My 90 year old neighbor is shot down by the po-pos

The BBQ Pit
181

A few seconds is slow.

Draw, aim, double tap to the center of mass in under a second is more like it.

Not gonna happen.

I’m not giving an intruder time to kill me.

Family members have keys. Law enforcement either rings the bell or are considered intruders and a threat to my life.

The house doors are locked 24 hours a day, seven days a week. Everyone who lives here uses a key, and everyone uses one specific entrance to the house. That entrance is not the front door. Those who live here know that everyone who lives here is armed and will shoot in self defense. We’ve never had a problem.

It takes less than a second to recognize that the target is an intruder, aim and fire at the chest. That’s what practice is for.

Cops who didn’t ring the door bell are intruders, and therefore a threat to my life.

The extra seconds you wait are enough time for someone to close 25 feet and get a good knife wound in. I’m not about to wait.

182

The intruder is not going to know where you are or the layout of the room. They’re going to have to take a few seconds themselves, esepecially as their eyes adjust to the light. They’re going to have to look around, figure out how many people there are in the room, where the obstacles are and what path to take to get to you. Generally, a home intruder wants something. Either they have rape on their minds or they want you alive to be able to tell you where the valuables are hidden. Unless you’ve really pissed someone off and the intruder is a hitman, they’re not going to come through the door with the intent of killing you as soon as they spot you.

Keys get lost. People get drunk and decide to play pranks. Is it really worthy of a death sentence because they didn’t ring the bell?

Do you really think the cops are trying to kill you?

If you fire at the cops, you are going to die. Either they’ll shoot you down where you stand or if (God forbid) you’ve killed one of them, you’re going to get the death penalty.

No, it’s not. By the time they’ve crossed the room and raised the knife, you could blow their head off, or aerate their chest while they’re standing in front of you.

183

I’m not about giving them extra time to figure out that I’m here and they should kill me.

You really think that it’s impossible for those who live here to comprehend that ‘we don’t play burglar while drunk because everyone in the house is armed.’?

People who live with me don’t get drunk and play burglar. I would never get drunk and play burglar. Just because your family and friends would, doesn’t mean mine are idiots. There’s never been a close call, a prank, or any other cause for concern. I have gotten rid of one intruder at gunpoint. You can talk about what I should do, but I know what I did do. The guy was in the sights before he made it past the foyer. He left when I cocked the hammer. The only reason I did not fire is that he turned toward the door and ran. Had he not turned as I cocked the hammer, I’d have done as advised by the sheriff’s department: empty the magazine into the center of mass.

I’m defending myself first and worrying about that shit later. You don’t seem to understand that. I don’t trust cops, I don’t really like them much, and I avoid them whenever possible because life experience has taught me that they can fuck you up with impunity. You think I’d feel bad about killing a cop on a no-knock entry?

Bullshit. Crazy guy with the knife in his hand is going to get across the room before you can get your gun out of your purse. Inside 25 feet, someone armed with a knife is seriously bad news.

184

I don’t know of any of my family or friends who would be stupid enough to do that, but I’m not going to fire at a target I haven’t identified first. The possibility that the person doesn’t mean me any harm does exist and I know I would regret it for the rest of my life (even if I didn’t wind up in prison) if I killed someone by accident because I was too trigger-happy to see what I was shooting at before I fired.

Call me a bleeding-heart but I’m not about to kill anyone unless I know they mean to hurt me.

No, I guess I don’t. I was always taught to be cautious and certain of my target before I fired. I don’t want to kill my idiot of a neighbor who busted through the door because he mistook my house for his own and thought his wife had locked him out. I don’t want to kill some kid who popped the lock because he wanted to steal my TV. I don’t want to kill a cop who’s just doing his job. I’ll only kill if it’s my last resort and just someone coming through the door is not enough information to judge their intent.

I feel sorry for you, I really do. It must be terrible to go through life with such anger and mistrust.

Well, I think you *should *and I imagine a jury would too, but no one can make you feel remorse if you don’t want to. Hopefully, your satisfaction in your decision will make the rest of your life in prison easier. Personally, I’d feel bad about killing anyone by mistake, but that’s just me.

From the way the conversation was phrased, I imagined the situation was that you had heard the intruder try to enter and already had the gun in your hand before they came through the door.

