The Stupid was strong whit this one.

All the wrong things were done.

Quoting from Grok:

This happened on July 25th 2025 in Seattle.

The shooter, Gregory Timm, was sentenced to 42 months in jail, and the veteran in the wheelchair, Harold Powell, survived.

Man sentenced to 3.5 years for Seattle waterfront shooting | FOX 13 Seattle

A bit more detail:

According to investigators and court testimony, Harold Powell was playing music when Timm approached him and accused him of lying about being a veteran. When Powell produced his identification to prove his service, Timm snatched his Navy service patch.

Powell then pulled out a knife, and Timm responded by pulling a gun from his backpack and shooting Powell in the chest.

Let’s go through the principles that need to be met to claim self-defense and use of deadly force:

Imminence – The threat must be immediate, happening now or about to happen in the next moment. Verbal threats alone rarely qualify unless they are part of an ongoing, active attack.

You are a 32-year-old physically fit individual engaged in a verbal tiff with a 68-year-old man in a powered wheelchair (disparity of force) who is having to take a long time to reach for whatever weapon is inside his bag. One principle not fulfilled.

Reasonableness – The belief in danger must be reasonable under the circumstances

Once again, we have an elderly disabled person against a physically fit younger man who could just simply move out of the pocket and seek refuge somewhere else. He didn’t. Another principle not fulfilled.

Proportionality – The force used must match the severity of the threat.

The argument can be made that a knife is as dangerous as a firearm because it can inflict deadly force or grave bodily harm. But force used was clearly disproportionate: The obvious disability and lack of aggressive forward movement towards the shooter, the distance between them and the fact that the shooter took three full seconds to shoot once the knife was displayed

Avoidance – If possible, avoid the confrontation or de-escalate the situation.

Obviously, the shooter did not avoid the confrontation.

Innocence – The defender must not have initiated the unlawful act.

From what was presented in court, it was the shooter who started the confrontation verbally and escalated to assault.

I am going to guess wildly here, but Gregory Timm may have had his Legal Use of Force by reading newspaper editorials and Gun Ho forums about Stand your Ground and figured he was legally safe.

He wasn’t. The only mercy to the situation was that he was not a good shooter and his victim survived.

If you are not putting the same effort (or more) to train your brain on self-defense legal issues as you are doing range work, you can end up also wearing orange jammies for a long time.