In a seperate but related story to the one immediatly below, we have a report that a local grand jury will refuse to indict a New Orleans man, Sean Minor, who shot and killed a teenager who was breaking into cars in his apartment complex. When they got to his, he opened fire.
I'm not sure how I feel about this one. The guys doing the vandalizing were a couple of teenagers, and probably would have been scared off by Minor turning on his porch light and yelling at them. However, just because they were teenagers doesn't preclude them from having guns and attacking anyone they thought saw them, either. The story just sounded too much like the car owner laid in wait, and then blasted the kid once he got to his car. The reason the case went before the grand jury is that the local police decided that Minor was not justified in using deadly force, since only his property was in danger.
Apparently the New Orleans DA will pursue a prosecution for manslaughter.
Posted by Neal (Nukevet) at December 19, 2002 07:29 PMWhile we may never really know exactly what was done and said, I find this distasteful. I doubt that his life was really in danger on a second floor balcony 30 yards from the car. Maybe they threatened him, maybe they waved weapons, but he could simply have backed up into the room and called the cops. I have some experience with weeapons training, shoot or don't shoot. This situation raises a lot of warning flags for me. Just because you may be free to fire legaly, doesn't mean you have no other choice, or that the shooting was moral. Legal and moral are often two very different things.
Posted by: puggs on December 20, 2002 01:45 AMI shed no tears for the teen. And if we expect everyone to exhaust every possible option before they use deadly force, they would never be able to protect themselves. Even if the shooter was found guilty, I still wouldn't care about the teen, vandalism & theft are two different things and if the teen didn't know better, than Darwinism would have got to him sooner or later.
Posted by: Thoth on December 20, 2002 08:06 AMLook, I'm not saying these kids were angels. I'm not saying anything about them at all really. There is a difference between fear of your life and pissed off. One is a legitimate defense, the other is murder. If we don't make the distinction as a society, then it's wild west days again, where you kill anyone who pisses you off. You may be good with that, but two generations of cops in my family lead me to believe thats a suckers game.
The law is you can't kill someone by laying in ambush, especially since it's just vandalism. Not assualt, not murder, not rape, they were just trashing cars. That makes them petty criminals, not Jesse James. I believe in self defense, I believe he had the right to confront and detain these teens, he didn't do that. He didn't even try. He waited long enough to let them approach his car, but didn't have time to call the cops?
The second amendment grants us an important right, but it's not a hunting license to execute punk kids for petty crime. You want a backlash to repeal that amendment, just defend stuff like this Thoth, it'll happen. Just as not every cop is always right, not every gun owner has good judgement.
Posted by: puggs on December 20, 2002 11:52 AMJust property?
Life is bleak for those with no property.