News this morning, Mike, says that they are not. Good thing, because both the father and daughter will be serving their own *life sentences* replaying the entire confrontation in their minds for the remainder of their days.
My thoughts exactly. I honestly can't even wish ill on the girl. She was worried about "getting in trouble". Now she has to live with the fact that trying to save her butt with a lie got someone killed.
The father said he told the teen not to move, but reportedly saw the teen reach for something, at which point police say the father opened fire.
Now admittedly I wasn't there, and this is just one sentence in a newspaper article.
But it's unclear to me why Dad opened fire. I realize that won't be a popular take, but there it is. Unless there was some reason to think he was reaching for a gun, the kid wasn't directly threatening anyone.
And, as it turned out, he was in the home by invitation.
My guess, sadly, would be fury--at the intrusion, and the insult to his daughter, at the disobedience if he suspected what was really up. I understand the fury, if he really believed the boy was an intruder, but that strains credulity. Didn't some part of him, somewhere, wonder whether his daughter had invited in a boyfriend? Has he been living in a cave?
None of which changes the fact that the young lady took an explosive situation and made it infinitely worse by crying "wolf."
The way I pictured it when I read it was that the boy was in the bed, the father told him not to move, and he likely was reaching for some clothing. As for why the father would suspect he's armed, if someone she claims she does not know is in my [non-existant] daughter's bed and she hadn't raised an alarm, I feel that assuming he's got a weapon he threatened her with is reasonable.
I'm sure home invasion rapists are not all that common, but not unheard of. And I'm also sure, of that subset, many are armed. So the father's expectation that the person in her daughter's bed (that she is apparently claiming she does not know) is an armed intruder doesn't feel that strange to me.
Well, this is one of those stories that my left-leaning friends would say justifies banning guns. If no one owned guns, then Dad would have been unarmed, and the boy would be alive.
Of course, if the teen had been a rapist with a knife, Dad might have gotten a belly full of steel. Or he might have had a criminally-acquired gun, as a lowlife rapist might well.
In any case, I can easily imagine having accepted an invitation to a midnight rendezvous at that age. Indeed, I'm not sure I can imagine turning one down if it had come from a woman about whom I was earnest.
I do think that a grown man should have been a little less trigger happy. If you're having a conversation with your daughter and she has time to say she doesn't know him, that doesn't look like an imminent threat of death or GBH to me (which is the ONLY reason to shoot someone).
And I'm inclined to blame the daughter greatly. I don't really care if she was worried about getting in trouble or not. She threw her lover under the bus to save herself from....
Hmm. Either she had reason to fear her father's response (in which case this shooting takes on rather a different aspect) or she had no legitimate fear (in which case what she did is despicable).
It looks like it may go to grand jury after all, so there will be a consideration of those issues.
Some news accounts say there was a "struggle" with the boy, which if true could excuse -- after a fashion -- the shooting. After all, if you lose control of the gun in the struggle, you could lose the capacity to protect your daughter from the man she says she doesn't know.
You might still say that he was in the wrong for bringing a gun, which escalates the situation; but in his own house, with a reported intruder in his daughter's room, I think most of us would say a gun is not out of line. If the boy did try to struggle with him for the gun, well, it's a tragedy, but not a crime.
But again, the grand jury will hear it, and we'll see what they think. They only get to hear one side of the story, so if they let it go, there probably wasn't much there.
You might still say that he was in the wrong for bringing a gun, which escalates the situation; but in his own house, with a reported intruder in his daughter's room, I think most of us would say a gun is not out of line. If the boy did try to struggle with him for the gun, well, it's a tragedy, but not a crime.
I don't think he was wrong to bring the gun. I am skeptical about whether firing it was really necessary but as you say, the grand jury hearing will look at that question. I think that's proper.
11 comments:
Wow. That's just horrible all around. I really hope they don't try charging the father with anything.
