That presumes that the State legislature makes every possible act illegal, and only allows those it has evaluated as "reasonable things to do".
Only in the most fascist authoritarian society is that remotely the case. In our society, the default is an act is legal, and the deemed unreasonableness of act is at best moderately correlated with, but neither a neccessary nor sufficient condition for its being made illegal, and its reasonable never even need be considered. In this case of acts deemed "basic rights" this is especially the case, since the legislature might and often does consider solely whether the act is a protected right, without any thought to its reasonableness either now or when it was deemed a right.
If we were talking about anything except open carry, that would be a good point. In this case, it's not that Ohio simply neglected to pass laws prohibiting the open carrying of firearms under normally mindless circumstances; they passed a law
explicitly allowing it.
Doesn't matter if they said its legal or just didn’t say it is illegal. The law is based upon blind application of the notion the people have the right to do it, without any consideration of how reasonable an act it is, how much public danger it would cause, or whether the cops would be reasonable in assuming such a person a deadly threat.
They are applying the "logic" that an act being a "right" makes all other considerations mute.
It isn't "illegal", but it is legal grounds for the cops to treat you like you are a deadly threat. IOW, he can be legally shot for doing something legal. The legality of his act does not diminish the legality of the cops actions in treating him like a deadly threat.
Tell that to the NRA.
Seriously. Tell them. They've been arguing the exact opposite in court for over a decade and mostly succeeding.
And your argument in defense of Crawford is identical to theirs. You support the NRAs position that until you actually start shooting people, anything you do with an assault rifle in a crowded public place is perfectly reasonable and nothing that anyone, including the cops, should even take notice of. Only be taking that position can you absolve Crawford of responsibility for his own death.
As to the NRA succeeding, can you show me court cases in which cops have been successfully prosecuted for treating an armed suspect as a threat, based upon the argument that their possession of a gun at any time and place is just perfectly legal non-threatening right that they have?
You're missing the point. It isn't about whether he did anything illegal or morally wrong. It is about whether the cops could have shot him without themselves doing anything illegal and morally wrong, and they answer is "yes"
Could have, yes. Strictly speaking, however,
the police violated his civil rights by opening fire and killing him.
Ah, so you must have pre-cognition that the cops will be found guilty of civil rights violations. Just above you appealed to court rulings to support your interpretation of the law, so I assume you will also use this court ruling to decide whether his rights were violated. Or is this more confirmation bias where the same type of "evidence" is either used or ignored depending on whether it supports your position?
IF he acted in a way that gave reasonable people a basis to think he was an armed and deadly threat, then his rights were not violated. Your argment requires that if he was standing over 10 dead bodies when the cops arrived, their demand that he drop the gun or be shot would still violate his rights. I seriously doubt any court has or would interpret open-carry laws to imply this.
Walking around with a gun that looks like that in a department store contributes to a reasonable basis for that inference, and the fact that doing so is not itself illegal doesn't change that, because that is a reality of human cognition and the law does not alter what a reasonable mind would infer in a situation.
To date, I see little evidence that the cops lacked impulse control.
The fact that they opened fire on a customer in WalMart gives lie to this claim. Force doesn't escalate that fast unless one side or the other loses control and jumps the threat level much higher than it actually is.
The situation was already escalated by his walking around the store with that weapon. The apparent nature of the gun implied that he could have killed several people in seconds with the twitch of a finger. Hesitation on his part to drop the gun and get on the ground is an act that escalates it further and adds to the already reasonable presumption of threat. IF he was a white NRA redneck and he shot a bunch of black shoppers in a heavily black neighborhood because the cops hesitated and gave him the opening, then all the people claiming racism now would screaming that the cops should have shot him down immediately and only hesitated because he's white and his likely victims were black.
Agreed, but only stupid people do stupid things just because a stupid law says its legal for them to do it. This guy was an idiot, and may very well have engaged in immoral acts that led perfectly reasonable and moral people to shoot him.
There is no "immoral act" he could have committed under these circumstances that would actually justify the shooting; he isn't even being accused of that much.
You keep missing the point. It isn't about whether his wrongful acts "justified" his death. IT is about whether his own actions were the major cause of his death, without anyone else having to act immorally or unreasonably to contribute to it. IT is akin to someone purposely stepping in front of a moving car. The fact that some idiot legislature might say that is a legal act, doesn't make it reasonable and doesn't make it at all immoral or illegal for the driver to run the person over rather than risk other people's lives slamming on their brakes or swerving and potentially killing themselves and or the drivers behind and next to them. Its a tragic outcome, but the person stepping in the road is solely responsible for their death. IF they did it mindlessly, then it was a stupid act that caused their death. If they did it on purpose to see how the cars would react, then they willingly put others is extreme danger, and it was a grossly immoral act that led to their own death. Yet that doesn't mean the their death was "justified" meaning that he should have been shot even if he had complied with the cops, just that it was his own fault.
He is being accused by a nosey fellow shopper of giving them dirty looks and looking suspicious. I cannot and will not equate "looking suspicious" with "immoral behavior."
Yeah, how nosey of people to not want to be gunned down. Any parent suspicious of a guy in a trenchcoat with a "free candy: Don't tell your parents!" sign on his windowless van next to a schoolyard is just "nosey". It is a man's "right" to do that and it is nothing but a non-threatening act of free speech.
He did not merely "look suspicious", he looked like a man (again, not a "boy" as some have lied) walking around a department store for at least several minutes with a high-magazine assault rifle designed for the purpose of killing as many people as quickly as possible. Those are the facts and how they would be perceived by any reasonable observer. To the ex-marine caller, he also looked like he was pointing it at people, including kids, and then messing with it in a manner that appeared to be loading it. There are really only two plausible explanations for that account. Either this witness just decided to make all of those extra details up on the fly while talking to 911 just to try and get this complete stranger shot by the cops, or Crawford did those things and was deliberately messing with people to try and freak them out. That latter is at least if not a much more plausible human behavior since it only requires someone be really stupid and not murderously evil, and there are many more of the former type of people.
Either way, those are the details the cops had when arriving on the scene, and if they and the witness are to be believed, Crawford did not drop the weapon when asked and instead tried to argue with the cops about the nature of the gun. Cops don’t wait for explanation in a life threatening situation, they demand compliance of the suspect and when the person is armed, they view it a an escalation when they don’t get compliance. Eventually the video should clarify what happened before and after the cops arrived. But unless the cops and the witnesses are lying and the caller just invented a detailed fiction while on the phone with 911, then Crawford was a deadly and armed threat to a reasonable observer, including the cops and their culpability is minimal at best.
BTW, blame here is largely a zero sum game. Wallmart and open-carry laws are only to blame if the cops and the caller were thinking and acting reasonably and within the law. If Walmart and carry laws create a situation where reasonable people and cops respond in way the gets a shopper killed, then they are to blame. But, if the guy got shot only because of a lying and murderous caller and reckless cops that violated his rights, then all other parties are off the hook morally and legally. Rogue reckless cops can kill people, regardless of whether Wallmart sells those guns or people open-carry, so his death would not support any change in policy by Wallmart or lawmakers. You cannot have your cake and it too, meaning you cannot blame everyone else in the situation, but leave Crawford blameless.
