one’s life. The peril sought to be avoided must be imminent and actual, not just speculative.”
Further, it ruled: “Even if it were established that Javier fired his gun as the appellants so insist, the imminence of the danger to their lives had already ceased the moment (Rolando) Dagani held down the victim and grappled for the gun with the latter.”
In my humble opinion, this is ludicrous.
Imagine a gun being held by a criminal against an old woman who’d just cashed in her pension check. It is a speculation that the elderly lady’s life is in danger because the assailant has not yet pulled the trigger?
If she’s a gun-packing grandma, must she wait for the assailant’s gun to go off—the gun spiraling out of the barrel in velocities exceeding 1,250 feet-per-second—before she can defend herself?
What’s worse is that the Santiano case involves government security officers sent to respond to a trouble alarm inside a government-owned compound.
Imagine if circumstances were different, posed Lawyer Jade Ponce over coffee yesterday: the incident happened closer to home and involved two police officers sent to
respond to the sighting of an armed person lurking outside a girl’s dormitory.
In Jade’s scenario, Cop 1 accosts the suspect who then raises his gun. A grappling match with the suspect for the gun then ensues. The gun goes off. Luckily, Cop 1 is
unhurt. Cop 2, while present, refuses to help. Least he gets jailed like Santiano.
Jade, by the way, serves as one of the consultants to City Hall and has, in more than one occasion, lectured to the Cebu City Police Office on topics that included deadly force.
But, then again, we can only surmise that a lot of enlightening things come up when a person, in this case a Supreme Court justice, reviews the things another was forced to do in the dark alleys that criminals call home, while in the comfortable confines of an air-conditioned office.
The reasonableness of an officer’s decision to use deadly force “must be viewed from the perspective of the officer on the scene...[and] not...from the calm vantage point of hindsight,” said the US Supreme Court in Tennessee vs. Garner in 1985.
Are we so far behind?
MAIL CALL. I got an e-mail from Sandy Osabel (sosabel2528@yahoo.com) recently and he wants to react to a review I wrote months ago on nineteen-elevens from Norinco (Stage Five, March 26 and 31, 2008).
I chanced upon you review of the Norinco 1911 over the net. The review and conclusions were very interesting.
I’m sure a lot of Norinco owners’ pride will be slightly touched by your observation. I too have done some small research on Norinco 1911 and it seem there is little
consensus on the measurements and dimension on the firearm per se.
What puzzles me until now the deviated measurement in Jerry Kuhnhausen’s manual and that, despite the deviation in measurements, these firearms continue to earn positive reviews from a lot, and I really mean a lot of Norinco 1911 shooters.
These are truly reliable, working 1911s. A lot of IPSC shooters I know have shot thousand of rounds through their Norincos and, other than making cosmetic changes, the only thing they’ve replaced are the recoil springs.
And since the Norincos have continued to perform at par with the more expensive 1911s, if not better, I’m starting to think that these measurement issues are not deviations or errors but improvements on the 1911 design. At any rate, your read was very interesting and informative. Keep it up.
Thanks for the mail, Sandy. I don’t know if the deviations are improvements or not. Nevertheless, the nineteen-eleven is such a good design that, despite variance in tolerances, it still works.