Truly horrible. There's a reason "Thou shalt not bear false witness" is important enough to have been included on the tablets.
News this morning, Mike, says that they are not.
Good thing, because both the father and daughter will be serving their own *life sentences* replaying the entire confrontation in their minds for the remainder of their days.
My thoughts exactly. I honestly can't even wish ill on the girl. She was worried about "getting in trouble". Now she has to live with the fact that trying to save her butt with a lie got someone killed.
The father said he told the teen not to move, but reportedly saw the teen reach for something, at which point police say the father opened fire.
Now admittedly I wasn't there, and this is just one sentence in a newspaper article.
But it's unclear to me why Dad opened fire. I realize that won't be a popular take, but there it is. Unless there was some reason to think he was reaching for a gun, the kid wasn't directly threatening anyone.
And, as it turned out, he was in the home by invitation.
My guess, sadly, would be fury--at the intrusion, and the insult to his daughter, at the disobedience if he suspected what was really up. I understand the fury, if he really believed the boy was an intruder, but that strains credulity. Didn't some part of him, somewhere, wonder whether his daughter had invited in a boyfriend? Has he been living in a cave?
None of which changes the fact that the young lady took an explosive situation and made it infinitely worse by crying "wolf."
Cass,
The way I pictured it when I read it was that the boy was in the bed, the father told him not to move, and he likely was reaching for some clothing. As for why the father would suspect he's armed, if someone she claims she does not know is in my [non-existant] daughter's bed and she hadn't raised an alarm, I feel that assuming he's got a weapon he threatened her with is reasonable.
I'm sure home invasion rapists are not all that common, but not unheard of. And I'm also sure, of that subset, many are armed. So the father's expectation that the person in her daughter's bed (that she is apparently claiming she does not know) is an armed intruder doesn't feel that strange to me.
Well, this is one of those stories that my left-leaning friends would say justifies banning guns. If no one owned guns, then Dad would have been unarmed, and the boy would be alive.
Of course, if the teen had been a rapist with a knife, Dad might have gotten a belly full of steel. Or he might have had a criminally-acquired gun, as a lowlife rapist might well.
In any case, I can easily imagine having accepted an invitation to a midnight rendezvous at that age. Indeed, I'm not sure I can imagine turning one down if it had come from a woman about whom I was earnest.
I don't think it justifies banning guns at all.
I do think that a grown man should have been a little less trigger happy. If you're having a conversation with your daughter and she has time to say she doesn't know him, that doesn't look like an imminent threat of death or GBH to me (which is the ONLY reason to shoot someone).
And I'm inclined to blame the daughter greatly. I don't really care if she was worried about getting in trouble or not. She threw her lover under the bus to save herself from....
Hmm. Either she had reason to fear her father's response (in which case this shooting takes on rather a different aspect) or she had no legitimate fear (in which case what she did is despicable).
It looks like it may go to grand jury after all, so there will be a consideration of those issues.
Some news accounts say there was a "struggle" with the boy, which if true could excuse -- after a fashion -- the shooting. After all, if you lose control of the gun in the struggle, you could lose the capacity to protect your daughter from the man she says she doesn't know.
You might still say that he was in the wrong for bringing a gun, which escalates the situation; but in his own house, with a reported intruder in his daughter's room, I think most of us would say a gun is not out of line. If the boy did try to struggle with him for the gun, well, it's a tragedy, but not a crime.
But again, the grand jury will hear it, and we'll see what they think. They only get to hear one side of the story, so if they let it go, there probably wasn't much there.
You might still say that he was in the wrong for bringing a gun, which escalates the situation; but in his own house, with a reported intruder in his daughter's room, I think most of us would say a gun is not out of line. If the boy did try to struggle with him for the gun, well, it's a tragedy, but not a crime.
I don't think he was wrong to bring the gun. I am skeptical about whether firing it was really necessary but as you say, the grand jury hearing will look at that question. I think that's proper.
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