Is it legal to ask to be shot? Say I ask someone to shoot me non lethally. Not assisted suicide, Just shot. Is this legal? Isn't it like asking to be assaulted with a deadly weapon?
You may legally ask someone to shoot you, or do all sorts of other things to you. There are no laws against asking or various kinds of speech: laws restrict the doing. If you ask a person to shoot you and they do it, that person will probably be arrested for assault (or murder, depending on how it works out) – shooting a person is assault. A possible defense against an assault charge is consent, but that defense isn't freely available whenever a person says "I give my consent for you to assault me". You cannot consent to foreseeable serious bodily injury (more accurately, the law does not recognize such consent as valid consent). You can agree to be struck (in a boxing match) because such force is not serious bodily harm; and if unforeseeably serious bodily harm results, the consent defense is available. But if you ask a person to shoot you in the liver, they will be prosecuted for assault, because the resulting serious bodily harm is foreseeable.
Because your buddy routinely points loaded firearms at you First, you should probably get friends who don’t do this but, even though this is objectively a threat, you know that you are in no danger (barring accidents). Self-defence is not justified. This is why there is the dual requirement that the danger is clear to both: an objective observer, and the person under threat.
I'll preface this by saying I live in Australia where the lowest jurisdiction that can make an act a criminal offence is the state; local governments simply do not have that power here, Question 1: If I understand this right you have a law that you do not enforce that carries moderate sanctions and you are asking that a law that you do not enforce with greater sanctions will be a greater deterrent? Well ... no (see here). If you want to stop the behavior you have to enforce the sanctions that you have in a fair and impartial way. I would suggest that you make it very clear that starting in early September the laws will be enforced - that gives people fair warning. Then, each weekend in September you bring in enough police (State Troopers?) to enforce the law. Its not going to take many $250 fines to make people stop. Question 2: No comment. Question 3: No comment. Question 4: Sounds like a good way of getting the city sued for negligence; just because people are breaking the law does not make it legal to hurt them. If you are serious then fencing the entire area may be worthwhile but the area would still need to be policed.
Yes, this would be legal self-defense. But, in practice, mass shooting events are usually too quick to allow anyone to make a booby trap. For example, a mass shooting event in Denver and Lakewood, Colorado this week lasted just 47 minutes and took place at seven distinct locations which no one but the shooter could have predicted in advance, spread over a dozen or so miles, with no more than five or ten minutes of activity in any one place.
Ethics and morality aside, does the situation cross over into a general legal understanding of extortion? No. Extortion necessarily includes coercion. An offer to tell what is wrong (and from the point of view of the target — only allegedly wrong) is neither threat nor force, therefore no coercion. It would have been coercion (and therefore extortion) if the guy said along the lines "If you don't pay I will exploit the vulnerability, and/or tell a bunch of bad guys about it — they will be sooo thankful to me". Provided that the guy does not say/imply he will do something if not paid, there are no legal issues here.
If you wrote for example "I had thoughts about taking the axe from my garage and decapitating my neighbour", and your neighbour read that, he would reasonably be worried and contact the police. I would take that as a death threat, and the death threat is by itself illegal. There would be some range where I could claim that you were making a death threat and making excuses to avoid legal responsibility. You can have all the thoughs you like, you can write them into your private diary where nobody can read them, but as soon as you publish it, it becomes "speech" and some speech is illegal.
Sending a letter to the Governor is legal You can do it, I can do it and the elected officials of Lancaster County can do it. Thanks to the first amendment, that letter can say pretty much anything you like subject to limits that themselves are subject to strict scrutiny - things like threats and defamation. Outlining a course of action that you propose to take is legal even if that course of action is itself illegal. I will also point out that people - sometimes even politicians - have been known to say things they don't mean. However, that just begs the question ... This article explains what's going on and, more importantly, the actual letter is here. I've read it. Twice. I can't see where the county proposes to do anything concrete that might be considered illegal. Apart from the first paragraph, the entire letter appears to be a case for why the county should be permitted to move from red to yellow on May 15 and they are asking for the Governor's support. Even the first paragraph is ambiguous; while it asks the Governor to move the county from "red" to "yellow" and states that they "intend to move forward with a plan" it is by no means clear that that plan is moving from "red" to "yellow" even though you could get that impression on a casual reading. Basically, what they intend to do is so vague that it's impossible to tell if it's legal or not. Of course, just because something is illegal doesn't mean it can't be done. The USA is a free country and the fundamental freedom is to reap the consequences of your actions. If the county does something1 then the state can take them to court - the court will decide if it's legal or not. 1 Or threatens to do something sufficiently concrete that an injunction against it could be issued.
Almost certainly, there is no such right. It's illegal under 18 USC 831 to possess "nuclear material" without specific authorization. 18 USC 832 forbids the possession of a "radiological weapon". If there is intent to use the device to cause death, serious bodily injury, or damage to property or the environment, that's also a violation of 18 USC 2332i. I don't think these laws have been explicitly tested against the Second Amendment, but related cases suggest they would hold up (if the challenge wasn't simply dismissed as frivolous). The Second Amendment doesn't grant a blanket right to own weapons. Federal law, 18 USC 922 (o) makes it unlawful to own a "machinegun" (as defined in the statute), and in the case of Hollis v. Lynch, the Fifth Circuit held that this law was constitutional, because, as they said, the Second Amendment only protects weapons that are in "common use [...] for lawful purposes like self-defense." This case doesn't seem to have been appealed further, but the reasoning cited by the Fifth Circuit comes from the Supreme Court's opinion in D.C. v. Heller. If machineguns aren't in "common use", and therefore not protected, surely the same would apply to nuclear weapons.