Rape can be deadly. I’ve seen patients who died due to the trauma inflicted during rape.
If I believed my wife was being subjected to a potentially deadly assault, I’d not hesitate to use deadly force to protect her.
Now maybe the husband in the news story knew it wasn’t rape but killed the guy in a jealous rage.
Or maybe not.
I really doubt she’ll give it a second thought. She’s going to Waffle House!!
I have absolutely no doubt that what you say is true, Quadgop. But I have a lot of doubt that this particular case involved rape. More like consensual sex while the old bastard was supposed to be asleep. He could have threatened him, he could have shot him in the leg - but no, he had to make sure he was dead by putting a bullet in his head.
An impotent 70-year-old with a 42-year-old wife who claims she doesn’t want sex, and yet this same man, her ex-lover had previously stayed in their house for a number of weeks? Come on.
That they had agreed to go to counselling for their sexual issues prior to the shooting just about says it all. Deemed a “hero” by his attorney? Pass me the bucket.
kayaker? I laughed aloud 
I don’t know if you knew it or not, but, the husband was tried in a court of law. IIRC, the verdict was not guilty.
Threaten a rapist with a gun?? Why??
I sometimes wonder if Carl Hiassen is a documentarian, not a novelist.
sorry - duplicate go bye-bye
So you think a man is raping your wife, I guess he must be on top of her, arms wrapped around her or something like that?
And your plan is to shoot at them?
He must have been one hell of a shot.
Reminds me of the story of a man whose wife is cheating on him, so he hires a hitman who turns up with a sniper rifle. He says it’s a thousand bucks a bullet, but he guarantees a hit with every shot. They wait outside the house for the lover to turn up, then the outraged husband turns to the hitman and says “I want you to shoot his dick off, and I want you to blow her brains out”. The hitman peers through his telescopic sight and says “If you can wait half a minute, I can save you a thousand bucks…”.
indeed!
“Fred Casely? How can he be a burglar? My wife knows him…he sold us our furniture!”
It fell under “justifiable homicide” in some places.
The photographer Eadweard Muybridge, famous for his photos of horses in motion that are credited for leading to the development of moving pictures, was one of the last people in US to be cleared of murder charges on such grounds in 1874.
What, you think he’d take her to Waffle House if he put her second???
Wait, if it’s Florida, where’s the 5 year old blond moppet buried alive in a wooden crate with nothing to eat but iced tea and Skittles? I missed that part.
Ah, the old “shoot them in the leg” logic.
OK, first let’s say that he honestly believed his wife was being raped. Obviously the jury did and that was the ruling.
Now, you find your wife being raped, how do you handle the “threatening him with a gun” part. Do you yell, HEY, I have a gun, get off her? Do you fire a warning shot? If you yell out to him and he is a rapist, what do you do when he pulls your wife between the two of you and puts a knife to her throat? If you fire a warning shot where does that bullet go? Does it hit an innocent?
Let’s talk about leg shots or go a step further and talk about shooting the gun out of someone’s hand. Both are works of fiction in the real world of people that train with firearms as part of their job.
First, a leg shot can kill someone regardless of how nonchalant it seems in the movies. Hit the femoral and the guy is dead unless he gets treated real fast.
Second, a leg shot generally does not neutralize the threat. The only reason to use deadly force is if you perceive yourself or another to be in danger of being killed or receiving grave bodily harm. (There are a few others in various jurisdictions that allow you to kill someone to prevent certain crimes as well, and rape is usually one of those.) So, if you are trying to prevent or stop something from happening you need to neutralize the threat and shooting in the leg doesn’t do it. There is not one single law enforcement or military organization in the US that advocates shooting someone in the leg, ever. If you have to shoot someone, it is to stop what is happening or to prevent something from happening period. Shoot the perp in the leg and he may well just kill your wife.
We’re talking about a guy lying on the ground, not one standing up and returning fire.
But if he does stand up, the fire he returns? Ewww.
Not quite, he is lying on top or the guys wife, and not the ground.
That is not meant to be smart a.. but it really does change the equation. Is he in a position to kill her or turn her into a hostage? If he was in fact a rapist then the answer would be yes.
The answer would be “maybe”. He shot the guy in the stomach and the head. It sounds like he pretty much walked up and pulled the trigger. Even I could hit a man in the leg from six inches away.
Perhaps, but I never mentioned that it is hard to hit someone in the leg as part of my logic. (Though, that is one of the reasons it is not taught in law enforcement.)
Will shooting him in the leg stop him from slicing your wife’s throat is the bigger question? You find this situation in your house, could you tell if he was armed or not?
More easily than I could shoot him in the head without injuring my wife.