A Honda Pilot SUV; can it be considered a dangerous weapon?
How tools influence our brains
The debate roiling the mainstream media over the weekend focused on last week’s deadly shooting in the state of Minnesota involving an agent of the Immigration and Customs Enforcement (ICE).
Long-time journalist Mark Halperin at Two Way called the mainstream media coverage “laughably biased’‘ and compared it to the storyline in “Bonfire of the Vanties,” a novel by Tom Wolfe.
The accusation from the 61-year-old Halperin is unfair to most of the journalists of today, who’ve likely never read the nearly 40-year-old novel and who’ve grown up in a world where motor vehicles are benign, everyday conveniences that people bear the responsibility of avoiding.
Thus, before any political bias enters the picture, the reportorial question becomes, “What the hell was the ICE agent doing standing in front of Good’s SUV in the first place?
Much of the country could probably care less about any of this with Vance having put the law-and-order card in play. The “great silent majority” to which the late President Richard Nixon appealed nearly six decades ago remains a dominant force in the U.S., and most Americans care most about staying safe in their own homes.
Still, anti-Trumpsters have been out in force since the shooting, protesting what they see as a crime, given that all Good was doing was driving a motor vehicle at or toward the ICE agent. It’s not like she aimed a gun at him or rushed him with a knife.
If she had, it is doubtful there would have been much, if any, outcry. But Good wasn’t holding either of those weapons in her hands. She was simply holding onto a steering wheel.
That the steering wheel was attached to a weapon far more deadly than a knife could be understandably hard to grasp for people living in a country designed around motor vehicles more than people since the end of World War II.
Since then, cars and trucks have endeared themselves to almost everyone in these otherwise unUnited States despite their record as killers.
The National Highway Traffic Safety Administration (NHTSA) calculates 39,345 Americans were killed by motor vehicles in 2024, the last year for which complete data is available. Preliminary data from the Federal Bureau of Investigation (FBI) indicates that approximately 12,000 Americans – fewer than three times as many – were shot dead in firearm homicides in the same year.
A lot of Americans now live in fear of firearms, and drive around paying little attention to the road becuase they view their MVs as friendly and protective sanctuaries that will save them in the event of an “accident.”
Most of these accidents, however, aren’t accidents. They are collisions caused by human errors – errors like those that led to Good’s death in Minneapolis and Ross’s subsequent vilification.
Guilty all around
No one can know who made the worst of these errors. Video clearly shows Good driving her sport utility vehicle at or toward Ross. Whether she was trying to drive around him or run him down remains unclear. Some reports have her wheels turning away from him. Video shot by Ross appears to make it look like he was struck.
Some media have tried to downplay the size of the vehicle by describing it only as a “Honda Pilot” rather than an SUV, which minimizes the vehicle’s 4,000- to 4,600 pound-bulk and squared off front end. This wasn’t a 3,000-pound Honda Civic with a sloping front that pushes a pedestrian up onto the hood in the event of a collision.
This was an SUV prone to topple pedestrians and run over them as most SUVs do.
And Good may have innocently enough moved her vehicle in the direction of Ross with no intention of hitting him, but a video of some of what was happening records Good’s wife, Becca, shouting “Drive, baby, drive!” as Renee started the car moving. Becca is the same woman who was earlier recorded telling Ross, “You wanna come at us? You wanna come at us? I say go get yourself some lunch, big boy.”
Whether any of this affected Ross, who’d been seriousl injured by a motor vehicle in June while trying to apprehend an illegal alien who’d been charged with sexual abuse, is another unknown. But under the circumstances, it’s certainly possible Ross made a human error and overreacted.
All that can really be said objectively about the shooting is that it was and is a tragedy for all involved, but there are those who want to use politics to paint it as a simple case of good guys versus bad guys, or bad guys versus good guys, as is all too often the case in this country today.
Rep. Alexandria Ocasio-Cortez, D-N.Y., predictably poured fire on the debate surrounding this shooting by claiming it reflected a Trump administration view that “people should be assassinated in the street.” There is no indication, let alone evidence, to indicate that Ross was told to shoot Good on Wednesday or that the ICE agent set out to kill anyone on the day in question.
What happened on the streets of Minneapolis is that two people armed with deadly weapons ended up in a confrontation that left one of them dead. One of the weapons was a firearm, a tool that these days scares the hell out of many in this country.
The other weapon was a motor vehicle, the potential deadliness of which is ignored by nearly everyone except those struck and injured by a car or truck.
Motonormativity
Deaths involving motor vehicles (MV) are so common that they are taken for granted with the fate of the victims almost always ignored. Unless a driver is drunk or obviously on drugs, the claim that “I didn’t mean to do it” is considered a valid defense for an MV homicide.
These deaths are pretty much treated the opposite of homicides involving firearms. There are plenty of people who’ve sent to prison in America after admitting to shooting someone, but claiming they didn’t intend to kill them.
“I’m so sorry that I took AJ’s life. I never intended to kill her,” Lorincz told a judge. Lorincz said she fired through the door becuase she was “terrified” Owens was going to kick it down and harm her.
A jury didn’t buy Lorincz’s story nor did Judge Robert Hodges, who called the shooting “completely unnecessary,” and said that “in this case, Ms. Lorincz was behind the door. The door was locked. She had already called law enforcement. They were en route. She knew they were en route. She was in a relatively safe position. For some reason, she went into her room and found a gun.
“She could have stayed in the room and put another locked door between her and Ms. Owens.”
Lack of intent is simply not a defense when a firearm is used irresponsibly to kill. But the opposite is true when a motor vehicle is the weapon involved.
