Dispatch from America’s shooting gallery
by digby
Another story of a brave gun toting yahoo who is so “scared” of 19 year old (black) girls he had to shoot first and ask questions later:
The parents of a 19-year-old woman who was shot in the face on the porch of a suburban Detroit home say they find it hard to believe their daughter posed a threat to the man charged in her death…
Wafer, 54, was arraigned Friday afternoon on the murder and manslaughter charges as well as a felony weapons charge. A probable cause hearing was set for Dec. 18.
What happened between when McBride crashed into a parked vehicle several blocks north of Wafer’s neighborhood and the shooting remains unclear. Police received a 911 call from Wafer about 4:42 a.m., in which he tells the dispatcher: “I just shot somebody on my front porch with a shotgun, banging on my door.”
They found McBride’s body on the porch.
Under a 2006 Michigan self-defense law, a homeowner has the right to use force during a break-in. Otherwise, a person must show that his or her life was in danger.
Prosecutors say evidence shows McBride knocked on a locked screen door and did not try to force her way in. The interior front door was open, and Wafer fired through “the closed and locked screen door,” said prosecutor Kym Worthy, who declined to discuss details about the investigation.
“We do not believe he acted in lawful self-defense,” she added.
That’s a relief. If it had happened in a “stand your ground” state all the man would have to do is say “I’m afraid of teen-age black girls” and they wouldn’t have arrested him at all.
Meanwhile, here’s another one of your staunch defenders of the Second Amendment making his case:
Police in Wilkesboro, N.C., are currently looking for a man who accidentally fired his handgun during a Tuesday night discussion about 2nd Amendment rights in a GNC vitamin store, UPI.com reported.
The unknown suspect took out his gun to show it to an employee. At some point, he accidentally fired a round into the store printer, according to Dumb As A Blog.
After seeing what he had done, the alleged printer assailant told the store employee that “he could not go down for this” and immediately left the crime scene, WFMY-TV reported.
The suspect is described as a white male in his late 20s, weighing about 170 pounds, who is 5-feet, 8 inches, with brown hair and brown eyes. He fled the scene in an early 2000s model dark colored Honda Civic, MyFox8.com reported.
Luckily no one was killed.
I’m a big advocate for the Bill of Rights. And I’d be a lot more inclined to defend the Second Amendment as vociferously as the First if it weren’t for the fact that it’s basically only defending the rights of numbskulls like this and criminals. (Also too: the fact that gun rights advocates are now routinely using their weapons to silence and intimidate people who don’t agree with them, thus rendering the First Amendment moot.) The idea that it’s useful to repel potential government tyranny is laughable, needless to say, which is the primary principle on which those who believe the 2nd Amendment confers an individual right depends. And the carnage caused by accidental and unlawful use of these weapons is so out of control because of these yahoos that it’s infringing on everyone else’s right to … live.
I don’t know what to do about it. America is not evolved enough to allow us to fiddle with the Bill of Rights. The whole house of cards could come tumbling down unless we treat it as a sacred text handed down by God himself. But there needs to be some kind of rational approach to this violence and a way to get through to this gun culture. It’s killing way too many people. Innocent people. They need to lock their guns up, allow society to keep them out of the hands of dangerous people and start being responsible citizens. This is crazy.
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