A jury awarded $580,000 to Senator Rand Paul in his lawsuit against his neighbor who attacked him.

It’s the right verdict. It might even be a little light in terms of damages. Neighbor Rene Boucher pleaded to attacking Paul after he became annoyed that Paul was stacking more brush into his brush pile. The attack left Paul with six broken ribs and a bruised lung.

We can’t have a society where you break a man’s ribs because you don’t like his yard. That’s just unacceptable.

Paul himself gets it.

This lawsuit wasn’t about me. It was about all of us and what we find acceptable as a society. We need to send a clear message that violence is not the answer – anytime, anywhere. We can hold different views, whether it’s politics, religion or day to day matters. — Senator Rand Paul (@RandPaul) January 30, 2019

Exactly.

It shouldn’t be a partisan position to extend the concept of non-violence to border disputes among landowners. There’s nothing subversive about looking at this case in the larger context of how we treat our neighbors. Even when they do something we don’t like — even when they do something that we think affects our enjoyment of our own land — the solution is never to violently separate one of their ribs from their family of ribs in order to prove a point about the dangers of crossing us.

I hope we can all learn from this. Violently terrorizing people because some of their stuff gets on our land is not the answer.

Elie Mystal is the Executive Editor of Above the Law and the Legal Editor for More Perfect. He can be reached @ElieNYC on Twitter, or at elie@abovethelaw.com. He will resist.