Murder? Manslaughter? Criminal Negligence? Discharging a firearm within city limits?
I think yes, he should be charged with a crime, and he should lose his right to own firearms. He was grossly negligent, IMO, in not establishing that there was a valid reason to fire his gun. He let his emotions (fear) control him to where he didn’t make a rational decision to shoot; he simply let fly without knowing who or what he was shooting at.
Gun ownership is a right that comes with responsibilities. One of those is to be sure that you need to be shooting at someone or something before you open fire. I don’t think gun owners should get a pass when they fuck up, especially when someone dies as a result of their idiocy.
Is this a tragedy? Yes. Should it be compounded by subjecting this man to criminal charges? While I don’t think the purpose should be to heap trouble on him, I certainly think he should be held responsible for his actions.
As usual, I eagerly wait for other Dopers to weigh in. What say you?
Assuming that the facts are as stated, there is nothing that society can do to punish this man more than the act itself already has - and will continue to…
Yes, he acted from fear and panic but even when it leads to tragedy, fear is not a crime.
Let me ask the OP if he’d have brought this article up as debate-worthy if the old man had hit his fiancee with a cane, causing a cerebral hemorrhage and more or less instant death?
Well, so how many times a year do you think a person, being surprised by another person suddenly, strikes out with a potentially lethal implement? I’ll guarantee you that this number is not insignificant as far as a total number goes, nor is the number of deaths actually caused. It seems a little late to the party if you weren’t aware that there is a category of murder referred to as involuntary manslaughter where it is accepted that a person is guilty of killing another person, but possibly innocent of malice or of even doing anything that any other reasonable person might have done in the same situation.
However, not all cases of manslaughter are worth prosecuting. Essentially you need to have either been doing something stupid and/or reckless to be charged with manslaughter.
Absolutely should be charged with a crime. I don’t know what crime specifically, but it would definitely seem like some sort of criminal negligence. I’m a gun owner and would fully expect to be prosecuted if I fired my gun at someone without knowing that I was in danger.
So, if a guy wants to murder his wife and get away scott free, all he has to do is say he thought she was an intruder. Yeah, that’s a precedent I really want to set.
It’s some kind of negligent homicide at the least, and perhaps more (do we have anthing other than his word for it that he thought she was an intruder?)
Of course it’s a crime, and this kind of thing happens a lot more often than anyone shooting an intruder.
But that’s true of every “crime of passion”, premeditated or not. We still incarcerate the killers, regret or no regret.
What I wonder, however, is whether the guy had a fit of dementia. He thought she was in bed with him ? How does that happen ? How can one miss that the bed is empty ? And if he thought there was an intruder, why wouldn’t he try to wake up his fiancée up before he looked for his gun ? Weird story.
I’d want the whole thing thoroughly investigated, just to make sure he’s not covering up an actual murder, but if he doesn’t break under questioning or other evidence turns up, then he should be charged with manslaughter, anyway. That’s the responsibility you take on when you act with violence, IMO. If convicted, he should at least face a fine, and removal of any gun priveledges, probably community service too. Also want to look into the senile old coot’s driving licence, I think. If he can be that jumpy with a gun, I wouldn’t want him behind the wheel.
Yea, I don’t have any problem with people using force against burglers in the like, but I think the state needs to make it clear you need to actually establish the person your shooting at is coming to rob you and you can’t just blaze away at any hazy figure in the dark who happens to be on your property.
Huh, I’m not a big fan of gun ownership. But I find myself with an instinct to defend this guy.
I don’t know any more than what is said in the OP. But if the man is telling the truth, it seems to me he made an honest and reasonable mistake. He believed someone had broken into his house, and he had every reason to think so. You hear someone walking down the hall in your house who’s not supposed to be there. That’s an intruder. You have a gun, and you have “the element of surprise” as they say. It seems like a no-brainer to me. Of course you shoot the guy. (I say “of course” but I think I’d personally be more likely to try to scare the guy away, just because I am personally extremely averse to violence. But I don’t think I’d be very wrong to simply open fire.)
People have said he should have “made sure” but the thing is, he was sure, and had good reasons to be so. Again, that is, assuming he’s being honest, which I think most posters in this thread are assuming.
