I recently studied a news item from Miami in which a woman raced home when her alarm system sent her an alert. She called 911, and subsequently caught a 17-year-old burglar by herself. In the ensuing confrontation, she shot and killed him. Apparently he was climbing out a window when she arrived and the shooting took place in her yard.
Did this woman use common sense or was this a case of the needless taking of a life? She had an active alarm system, had called 911 and the police were on the way. She was armed and had a permit to carry. I wasn’t present—there were no witnesses—but I’m guessing she rushed home, found the thief coming out a window, drew her pistol and tried to stop him, maybe even tried to put him on the ground. When he heard a siren, though, the young thief panicked and tried to run—maybe struggled with the woman, tried to wrest her gun away—and she shot him. The police arrived moments later.
I am of two minds. First, the kid knew (or should have known) the risks—although, like any kid, he probably thought, “It can’t happen to me.” Second, the property owner drove home and—you could argue—caused the confrontation outside, in her yard, in which anything could have happened. Third, her home had been burglarized at least twice before and she had fully cooperated with police and government and insurance companies…to no avail. The representatives of those institutions filed their reports and left her with the damages and increased her bill.
I’m projecting this onto a situation I encountered in an Atlanta restaurant. My wife and I were eating dinner. I was carrying and sitting in a position to observe the seating and serving area. A man began arguing with the employee who keeps the waiting list for tables; he believed she was seating others before him, taking people out of order to their arrival, and this made him mad. He only shouted though, never physically threatened her. But what if he had? At what point would it have been proper to intervene? Would he then have turned his anger on me? Would my intervening have calmed or aggravated the situation? As a legally permitted and armed member of the carry community, do I have a responsibility to, at some point, leave my family and intervene?
What if the man had assaulted the woman at the front of that restaurant and begun to beat her? To me, that’s clear: I ask my wife to call 911 and then assist the wait staff. But as the Miami situation shows, just drawing a weapon does not necessarily put you in control—sometimes, I think, presenting a firearm can aggravate a situation. Based on so many recent publicized cases of police shootings, where men refuse to obey an officer with a gun, I’m thinking that if I ever intervened in a conflict, I should to be prepared to shoot someone…and face the consequences.
That leads to emphasizing common sense in public and at home. I believe the best way to sharpen that instinct is to engage in scenario training—almost any type of training is better than none—in which you are presented with a situation and called upon quickly to act or not act; to make a decision. Even thinking about or imagining yourself in situations like that in the restaurant—and realizing that every scenario will be different—is better prior to strapping on your firearm, because once you intervene, your life will change whether you shoot or not. So nothing is better than a good dose of common sense…and practice during supervised training.
