Stop or the Senior Citizen Will Shoot! Moment 71-Year-Old Gunman Shot Two Robbers as They Tried to Hold Up Florida Internet Cafe

Stop or the Senior Citizen Will Shoot! Moment 71-Year-Old Gunman Shot Two Robbers as They Tried to Hold Up Florida Internet Cafe

He shot 'em. That is, the presence of a gun in the hands of an ordinary citizen turned what was a couple of thugs robbing a business and its patrons, and which might have ended up with some of the patrons, the business' employees or both laying dead in a pool of blood into two thugs in jail with some extra holes in their bodies. The thugs, for their part, complained that "they weren't going to shoot anyone."


That's why they were waving a gun around, right?

Incidentally, for the person on the "business end" of a firearm it's not possible to know whether (1) the gun will work or (2) most of the time, if it's loaded. If you can see the rifling a fair (and lawful) presumption is that the person pointing it at you is prepared to kill you -- period. If the person doing the pointing is engaged in an unlawful act at the time they've already declared their willingness to ignore the law and thus it is fair to assume they're willing to commit homicide as well.

Scratch two thugs from the street, for a while anyway. Unfortunately our "Just-US" system will likely let these two jackals out far before it should.

Florida, and indeed the rest of the country, should adopt not just "must-issue" concealed carry but rather Constitutional Carry.

The clause in the Second Amendment is very clear: shall not be infringed. If I wish to carry a firearm, openly or concealed, I have the constitutionally-protected right to do so. Note that the Constitution doesn't give me that right, it protects it. I have that right as a consequence of the unalienable right to life and liberty, which are not the government's to give. If someone intends to take either from me by force I have the right to resist.

That Government often infringes rights should not be surprising. It does. In fact, that seems to be what government does best! But this does not make it right -- it just means that they have more guns and more goons, and the people have not reached their tolerance point.

Nonetheless, we occasionally get very-public object lessons of what the law should be and should protect.

This is one of them.

Unfortunately we also get negative object lessons. Like this one:

According to a Lake County Sheriff's Office spokesman, two deputies showed up at Scott's unit around 2 a.m. Sunday morning. They were looking for attempted murder suspect Jonathan Brown. Deputies said they found Brown's motorcycle in front of Scott's apartment and believed Brown was inside.

They said they knocked on the door and when Scott opened the door, he had a gun in his hand.Deputies said Scott had the gun pointed in their direction, so one of the deputies opened fire, killing Scott.

FOX 35 news has also learned the deputies did not announce they were law enforcement when they knocked. They said they didn't announce themselves out of fear the suspect would run. A deputy spokesman said it's not required to announce themselves in these situations.

Here's the problem -- the man they sought wasn't in the apartment. By definition an apartment building has a lot of residences served by a common parking lot.

The police were not in "hot pursuit"; they didn't see the alleged perpetrator they were seeking going into the unit, for example. They could have sought a warrant, they could have sought to confirm the man was in the apartment first, they could have staked out the building with a perimeter and binoculars so he couldn't leave without them knowing about it and waited him out.

Instead they decided to knock on someone's door at 2:00 AM without announcing that they were law enforcement officers and when the person who answered it did so while armed, a perfectly reasonable thing to do when someone knocks on your door at 2:00 AM unannounced, they shot him.

So who's in the wrong here? It's not an easy question to answer. Clearly there wasn't intent to shoot the resident, who was not the target of the investigation. But there were also decisions taken by the police in this instance that were unnecessary and ultimately proved wrong in that their "suspicion" that the man was inside the unit was unsupported by anything particular -- remember, this is the case of "which door is he behind, if any?" given that all they had was a vehicle registered to him in the parking lot.

We can and must demand that those who hold themselves out as professionals, including police officers, live to and operate under a higher standard of conduct than ordinary citizens. If I hold myself out as an Internet Security professional (and I do) I'm expected to know more about anti-virus programs, firewalls and similar things than the common person. My standard of conduct that meets "reasonable and due care" is thus higher than yours, if you're simply someone using a computer to write a business document or surf the Internet.

The same standards must apply to professional law enforcement officers. Carrying a firearm is a serious responsibility and doing so as part of one's job even more so. When a police officer or department makes a decision to bang on someone's door at 2:00 AM unannounced they must accept the fact that the occupants, if they are not criminals, are well-within their rights to assume that the person doing the banging has a high probability of being a criminal, not a cop. This doesn't give the occupant the right to shoot, but it sure does give him or her the right to answer the door prepared to defend himself.

The professional -- in this case the cop -- is the one with the higher duty of care and standard of performance.

Based on the information presented thus far I believe manslaughter charges are in order for the officers in question, and that the Lake County Sheriff's department (along with the rest of the Sheriffs in Florida) should give serious consideration to changing policy such that "inquiries" of this sort should be reserved for circumstances where other alternatives, such as staking out the location, are unavailable due to exigent circumstance (e.g. a known or suspected active hostage situation.)