What is the difference between killing an murder? Well there really only seems to be one thing that separates the two, and that is intent. throughout the duration of this speech I will give examples of killings/murders and explain why they were considered either a killing or a murder.
first of all, I will explain what I mean by intent and believe it or not, intent is what you intended to do, if there was a 2 car crash and one of the drivers died, the intent wasn’t for them to die therefor they were killed, not murdered. in the same scenario with the 2 car crash but it was one of the drivers intentions to get the other killed and they were, then that is classified as murder.
Self defense is a topic with grey area as to whether it is considered a killing or a murder in most people’s eyes, in most court cases as long as the person who killed another indeed had acted in self defense and can be proven that they had no malicious intent then they are legally justified and don’t get charged for murder.
Bin-Laden was the leader of the terrorist group Al-Qaeda before his compound was raided on May 2nd 2011 by SEAL Team Six where he was killed by one of the SEALS. Many people have asked whether the SEAL member responsible for putting down Bin-Laden killed him or murdered him, reportedly Bin-Laden was unarmed, so the SEAL member couldn’t have acted upon self defense right? Well yes, he could and he did, self defense can include something called a preemptive strike, which is when someone that is feeling threatened can defend themselves before they are in any danger, Bin-Laden had killed thousands and planned to kill thousands more, by putting him down, the SEAL member was perfectly justified in his actions.
Police in the United States tend to catch a large amount of criticism with how they have been trained to handle threatening situations. When someone is shot and killed for being a potential threat to a policeman the officer is labeled as a murderer by the general public because he didn’t deploy his taser or some other less than lethal option even though tasers don’t work a lot of the time and police are trained to never use less than lethal unless another officer with lethal cover is with them. The argument people like to make is “why didn’t the officer shoot him in the leg” or something along those lines, there are multiple reasons that could be a whole speech on it’s own but the main one is that sometimes it doesn’t work. There was an incident when an officer pulled over a man for a regular traffic stop and the driver of the vehicle got out of his car with a 9mm pistol and started shooting at the officer, the officer returned fire and hit the driver 14 times in the lungs, heart and liver with a .45 acp glock, however the bullets that landed landed weren’t immediately fatal, and the driver was still on his feet. This alone should be good enough evidence why police don’t shoot to wound. In an event where a policeman shoots and kills someone, it is considered self defense because their intent was to protect themselves and other, whether they shot preemptively or not.