Gun owner here chiming in. I fully support gun ownership and self defense. What this guy did was grossly negligent and criminal. He should be prosecuted. If this guy was 40 years old and killed his 16 year old kid sneaking back into the house, there wouldn’t even be a debate. Just because he is older doesn’t excuse it.
How can you say that, given the facts we do know to be true. Of course you shoot the guy? Even now, knowing that the “guy” may, in fact, not be an intruder, and may just be a loved one who went down the hall?
You may respond by saying that I am being unfairly critical, since hindsight is 20/20, and he obviously (I, too, will assume he’s being honest) believed that an intruder was present.
But hindsight wasn’t necessary. Do you mean to tell me that, when you hear a strange noise at home, it is “reasonable” to jump to the most extreme possibility - an intruder ready to do violence - absent some sort of corroborating proof? Just because you buy a gun doesn’t increase the likelihood of an intrusion into the home, and there are so many other possible explanations of strange noises/shadows, that it would necessarily require some extreme information in order to jump to this extreme conclusion.
His mistake may have been honest, but it was not “reasonable”, and I think that was true even before he killed her.
Count me down as believing that this is a textbook example of manslaughter (though not involuntary, since he willfully pulled the trigger). No murder, since no malice, but a homicide nonetheless*.
*Whether the State should prosecute is another issue, though. Given the possibility of recidivism (low), and the trauma this guy must be going through already, I can see why a prosecutor would try to get the guy to accept a guilty plea of a lesser included offense, rather than throw the book at him.
If I hear a person walking down the hall at night when there’s not supposed to be anyone there, then yes, I jump to the “extreme possibility” that it’s an intruder. And if they’re willing to break into my house, it seems reasonable to assume they’re willing to do violence.
I can’t figure out how this is an extreme possibility. Footsteps. In the hall. No one’s supposed to be there. How is that not to lead me naturally to conclude that someone has broken into my house?
(Here I’m assuming a homeowner who makes sure to lock doors at night. Otherwise I’d imagine I’d need to eliminate the possibility of an honest or drunken mistake. I walked into the wrong house as a kid once, and some drunk guy walked into my house once in my college days.)
You’re characterizing them as “strange noises,” I guess I’m imagining not just “noises” but the sound of someone walking around, which it seems to me is pretty unmistakable. I don’t know what the guy in the OP heard, though so you may be right about his case.
I think this “debate” is ultimately restricted by the lack of facts we have at our disposal. In my opinion, though, given that this guy lived with someone, the fact that he heard someone else in his house should not have immediately led him to believe that an intruder (who needed to be shot and killed) was present. At the very least, it is not a reasonable reaction (which was the reason I responded to your post), absent corroborating evidence.
[Yes, I saw that he though she was in bed. But, you hear a noise at home - someone got up to use the bathroom; someone went to get a drink of water; was hot, and wanted to adjust the AC; insomniac, who decided to read a book to make herself sleepy…I can think of tons of reasons that explain this incident that never require a home invasion]
In my opinion, your own experiences corroborate my belief. If you’ve personally experienced situations when a person “innocently” ended up in the wrong house (I once had someone accidentally come into my hotel room while I was asleep), you must surely realize that, given a strange noise, there are explanations that may be more reasonable than “requires deadly force”.
On a larger point, I think this speaks to some sort of logical fallacy that perhaps we all experience to a point. This guy bought a gun, presumably to protect his family, so he now assumes that there is a need for protection. In other words, by identifying a possibility (burglar), and taking proactive steps to prevent it (get a gun), he may have elevated that possibility to a probability in his own mind. Every time he handled his gun, he may have thought of the horror of being attacked, which only increased his belief that the attack was a real likelihood. He has pre-emptively set himself up to jump to a conclusion when he has no real justification to do so.
Yes, I’m wildly speculating at this point. But I do believe that, if he had not owned the loaded firearm, he would have been less likely to assume it was needed to subdue an invasion. Given less lethal alternatives, I expect that he would have looked for additional information as to the source of the noises/shadows, if only because he had no other means to respond to an attack.
If you have a hammer, every problem looks like a nail. But if you don’t have a hammer, then you’ll examine every nail-like appendage to make absolutely sure that it doesn’t need a hammer at all.