Another week, another gun-related tragedy.
A good neighbor in Fort Worth, Texas calls the police at night to report another neighbor’s front door ajar. Police respond to do a “welfare check”…to make sure everything is OK. The policemen then walk around the home, with guns drawn. One of them sees a figure in the house, shouts “Show me your hands!” and immediately shoots at the person, though the glass window, killing the female owner of the house.
There are so many things wrong with this story.
First, it shortly follows the case of another unfortunate Texas homeowner who was shot to death in his own home by a police officer. That victim’s crime was eating ice cream on his couch when the female cop mistakenly entered the wrong house and shot him dead.
Second, neither of these victims presented a threat to the police officers. They were in their homes, enjoying their property, living their lives.
Third, the officer who did the most recent shooting, from outside the house, through a closed window, didn’t identify himself or give the homeowner any opportunity to respond. (The incident, by the way, was videotaped by the officer’s body cam, which revealed no threat to the officer.)
As is usually the case, the police department is now saying that a subsequent search of the house uncovered a gun…as if that makes the incident understandable.
Actually, there are a lot of homes in Texas where the owners have firearms; it is one of the most heavily armed states in the Union. As a matter of fact, citizens of Texas feel strongly about “the right to bear arms” and “stand your ground” laws. Owning a firearm, or a dozen of them, is a sign of manhood, evidently.
It would be, in fact, perfectly legal for every resident of a home in Texas to wear a holstered gun indoors at all times. Breaking into an occupied house in that state would be a foolhardy endeavor, indeed.
I don’t live in Texas, but if someone is prowling around my house at night I might be tempted to grab my .45 cal pistol and take a peek out the window. As far as I know, that’s my right. After all, a man’s home is supposed to be his castle.
My point is that the female homeowner would have been totally within her rights to have had a gun and was investigating someone prowling outside her window…even though there is no evidence that she was armed within her own home.
Fourthly, let’s say for a minute that some teenage crackhead/burglar had been in that house, up to no good, and found himself catching a bullet from the police officer. Question: Since when is burglary a capital crime, punishable by death? In this case, there wasn’t much effort exerted to apprehend the “suspect” (who happened to be the homeowner), and the cop evidently considered himself the entire criminal justice system…and went ahead, erroneously, and found the victim “guilty” of a heinous act.
I am curious about police training and what justifies the drawing of a weapon. One would think that deadly force would be the last resort, not the first, of a trained law enforcement officer.
To do a welfare check, with guns drawn, seems to me to be asking for trouble. Couldn’t the officers have simply gone to the front door and rang the bell to see if anyone was home? After all, the only suspicious thing reported by the neighbor was the front door slightly opened at night, which can be a pretty innocent thing.
I’ve forgotten to close my garage door many times at night. Thank goodness I wasn’t in Texas where such a situation obviously means to law enforcement that armed intruders are ransacking the place and abusing the occupants. I could have been shot dead by a hopped-up SWAT team.
By the way, did I mention that both of the homeowner/victims were African Americans, executed by White American police officers? Maybe Caucasian policemen are intimidated by Black people, putting them on edge. Who knows?
Sure, these incidents were unfortunate, and most cops aren’t so trigger-happy. My son Ron is a retired Sheriff’s Lieutenant and, in his long career, had to draw his pistol on a few occasions, but I know that it was the last thing that he wanted to do.
“Talking” is probably a policeman’s most effective means of handling a situation, bringing in reinforcements is another, and most officers have tasers and other non-lethal means to apprehend bad guys. It would seem that a cop must first identify the problem and, then, decide how to handle it.
If the first decision that the officer makes after getting out of the patrol car is to draw a weapon, then the possibility of “accidental” lethal force injuries is magnified a hundred-fold: it’s awfully hard to call back a bullet that was discharged in a tense moment.
Suffice it to say that I feel so sorry for the victims (and their families) in these cases, who did nothing wrong but be Black in their own homes. And, I feel sorry, as well, for the police fraternity as a whole which got another black eye as a result of an overeager or poorly trained officer being trigger-happy or, perhaps, just wanting to be a hero.
It’s no wonder that the police are not considered “friends” in Black neighborhoods throughout America. There are far to many of these episodes each year; it’s endemic. In recent years, innocent African American men have been killed by police officers for simply driving their cars, running scared from police, walking, and standing. Now, we can add eating ice cream and peering out of one’s own home window.
Of course, the “elephant in the room”, as they say, is the fact that there are so many privately held guns in America. We are armed to the teeth: a recent study found that there are 88 guns per 100 residents in the U.S.! That ratio is many times higher than in most developed countries.
Not surprisingly, many American policemen are a bit jumpy when pulling over a speeding car, responding to a domestic complaint, or investigating an unsecured front door. Who knows if the suspected perpetrator is “strapped”? In crime-infested urban areas, he probably is. (And, if the suspect is Black, that guy, even if he’s jaywalking, is pretty apprehensive about what the cop is going to do to him. Can you blame him?)
I can’t remember the last time I read a news flash about a Caucasian person being accidentally shot by a policeman in America. I’m sure it happens, but not every week like it does in U.S. minorities neighborhoods.
One doesn’t read about lethal gunshot “accidents” in Great Britain. That’s because beat cops don’t carry guns. They don’t need to because private gun ownership, and the misdeeds and mistakes that can go with that, is rare. The tension level is reduced on both sides when guns are not there to be unholstered.
One wonders how many tragic gun-related deaths could be avoided in America if gun ownership was significantly reduced. It seems like every week we hear of some child shooting himself or a sibling with Daddy’s gun.
Sure, our Constitution gives citizens the “right to bear arms”, and I have no problem with that for the theoretical protection of home and property. I have a gun, and I hope I never have to use it. But, I would to protect my property and my wife.
Importantly, we all need to recall that our right to bear arms was granted in the Constitution to ensure “a well-regulated militia”, i.e. to guard against tyrants and invaders. Of course, way back then, we didn’t have the huge standing army that we do today; the Founding Fathers didn’t anticipate that.
So, does an individual private citizen, in America, need a dozen guns, or a military grade assault rifle with armor-piercing bullets, in his home? Is that really appropriate? How likely is it that this individual will be called up to the “militia”?
The problem with our abundance of lethal weapons is that the folks who get killed most often are not burglars, rapists, or invading tyrants. They are, in fact, our wives, our relatives, and our children who are shot in domestic disputes, or people who are massacred at schools, churches, and malls by pissed-off individuals armed with military-grade assault weapons.
If weapons like that were not available to the average citizen, there would be very few mass killings in America; we’d be more like Great Britain.
And, if the amount and kind of scary weaponry was not available to the average homeowner, then, perhaps, our policemen would not be as jumpy and aggressive as they seem to be. If every person they encounter potentially has a deadly weapon on them, then every person is a potential threat to them. They’re running scared.
We need to de-escalate the “arms race” in America.
And, we will only do this when we have politicians who appreciate this problem.