Some on the left in this country want to believe that only those on the right hold the view that all motor vehicle deaths are the result of “accidents,” and becuase of this no one should be held accountable. But the view that motor vehicle deaths are accidents is largely universal, which is why even the worst of drivers can kill someone with a car or truck and walk away with little or no penalty.
StreetsBlogNYC recently reported on the attitude with which motor vehicle homicides are treated in that East Coast megapolis. The story sported a provocative headline: “What Is A Life Worth in NYC? In Fatal Crashes Sometimes Just $50.”
“Brooklyn prosecutors got a conviction for criminally negligent homicide, but it was overturned in 2009 by New York’s highest court, the Court of Appeals on the grounds that Gentile’s ‘decision to make a U-turn across three lanes of traffic to extricate himself from a precarious situation was not wise, but it does not rise to the level of moral blameworthiness required to sustain a charge of criminally negligent homicide.'”
This issue of “moral blameworthiness,” Hicks added, stymies the prosecution of dangerous drivers in New York. It is the same in Anchorage and most other U.S. cities.
When StreetsBlog examined the 10 fatal deaths of vulnerable road users that NYC police investigated in January 2025, it found that “none of the drivers faced a serious charge of vehicular homicide or criminally negligent homicide. Nor did any driver have to worry about losing his or her freedom for the crime of killing someone.”
In New York, StreetsBlogNYC reported, “seven drivers were charged. Six received the paltry charge of failure-to-yield. The seventh got a failure-to-yield charge, plus one for driving without a license.”
The other three drivers were never charged because police said the victim of the crash crossed against a light or “entered the roadway.” How many of those people, if any, were in unmarked crosswalks where pedestrians legally have the right-of-way, StreetsBlog did not say, but pedestrians struck and killed in such crosswalks are often treated by local law enforcement as if they did not have the right-of-way.
Not that it matters all that much if someone on foot does have the right-of-way. When Anchorage driver Russel E. Webb ran down and killed 85-year-old, retired dentist Carlton Higgins in a crosswalk near Providence Hospital, the penalty was a $100 fine and four points on his driving record.
This is allowed to happen almost everywhere in the country because the vision of “moral blameworthiness” applied to drivers by most of society – right, left and undecided – is that it is the responsibility of pedestrians to stay the hell out of the way of motor vehicles.
This, for many on the left, defines the situation in Minneapolis. It doesn’t matter to them if Good was trying to drive over Ross or not, because people on foot or a bicycle should know better than to get in front of a vehicle. And thus it was Ross’s fault for positioning himself where he could be struck.
This is the same view reflected by CNN, which challenged the assertion of Secretary of Homeland Security Kristi Noem that Good “weaponized her vehicle in an attempt to kill or cause bodily harm to federal law enforcement.”
CNN’s take was that “several experts who reviewed the incident remarked how quickly it escalated and how Ross limited his tactical response by positioning himself so close to the front of the vehicle during the confrontation.”
Those on the law-and-order right, of course, take a different view on this situation and recognize that a motor vehicle can be a deadly weapon, something they are unfortunately loath to admit in situations that result in the deaths of people like Anchorage dentist Higgins.
But those on the left are equally happy to treat such deaths as accidents that must be accepted for the convenience of driving everywhere. There were no public protests or cries of outrage after the Alaska Landmine first revealed that Webb, the husband of a retired Alaska judge, got off with a $100 fine for killing Higgins.
The use of a firearm in Minneapolis, however, divides people much more obviously along party lines because many on the left see firearms as inherently evil, while most on the right adhere to the narrative that “guns don’t kill people, people kill people.”
And there is no doubt that if ICE agents were unharmed, as immigration and border forces are in the United Kingdom and some other countries, Good would still be alive, although Ross might be dead or injured as he was in June 2024. At that time, Ross was injured by a Mexican man illegally living in Minnesota despite having been convicted on charges of “domestic assault and convicted of sex crimes against an underage teenager,” according to Homeland Security, which added that the assailant in that case had been “additionally…convicted for driving without a valid license, and multiple charges for driving illegally.”
NBC News reported that Ross was dragged by the car and “suffered multiple lacerations and needed 33 stitches to close his wounds.”
How that influenced his later behavior might never be known, but it is hard to believe he wanted to kill Good or anyone else. Given the politics of the moment, no ICE agent could be ignorant of the chaos likely to follow any such shooting, deadly or otherwise.
Ross’s wife and two children are now reportedly in hiding due to threats against him, and he is in the eye of a social media storm where he stands accused, among other things, of being a white supremacist because he married a Filipino woman and the Washington Post, the New York Times and Vice claim white supremacists have “an Asian fetish.”
As one person posting on Instagram put it, “after committing genocide in Iraq, Jonathon Ross married a Filipino immigrant and joined ICE so he can murder more people legally.”
Welcome to America today, where someone is killed by a motor vehicle every 14 to 15 minutes and nobody seems bothered by it at all. But when someone on foot decides they need to shoot back well….
Categories: Commentary
Good read! I quit riding road bikes when I saw more and more deaths in the ER of pedestrians & bikers. And other drivers. It changed my lifestyle and I never understood how people couldn’t see vehicles as a deadly weapon either.
Well written as always, Craig. In Use of Force Law the key factor is “Reasonableness”, perfection is not required in one’s perceptions or defensive actions, as it is impossible to achieve. It’s also used in determining Negligence or not, as in the actions of a driver who hits a pedestrian. I’ve never thought about the two in the same frame before.
“Good was injured by a Mexican man illegally” should be “Ross was injured by a Mexican man illegally”?
Thanks. Fixed.