I gotta say, I don’t like these cases:
A Montana man is accused of setting a trap and blindly blasting a shotgun into his garage, killing a 17-year-old German exchange student. A Minnesota man is convicted of lying in wait in his basement for two teenagers and killing them during a break-in.
The two recent cases take the “stand your ground” debate to a new level: Do laws that allow private citizens to protect their property also let them set a trap and wait for someone to kill?
…In Montana, Markus Kaarma told investigators his Missoula home had been burglarized twice within the last week before Sunday’s shooting death of 17-year-old Diren Dede. Kaarma told his hairdresser he had stayed up three nights waiting to shoot a kid, the woman told investigators.
The night of the shooting, Kaarma and his partner, Janelle Pflager, left their garage door open. Pflager left her purse in the garage “so that they would take it,” she told a police officer. She also set up a video baby monitor and installed motion sensors, prosecutors said.
After midnight, they heard the sensors trip. Pflager turned to the video monitor and saw a man in the garage. Kaarma took his shotgun, walked out the front door and to the driveway.
He told investigators he heard metal on metal and without speaking fired four times – sweeping the garage with three low shots and a high fourth shot. Dede was hit in the head and the arm.
Montana’s law says a person is justified in using deadly force if they believe it necessary to prevent an assault or a forcible felony.
…Smith was convicted of premeditated murder Tuesday. Prosecutors said Smith moved his truck to make it look as though no one was home. He turned on a handheld recorder, had a surveillance system running and waited in the basement with food, water and two guns.
Brady descended the basement stairs first, and Smith shot him three times, saying “You’re dead.” He dragged the body to another room and waited until Kifer followed, and he shot her. “You’re dying,” he told her, according to the audio recording.
Let’s first review this video:
Again the only thing that Stand Your Ground Eliminates is the duty to retreat. Let’s also look at this story. To quote myself:
This one minute clip has done a LOT of damage to this man’s future if he ever chooses to carry a weapon (and don’t think because he’s a “Progressive” and anti-gun that he won’t) and needs to use it.
What he is doing here is making a case for a future First-Degree Murder case against him. He is saying in a safe radio studio about a hypothetical situation that “He will feel threatened” and use it to shoot somebody he doesn’t agree with politically.
Now in the event he ever needs to defend himself, this clip will be admitted as evidence and it will make a defense trial VERY difficult.
While I don’t like laws that assume total innocence of an alleged attacker in a defensive shooting, we also can’t assume total innocence of the defender either…that’s why we have charges called “Murder”, “Manslaughter”, and “negligent homicide”, and while in these cases we do have what does appear to dead people committing trespass on private property, that isn’t the end of the story.
Self defense really needs to have the defender as a reluctant party to the violence, and while I oppose duty to retreat, I will damn well retreat from any violent encounter I can. My big dislike of it is that the time to retreat is BEFORE you draw your weapon, not AFTER, when your gun is out you are either in grave fear of IMMEDIATE serious harm, OR you are very possibly criminally brandishing a weapon.
For example, I’m walking home and I see a group of teens/young adults walking down the sidewalk, making a lot of noise and acting tough. I will cross the street or take a different street. Better safe than sorry. That’s a smart retreat! Now once those kids have engaged me and made threats is NOT the time to retreat, its the time to fight, but the more you attempted to avoid that confrontation the better.
Now in your home you are IN your retreat, and if somebody encroaches upon it it is ALWAYS time to fight…still reluctance must be there.
Right now it is the middle of the day, and my doors are locked. At night the doors are locked and the alarm is armed. This is not paranoia, this is PROTECTION, not only does it not make my home an easy target, but it also adds a unit of effort a hostile needs to expend to become a threat to me.
There is a lot of talks about the various stories where blackout drunks are shot in stranger’s homes because they wandered into the wrong house. Now we can talk about the threat posed by somebody so impaired that they aren’t aware what home they’re in some other time.
Still a drunk wandering into my open front door and rummaging through my fridge or laying down on my couch IS an invasion of my home, but weather I’m experiencing a threat is debatable. A debate is NOT what you want to be having in a court of law with your life on the line!
Now a drunk KICKING DOWN my door has shown a LOT more hostility, and a lot more similarity to a home invader of any ilk. Add in the din of my alarm going off, if somebody is sticking around through that, I’m going to be shooting at them.
Not because I want to, but because somebody doing all that is either dangerously stupid, or straight up dangerous.
Laying a trap in your home and staying up with supplies and guns really don’t make you look like a reluctant party! It really is starting to look like murder to me.
Double goes with letting a wounded intruder bleed out. You don’t need to render medical services to an attacker, and if they WERE trying to harm you, I’d say it was stupid, but you DO want to call the police and EMTs so THEY can do their jobs.
What do y’all have to add?
