If you make a crooked move, you both fall dead.
. . . He loved the women and he hated the law
and he just wouldn't take nobody's jaw.
Doc Watson -Otto Wood the Bandit-
___________
When I first heard that a Texan by the name of Joe Horn had shot and killed two men he saw exiting his neighbor's house carrying a bag, my reaction was that he was a long way outside the "castle doctrine" law that allows one to defend one's life with deadly force without the requirement to wait until an intruder shoots you or to first attempt to flee.
At least in Florida, my state of residence, this law does not allow one to shoot someone to protect property or to shoot someone in the back as he runs away. Air America spent a lot of time yesterday discussing this case and listening to the callers, two things struck me forcibly: In Texas it's legal to kill somebody over a watch or a toaster, even if he's no threat and is running away, and that public sentiment seems to back the idea that anyone can shoot anyone observed to be engaging in criminal activity even long after the crime has been committed.
Just how far down the freeway of fear have we traveled that one reads comments in the New York Times like these:
"His actions were absolutely and inflariously [sic] justified. It was his Christian duty to protect and defend his neighbor."
"Anyone who breaks into someone's home with the intent to steal, rape or whatever is a worthless human being and deserves to be shot."
" so as far as i [sic] am concerned, the thieves gave up their right to life when they broke into someone elses [sic] home."The idea that theft is a capital offense and that any witness has the right to enforce capital punishment without even a casual nod to due process or Jesus is something that would have been radical in the illegal mining camp of Deadwood in 1875. Do I have to admit, after half a century of believing in the basic decency of most people, that all that now separates my fellow Americans from unprincipled savages is the threat of violence at the hands of the law?
Of course the years of Republican fear mongering have had an effect. Of course years of Reganite insistence that Government has no answers to any problem have had an effect. Years of declining violent crime rates have done nothing to convince much of the rabble that civilization itself is not the culprit and that the wages of lawbreaking is and should be instant death by the hands of any vigilante or self appointed deputy with the few hundred bucks it takes to buy a decent firearm. Of course this case has been further inflamed by the fact that the burglars were illegal aliens and you'll read that fact cited in may of the arguments that such people have no rights at all much less the right to remain alive.
As for now, I still cling to my childish naivete, but I'm coming close to the point where I will have to declare that I live in a nation of vicious, bloodthirsty, bigoted and stupid cowards more like a baboon troop than a nation.
7 comments:
I absolutely believe in a person's absolute right to defend him or her self from harm
You're right. Theft is not a capital offense. I do not own one single thing that is worth killing someone over.
O'Reilly can blow and go about the crime rate going down in Horn's neighborhood. He can blow and go about illegal aliens.
Bottom line, two human beings died that didn't have to die. Horn's actions are in no way justifiable.
Good piece.
I too clung to the idea that people are basically good and interested in behaving in a civilized manner....until about the time Kennedy was shot. I didn't change my mind because of that incident but it was around that time that I began to question it. Vietnam sealed it for me. Now I think that everyone has a very violent and savage instinct and given the opportunity, the motive and the means they won't hesitate to act on them - some more readily than others. Put them in a society where criminals have as many rights as victims, where prison sentences for many are a joke, where the people are numb to crime by the constant violence they love to watch on TV, make guns available to all of them, and then make sure they are all pissed off most of the time with more taxes, less pay, nightmare traffic, corrupt leaders, public officials that don't give a shit, etc, etc and you have given them the motive and the means. The opportunities will arise on every street corner.
What gets me is that one good fellow described shooting the burglars as a Christian Duty.
Yes I think anyone (present company excluded) is capable of horrific things under the right circumstances and you can't be sure what those circumstances might be.
I think self defense is an inalienable right too, but although it may be legal in Texas, it's murder to me.
Great post. Timely topic especially with the current rash of mass killings on the rise.
I wonder if it's really on the rise though. We only hear about crime clusters and we hear about them for years after the fact. if there's a spell where there are none, we don't notice because we're still talking about Columbine and grinding our individual axes on that story.
I would like to see some real statistics, but we never will because the idea of rising crime and the attached outrage is a gravy train for the media and politicians.
I had dinner with some friends Saturday night, and we were laughing because, though politically we're polar opposites, we all had been "amused" regarding the pride with which the Colorado Springs mega-church pastor lauded the security guard who blew away the gunman there last week. Not that the likely killer was wrongly gunned down, but the fact that, instead of the expected, "we are praying for his soul" rhetoric, we heard the "religious" leader bragging about what a great marksman his "voluntarily" armed guard was... Unreal, no?
I believe that was the security guard who insisted that Jesus was guiding her shots. Didn't it turn out that the guy shot himself?
But if there's anything that proves the absolutely ammoral nature of American religion it's this. God seems to want whatever it is that preachers want whether it's money, power, sex or the violent death of all who get in their way.
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