> Under the new law, an Oklahoma driver will no longer be liable for striking — or even killing — a person if the driver is “fleeing from a riot ... under a reasonable belief that fleeing was necessary to protect the motor vehicle operator from serious injury or death.”
Super disingenuous to characterize that as "it's legal to run over protesters".
> The person you drove over doesn't get to give an alternative story to this necessity, nor do they have to be somebody that you're fleeing from.
Agreed. This is one of many reasons why rioting is awful—it creates these dangerous scenarios where ordinary people have to make split second life-or-death decisions. Frankly, I wish rioting was prosecuted more aggressively rather than blaming people who are stuck in situations where they have to defend themselves (“but they don’t need to be there!” <- people have the right to assemble in public, but rioters don’t have the right to create dangerous situations).
> I don't think it's reasonable to defend yourself from somebody by going up to a passer by and shooting them
This is an embarrassingly obvious straw man. No one is arguing for the right to kill a third party to defend oneself against another, the argument is that people should be given a pass if they accidentally hit someone while fleeing for their life. It’s one thing to disagree with that, but it’s an entirely different thing to lie about the law or the argument.
Occasionally self-defense laws protect guilty people, but that doesn't imply that the law isn't a self-defense law. I'm sure there's lots of good criticism of this law, but characterizing it as the OP did is patent dishonesty. Even Vox wasn't willing to go that far ffs.
For the purpose of your claim that the law legalized killing protesters, it doesn’t matter.
That said, per my previous comment, there may be lots to criticize about this law, including that it may have been superfluous. I’m not a lawyer, but my best guess is that existing self-defense law didn’t clearly absolve the victim of injury or death to bystanders as she pursued her own safety. But again, none of that has anything to do with what’s going on in Canada.
> Under the new law, an Oklahoma driver will no longer be liable for striking — or even killing — a person if the driver is “fleeing from a riot ... under a reasonable belief that fleeing was necessary to protect the motor vehicle operator from serious injury or death.”
Super disingenuous to characterize that as "it's legal to run over protesters".