You and your kids are out for a day of fun at Valleyfair.
Some dirtball cops a feel of your daughter.
You go to try to set him straight.
He calls for a bunch of his friends.
They mean to do you harm. Lots and lots of it. Eight teenagers and twentysomethings, jacked up on misplaced testosterone.
What do you do?
If you’re a concealed carry permit holder in the state of Minnesota, and didn’t seek out the confrontation, and think you can convince a jury that you reasonably fear death or great bodily harm, and that you’ve made reasonable efforts to de-escalate, and that the use of lethal force is reasonable (again with the jury), and there’s not a big crowd with possibilities for collateral damage, the decision is both easy and awful. You draw. You point. If the scumbags are like most scumbags, they get a sudden case of mortal fear, and they run like hell. If they don’t back down - say, they draw a knife or a gun of their own, or come at you with tire irons - you shoot. Given that you are probably overwhelmed with adrenaline, you don’t - can’t - try to get cutesy with your aim; you shoot for center mass, and keep shooting until your target drops. And pray that that’s enough to stop things. As, indeed, it usually is.
What if it’s not you? What if you see the event going down - the father defending his daughter, the gang of wanna-be thugs gathering, the “men” stomping on the man’s head. You have a permit. There is no sign of a security guard, to say nothing of cops. Nobody else is stepping forward. You reasonably believe that the guy, the father, is about to get his brains stomped out.
What do you do?
While Minnesota’s self-defense law states that one can use lethal force in self-defense if one reasonably believes oneself or another person are in imminent danger of death or great bodily harm, things get very cloudy when you are not the potential victim, but just a good samaritan.
There’s nothing hypothetical about the story, of course. As John Hinderaker notes, the local media is finally talking about this two-week-old beating at Valleyfair…:
Shakopee police say as the crowd was leaving Valleyfair Amusement Park around midnight on the 4th of July, the victim’s daughter was confronted by two men.
“The 12-year-old daughter was either touched or slapped in the buttocks area,” Scott County Attorney Patrick Ciliberto said. “The father confronted (the men) by yelling at them for what they had done to his daughter,” he added.
Police say the two men called their friends, who were also in the park. The group of seven men and a juvenile then confronted the father.
“They beat him to the ground and then, the evidence that we have, when he was on the ground, they used their feet on him. They were kicking him in the face when he was down,” Ciliberto said.
According to the criminal complaints, the men were stomping on the 41-year-old father as he lay on the ground, unconscious.
He suffered severe head injuries, including a fractured right orbital bone and possible subdural bleeding on the brain. “We don’t know if there are permanent injuries yet,” the County Attorney said.
Of course, nobody was armed - or if they were, they opted not to use their gun to break up the beating. Nothing unusual there; it’s a difficult decision, made all the harder by the disdain in which the local officialdom holds citizens who defend themselves or other citizens from the depraved.
In 1994, after a crazed loner killed a Saint Paul police officer, a citizen - and expert marksman - had a clear shot at the murderer. He hesitated - because he feared that he’d be prosecuted by then-Ramsey-County Attorney Mark Foley, known (as is his successor, current occupant Susan Gaertner) for his hatred of law-abiding citizens with guns. So he shot instead to mark the car - and did it with such accuracy that he was able to tell the police forensics lab exactly where to find the bullet, later on. If only he’d felt empowered to do the same with the murderer’s head; the madman went on to murder another policeman later that day. The citizen was right to be worried; Foley did try find some reason to prosecute. The Saint Paul police made it known to Foley that, since the citizen had tried to save a cop, they would not cooperate with any attempt to prosecution.
Would he have gotten the same treatment had he decided to help a typical citizen?
Like someone who had tried to draw on this lot…:
The six adults charged and held in jail are Devondre Evans-Lewis, Andrew Shannon, Darris Evans, Terry Arnold, Derry Evans, and Anthony Gildersleeve.
…and their two “juvenile” accomplices?
Eight “men” who put an innocent man in the hospital, possibly with permanent brain damage? “Men” who could have killed the victim?
We don’t know. It’s all gray area.
The DFL wants to keep it that way. They want you, the law-abiding citizen, to feel out of your depth when trying to keep the forces of barbarity at bay when they are tearing civilization apart in your face. They call it “vigilante justice”. When we try to change the laws to put the average citizen on firmer ground, they lie through their teeth to scare the uninformed (who are uninformed precisely because that’s the way they want it).
Feel helpless?
Feel angry?
Good. You should.
You should turn your anger on everyone who voted against Tony Cornish’s “Stand Your Ground” bill. At the polls only, of course.
You should turn your anger on Citizens for a “Safer” Supine Minnesota, the lying racist orcs who want to keep the laws just as they are - because they value criminal lives more than they value yours. But only rhetorically.
You should turn your anger on the lying hacks in the bought-and-paid-for media who play along with CSM’s propaganda, who give it unquestioned play while understanding neither the laws, the proposals for change, nor any of their ramifications (beyond what’s fed to them by their benefactors). But only by repudiating their lies.
And save some anger for the alleged perps. Because they are out on bail.
And here’s praying that, if every last one of them doesn’t suddenly come to Jesus (or whomever) and beg forgiveness for trying to destroy a man and his family, that the next man they try to destroy can respond meaningfully - with half a dozen shots to the chest.
Cross-posted and comments welcome at Shot In The Dark.
