Three guys looking to cool off:

Investigator Christy Carona said the three men broke into the storage home of Jack Busby on the 200 block of Cleveland Street and attempted to take two air-conditioning units.

She said Busby found the men and held them at gunpoint until police arrived. Busby later shot King in the lower back after he attempted to flee the scene.

Something that comes up fairly often in discussions involving defensive gun use is “but is your wallet/television/air conditioner really worth shooting someone over?“.

Though not 100% totally without merit, this question comes close. If someone were to rob me on the street, I wouldn’t really know if all they wanted was my wallet, or if things would continue to spiral out of my control from there.

When it’s a home invasion scenario, though, the question is totally 100% without merit. If someone comes uninvited into my home, my personal safe zone and the safe zone of my family, I don’t care if all they want is my television or my air conditioner. I’m not going to shoot them because they want to steal my property, I’m going to shoot them because they violated my ‘do not cross’ line.

And, believe me, I will do everything I can legally do to get myself into a position to shoot them. Unless they directly threaten my safety or, even worse, the safety of my family. Then I won’t spend any time making sure it’s legal that I shoot them.

Why doesn’t anyone ever ask the potential criminal “but is taking someone else’s wallet/television/air conditioner really worth getting shot over?” Instead, we have a criminal that intentionally breaks into someone’s home with intent to steal their property and/or harm the occupants and a homeowner that is often regarded as “dangerous” somehow because he defended his own life and property from the wrongdoer.

Tags: MS

This entry was posted on Sunday, April 27th, 2008 at 12:44 pm and is filed under Castle Doctrine. You can follow any responses to this entry through the RSS 2.0 feed. Both comments and pings are currently closed.