185

Well catsix, going only by your posts ( which we are supposed to believe) the following must be true:

  1. Every person in your house is armed.

  2. They are always armed when in the house.

  3. This means that they have a sidearm ON their person, no matter what their state of undress or dress, what they are doing, where they are in the house. Kitchen with apron on? Gun in the pocket. Bathroom with shower going? Waterproof gun in holster lashed to special mount in shower stall. Emptying the garbage in the back yard at the cans? Gun in hand, cocked, safety off, aimed- while carrying out the trash.

  4. That means when wiping their ass, they use the other hand to hold a fully loaded 9mm GlockMeister SigHeil Special with mercury-filled bullets. Otherwise, well, they wouldn’t be armed at all times, now would they?

This means that every person in the house has a legal permit to own the weapons, and a permit to carry them on their person inside the house. ( Opposed to keeping them in a locked box bolted under the bed like some folks do ).

How many adults in your house? How many minors? How many weapons? How many fully loaded magazines? They get left around like Ritz crackers on the sideboard or kept locked away? What about when others are in the building? Keep that ammo locked up at all times? Wouldn’t be very efficient to run out in a firefight and find out someone foolishly locked up those extra eleven loaded mags, would it?

Your gun rage is appalling, sickening and predictable. You must sleep very very well with your gun shoved someplace really close where you can touch it and caress it in your sleep.

:rolleyes:

Tell us- what delivery person is safe from having a magazine emptied " into the center of their mass" ? What water meter reader is safe approaching your compound…er…base…uh…house to do the job they are paid to do? Hey, the crossed your property line and have therefore violated the laws covering criminal trespass. How many UPS drivers have been assigned to your route since you’ve lived there to replace those blown away when trying to deliver something?

This is the Pit, thank god. You fucking disgust me. Who the fuck are you, Rambo? You shoot first and ask questions later? Got any kids? Got any kids who have friends, where they might go to said friends’ house and walk in on a hot summer’s day because their friends called them up and said, ’ Hey c’mon over and hang out" ?

You gonna bury your kid in a plain pine box, or go for the deeeeluxe polished mahogany when they come up against a fucking lunatic like you and, uh…what were your exact words? Oh yes, when your child has the " center of their mass " obliterated for having committed the high crime of going to see a friend.

Get a life. And Jesus in a sidecar, get some professional help. Oh, and turn in the arsenal you and your Compound-Mates apparently have everywhere in the houes, because…as you said, everyone is armed at all times inside your home.

Get a life. Stop fantasizing about taking one.

186

no, quite bluntly, you’d not feel anything because the extreme liklihood is that you’d be dead. no knock entries are generally done by teams, one of whom would be able to kill you, as happened in the case in the OP.

187

I don’t know where Catsix lives but requiring permits to have a gun are primarily just in a few of the more draconian states in the US.

188

OK, even with only the information we have I see one obvious criticism of “police procedures” in this case.

If the cops in question had reason to believe this was a meth lab, probably run by some sort of gang, and so they had to expect resistance to entry, where the hell was the experienced swat entry team? If it had been a gang’s cook house, all three officers would have died, and we would have read about their bodies being found the next morning. The bad guys would have been gone, with their drugs and equipment before the first 911 responders got there. These particular cops were not a match for one elderly woman. It is their best break in their lives that the warrant was wrong, even if they do jail time.

The whole point of civil authorities showing overwhelming force for an essentially civil act (search warrant) is to make sure that no resistance is attempted. So you have blaring bull horns, lights, and dozens of armed guys in armor. Time to give up, these are obviously the cops, so I will not be raped and murdered.

I want lots of investigation. If the woman was an innocent victim, the city, and the officers personally need to pay damages large enough to be punitive. (Yes, to the city too. Let’s get the citizens really angry at the police department, so that changes actually might happen. A couple of hundred million ought to make police training a priority.)

Tris

189

Cartooniverse, even though this is the pit could you at least respond to what **catsix ** actually posted as opposed to some huge [del]strawman[/del] strawmob that you have created?

Yes, *catsix ** believes in the right of an individual to be armed, and she vigorously believes in and defends her personal right to have a weapon. I would prefer that few people arm themselves, but if they are going to, I’d rather they do it the right way. From catsix’s many posts on the topic of guns, it is apparent that she takes the responsbility of gun ownership very seriously–I like that.

