I told you if you came back, I was gonna kill you.
Anonymous St. Louis Woman
January 2012
Self-defense shootings to get closer scrutiny
[And she did kill him. She will not be charged.
From reading the article I am strongly inclined to conclude that while her actions were probably within the letter of the law she violated the spirit of the law, and acted immorally.
On the other hand if the backstory been that it was my daughter and she had been beaten by him for years (from the story above this is not known to be true), finally kicked him out, and had a restraining order against him at the time he broke in I would have been strongly inclined to handle it differently. Rather than giving the gun to the woman as the guy in this case did I would have had a strong urge to tell her, “I can shoot better than you. Close your eyes and plug your ears.” Then I would have done my best to empty the gun into him before he dropped to the floor. At close range 18+1 rounds should take on the order of 3.8 seconds and leave a hole on the back side that you could hide a basketball in.
Then the daughter would call the cops (she is the one still be able to hear) and tells them nothing but there has been a shooting and they should send an ambulance. Then she would then call a lawyer who will answer all questions from the police.
Regardless of what really happened in the case above it appears to me this woman made some serious errors. Others should learn from those mistakes.—Joe]
They make no mention of a restraining order. The way I read it, that was a different case in a different city.
All they say in that last case is that it was an ex, who “broke in” and tried to harm her. That’s enough for me. If my daughter had told some guy, “If you come back, I’ll kill you” and he came back, well that’s that. If you don’t want to be killed, don’t come back. Seems pretty simple and easy to me. Standing the guy against the wall and ceremoniously killing him could be seen as wrong, maybe, but we weren’t there, we don’t really know what happened, and we know nothing of the dead guy’s history. They could be borderline murdurers, but they might be saints.
Probably this is a function of my mother being who she is (which is to say, more than a little squeamish) but I consider it my duty as a man to do any killing that needs to be done myself. Preferably out of sight and earshot of the womenfolk, if at all possible. Especially if it involves the possibility of jail. FWIW. I know it’s not terribly PC, but that’s how I grew up, and that’s what strikes me about that story.