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Comment by Dylan16807 | Hacker News Reader

Courts aren't automatically reasonable. You're endorsing the classification.

Fists can do just as much damage as a skateboard.

Yeah, and a knife can kill just as well as a gun. Except it can’t. A medium build woman can break one’s skull with 2-3 swings of a skateboard, especially if it lands on the edge or on a sticking metal part. To achieve the same damage with fists, it would take years of training and would also cause a significant damage to one’s hands.

If hitting with just the right angle on a hard bit is good enough to count then half the things on my desk are deadly weapons. I can't get behind that definition.

Then don’t. You can continue denying common sense. But if someone threatens to assault you with a skateboard, bare hand or an item from your desk, then will intuitively discover the difference.

Is that the bar? Anything more effective than fists, even if just by preventing the attacker from being hurt, is a deadly weapon?

My normal desktop items could break skulls too, I'm pretty sure. And the pens, oof...

If you started using your desk items as a weapon and swung them at a person in a manner that could reliably kill them then the court would consider you to have a deadly weapon as well.

If you use an item in a manner that can reliably kill people then you use a deadly weapon even if it wasn't intended to be a deadly weapon. Is a pair of scissors a deadly weapon? Yes. Is a heavy hard blunt object (like a statue) a deadly weapon? Yes.

Well, noted I guess. I probably dismissed the idea in the wrong way then. Next time I'll just say "'deadly weapon' is a very low bar and doesn't mean much".

It's not productive to argue about definitions, even if they don't make sense to me. My intent wasn't a semantics argument.

The requirement is that you be in fear for your life or the life of another in your vicinity. Let's say you grabbed a Bic pen, and went for someone's neck with it: in this situation the courts would favor the persons right to self defense given the credible threat to their life. The same counts for something that is a risk to incapacitate them, because courts have historically favored the argument that what happens after you are disarmed or incapacitated could result in death.

I'm not saying it's right, I'm just offering my observations of precedent.

We don't have to argue about it, you can look at the Wisconsin law for it.

> “Dangerous weapon" means any firearm, whether loaded or unloaded; any device designed as a weapon and capable of producing death or great bodily harm; any ligature or other instrumentality used on the throat, neck, nose, or mouth of another person to impede, partially or completely, breathing or circulation of blood; any electric weapon, as defined in s. 941.295 (1c) (a); or any other device or instrumentality which, in the manner it is used or intended to be used, is calculated or likely to produce death or great bodily harm.

I would say a skateboard, wielded as a weapon, is likely to produce death or great bodily harm. Getting hit in the head with a skateboard even once seems likely to cause a concussion or maybe even internal bleeding.

You probably do have a good number of items that could be classified as deadly weapons on your desk, depending on how they were used.

You must be joking or have not done many things where people swing things at you. 100% of the time in a random “get hit in the head taste test” I would choose a fist.

Aluminum bats don’t weigh much either but I’m not going to go out of my way to have my head in the path of one.

You've heard of levers, I'm sure. One classic 'simple machines'. Skateboards have more leverage than fists.

They're not that big compared to arms. Moderately more leverage, but a significant reduction in weight.

They're about as long medieval maces, with a similarly heavy bit of metal on the end. And when either is held in the hand and swung, they have substantially more leverage than the hand itself. Unless you think he was swinging a skateboard from his armpit?

This conversation is getting ridiculous.

> And when either is held in the hand and swung, they have substantially more leverage than the hand itself. Unless you think he was swinging a skateboard from his armpit?

A skateboard held in your hand can't use much of the mass of your arm to help, it's mostly impacting with its own weight. Your hand can impact with a lot more weight behind it even though the swing radius won't be as big.

People die if you hit them with in the head with a fist sized rock, that is what is required for something to be a deadly weapon. A metal rimmed skateboard can deal more damage than a rock so it is a deadly weapon.

I can understand that, and see my other response https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=29236031, but even so...

How many people, if you asked "Do you have any weapons in your backyard?", would say "Yes, several rocks."

But if someone charged at you holding a rock ready to swing it high, would you fear for your life? Almost surely, yes, you should fear for your life in that situation.

This isn't about possession but about a confrontation. A person with a rock wont get caught by police and taken to court over owning a weapon. But a person swinging the rock around and charging at people will get charged for attacking people with a deadly weapon. And in this situation the question is "Was it reasonable to fear for your life?", then the second definition is used.

If it's about confrontation, I'd fear for my life if someone came at me hard enough even if they were empty-handed or holding something tiny.

And I'll point out that the original post I responded to was saying that they were armed. To me that implies the object needs to be a weapon in a vacuum.

Yeah, I agree that the person wasn't armed. Armed typically means weapons made to kill like firearms, I just object to the deadly weapons discussion since that is a much more lax term.

If you are just going to call the entire court system rigged, or whatever, then it is corrospondingly difficult to take what you are saying seriously.

As a general rule, I think that the legal experts know more about this than you do.

No, not rigged.

But sometimes things get interpreted in ways that really stretch the meanings of words. I think anyone that has looked at legal history can agree with that.

And sometimes legal definitions are dumb, which isn't even a court thing.

Also even if it's correct inside its realm, if enough objects count as deadly weapons then "he had a deadly weapon" loses most of its impact and gets misleading. I'm reminded that technically a bare receiver is a gun...

But as a general rule, if we think about all this in aggregate, we should agree that the literal legal experts are way way more likely to get this stuff correct than you are.

If we were evaluating how valuable someone's opinion is on all this stuff, your opinion would be way down the list, compared to legal experts.

And if we compared a random ununiformed opinion, such as from you, and compared it to the opinions of the legal system, it is way more likely that you don't really know how any of this works, as opposed to the actual legal experts.

I think you’re being hung up on the literal meaning of the words a little bit. It seems reasonable to have more severe consequences for someone attacking someone else with a rock compared to somebody just using their fists. We decided to call the former “assault with a deadly weapon”. This doesn’t mean that a rock is a “deadly weapon” under all circumstances. You can’t get charged with “possession of a deadly weapon” for simply walking around with a rock without intent of hurting anyone.

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