To the OP–it would be nice to know what really happened with granny and the cops. We’ll just have to see what information we do get and try to make some sense of this situation. Right now we don’t know enough.

*on the Dope. IRL, she probably rarely has so many people picking on her at once.

190

You defended every single line. Which part did you not agree with?

191

I did. If you don’t like the fact that I quoted words directly from catsix and then used them to ask very pointed questions, that’s very much your problem.

There is no straw man there, just a hugely angry violent gun-toting person who claimed things that are just beyond belief. I asked for some articulation, some verification of what was said.

She said everyone is armed all the time in the house. -shrug- Why not ask the same questions and see what she has to say? :slight_smile:

192

I didn’t agree with the stuff about having meals interrupted to look for a missing kid, just as one example. Nor did I agree that peole don’t want to get involved when it comes to crime.

I disagreed with some of E-Sabbath’s rebuttals but that doesn’t mean that I was totally in agreement with the author’s original assertions.

193

Wow. You’re batshit fucking crazy, aren’t you?

194

Just out of interest, if the city has to pay damages doesn’t that penalise nobody but the taxpayer?

195

The cops are agents of the taxpayers; who else should pay? If you don’t like paying for the cops’ screwups, then demand improved policing through your elected representatives.

196

Most public servants are protected by the municipalities who hire them. As a former E.M.T. for both pay and volunteer, I can tell you that I was covered by Liability Insurance in both cases. In the case of the Town Volunteer ambulance service, our corps paid for liability coverage out of our operating budget. In the case of the for-pay company, it was provided for us.

I suspect cops do not pay for their own liability or malpractice ( s.i.c.) insurance. So yes, the taxpayers bear the burden of financial settlements.

Since all of the facts aren’t out, and lawsuits will be flying if they aren’t already, the real question to me is not if the cops involved are found liable in a civil court, but if they are found guilt in a criminal court.

My WAG is that neither will occur in this case.

197

The taxpayers paid for incompetent police. Incompetent police planned an incompetent use of deadly force on behalf of those taxpayers.

It seems that there was a “no knock” warrant. If there were, the question remains, if they thought it was probable that there would be resistance, the half assed attempt to enter without appropriate back up is neglect of professional responsibility. If police departments are not held to a reasonable standard in the use of no knock warrants, and being prepared to make sure that citizens know that they are the police, and are acting with proper due process, the taxpayers are supporting armed thugs, and should be penalized. (Yes, even if I am one of them.)

Tris

198

Presumably the delivery personnel would wear uniforms AND ring the bell or knock. I’ve never met a legitimate one who just walks into someone’s home. :rolleyes:

199

Using your methods I would have shot my stepdaughter trying to sneak in at 5am. A couple weeks earlier we had a set of keys stolen and assumed that it was an intruder using those keys to attempt a robbery/theft.

Target identification is always #1, it does not take seconds, its more like tenths of seconds.

200

What a sad situation. Count me with the many who’ve voiced the fact that the War on Drugs is just overkill, really.

I don’t understand why some preliminary investigation wasn’t done to determine the primary resident of the house, and proceed with that understanding. How much extra effort would that be, and how much injury would have been avoided to all? If the effort to eradicate certain drugs from our society is to be at all successful, it has to encompass the community that it’s entrenched in, with an understanding of possible harm done to innocent parties.

Timely; I listened recently to an interview on NPR’s Fresh Air on Wednesday, with Ed Burns, a former Baltimore detective, and creator of “The Wire” TV series. I haven’t seen the show, but after hearing the interview, want to. He said that he thought the War on Drugs was responsible for the downfall of proper police work, due to shoddy investigation procedure.

I don’t see how, if this was such an important drug bust, with the manpower that Askia describes coming out, including a helicopter, that some damn good investigation wouldn’t have been done beforehand. That’s a lot of our tax dollars involved. Yet, as of now, they haven’t even picked up the guy that sold the drugs. If he were a big dealer worth that effort, why wouldn’t they know more about him, and be able to get him right away?

And, the “narcotics” confiscated, down at the lab for analysis: wouldn’t an aptly trained drug bust force be able to promptly ID any large quantity of the usual bad drugs found?

Both Lissa and E-Sabbath had good posts about police procedure, and balance out, for me. I appreciate police officers for the hard job they have to do, but have also seen some bad abuse by certain individuals.

This is just a horrid situation. Askia, have you found out anything else from the neighborhood talk?