6th Grader Shoots Potential Rapist

[invadergir]

I see we don't have any responsible gun-owners here. Why does a 12-year-old have access to a loaded hand-gun? Not only are the parents apparently not present at the time of the break-in, but they have an unsecured loaded hand-gun with a completely unsupervised 12 year old?

Bad parenting.

 

[Yan007]

Haven't read past page 2, but most of what I did read was expected. Blaming the girl or looking down on what she did is scummy. I'm pretty sure someone here probably suggested she should have made sure to shoot him in the foot or ask him why he is here then beg for him to leave instead.

If someone comes into my home uninvited then that person has a high chance of dying. I don't care if you just want to steal my TV or rape my wife/kids/dog - everyone in my home will have two goals: surviving and taking you down. We'll use blades,guns,sticks,books, whatever we can to stop you and make sure you would wish for death.

 

[invadergir]

I see we don't have any responsible gun-owners here. Why does a 12-year-old have access to a loaded hand-gun? Not only are the parents apparently not present at the time of the break-in, but they have an unsecured loaded hand-gun with a completely unsupervised 12 year old?

Bad parenting.

Who knows. Maybe she had proper training for years and the parents decided that she is responsible enough and trained enough to have access to a firearm?
And how is it the parents fault that the criminal decided to break in when they weren't at home? A 12 year old is certainly old enough to be left alone for a day / night so giving them any kind of faul there (how should've they seen the break-in coming?) has no ground.

Fast conclusions, huh?

Absolutely not. I have to ask:

1) Do you personally own a gun and 2)Do you have a child.

 

[Stu35]

In Britain killing an intruder is murder.

False.

In Britain killing an intruder who is retreating is murder.

There are some other subtleties too, but that's the main one right now. We still don't quite have the American "property = life" approach to use of lethal force, but we're a hell of a lot better than mainland Europe.

 

[asinann]

That's pretty awesome, congratulations to the kid, although I disagree with the idea of people keeping guns in their houses (or on their person). For every rare case of a person possibly saved like this, there's accidents and the use of guns for crime to consider. I understand it may be different for our American friends since they have a large border with a poor crime-ridden country (no offence any Mexicans) which guns can leak over into the hands of criminals but I stand by my position in theory at-least.

TL;DR: Please flame me

As much as gun crime and violence is sensationalized and called the greatest evil in America, more people die in car accidents every year in the US. There are fewer drivers than guns in the US. Does this mean cars should not be driven?

 

[asinann]

I was wondering when you'd come in to condemn this. Tell us, my friend, what should a 12 year old girl do when she's cornered in a house when a stranger (who broke in) is roaming through, and tries opening the door she's behind?

How about getting out of the house? No chance of murders, trauma, or anything of that. Fyi: People dying is a bad thing.

And if not, then not. No burglar ever cares about finding 12 year old. They want to steal things to sell for money.

As for the anarchists, that's not something I meant obviously. It's merely taking a piss at the hypocrisy and naivity of people who call themselves that. They advocate 'might makes right' without knowing why. Childsplay to turn the tables on them and picture them as victims of that might to see if they'd still like that.

A burglar finds a witness, the witness either becomes a murder or kidnapping victim. Especially a 12 year old girl. And you're also conveniently skipping over where she is cornered in the house. She didn't hunt through the house for him, she hid in a closet, and when he came for her, possibly hearing her moving or breathing or crying, she shot. He didn't die, he was wounded and arrested. She used the handgun for what it was designed for: defending herself from a much larger assailant.

 

[chikusho]

Self defense cases aren't rare, they outnumber crimes, suicides and accidental deaths using firearms by a substantial ratio, as in multiplicative. http://www.justfacts.com/guncontrol.asp

http://www.hsph.harvard.edu/research/hicrc/firearms-research/gun-threats-and-self-defense-gun-use/index.html

 

[DanDanikov]

Firearms- the world's greatest equalizer.

 

[DanDanikov]

Actually, I'm with everyone complaining about where the fuck 'rapist' came from. The original cited news story on yahoo is entitled 'Okla. Girl, 12, Shoots Intruder During Home Burglary' and makes no such connection.

Then you have the yilb.com story '12-Year-Old Shoots What May Have Been a Rapist'. Ok, seriously, where did that come from? Getting a bit sensationalist, aren't we Noah Swimmer? I mean, he even admits his inference is quite shaky and not really factually grounded at all both in the title and his first line '..Well sort of.. '.

He does vaguely reference a KOCO news report (I assume this: http://news.yahoo.com/video/12-old-oklahoma-girl-shoots-135211392.html) in which the girl does say that she's heard of girls being abducted and going missing, and that she was scared, but that only really speaks to her state of mind and nothing to the man's intention. Stacey Jones was identified and arrested, but there's been no note of priors and he was only charged with 1st class burglary.

So I'm really disappointed with the OP, Kurt Cristal, for perpetuating a single, sensationalist spin on an otherwise straightforward news story. I can't presume whether this was to intentionally maintain the sensationalist, yet deceptive nature of the story, or just a lack of care to do 5-10 minutes of basic research and validation.

 

[DoPo]

Then you have the yilb.com story '12-Year-Old Shoots What May Have Been a Rapist'. Ok, seriously, where did that come from?

First sentence of the article

"..Well sort of.."

And then a paragraph later there is the utter brainfart of negative genius:

"Although there?s no proof that the intruder intended on harming the young girl, the fact that he was chasing after the girl in the closet instead of grabbing the flat screen on the wall is fairly telling."

Or in other words "Well, we admit having no proof that he was a rapist, but he might have been a rapist, so that is self explanatory (we mean, he must be a rapist)".

 

[tmande2nd]

Only thing bad about this story is that the dude survived.

Harsh but who cares.
Burglars dont deserve anything else.

 

[spartan231490]

Self defense cases aren't rare, they outnumber crimes, suicides and accidental deaths using firearms by a substantial ratio, as in multiplicative. http://www.justfacts.com/guncontrol.asp

http://www.hsph.harvard.edu/research/hicrc/firearms-research/gun-threats-and-self-defense-gun-use/index.html

"Recent analysis reveals ?a great deal of self‐defensive use of firearms? in
the United States, ?in fact, more defensive gun uses [by victims]
than crimes committed with firearms.?"
http://www.law.harvard.edu/students/orgs/jlpp/Vol30_No2_KatesMauseronline.pdf

The trick to your study is that they don't count defensive uses of a firearm as self-defense when the firearm is only used to intimidate, they only count it if the gun is fired. And since significantly more than 90% of defensive gun use is as intimidation, they are artificially lowering the number of self-defense cases that show up. Always read the method.

 

[bartholen_v1legacy]

It doesn't matter at all if the guy was going to rape the girl or not. He was clearly coming for her, whether to rape or maybe he was just going to tie her up so she wouldn't alert anyone. Anyhoo, it was him or her, and she did it in self defense. I see the shooting is justified. And it's nice to see a story like this where no one died for a change.

 

[spartan231490]

Self defense cases aren't rare, they outnumber crimes, suicides and accidental deaths using firearms by a substantial ratio, as in multiplicative. http://www.justfacts.com/guncontrol.asp

http://www.hsph.harvard.edu/research/hicrc/firearms-research/gun-threats-and-self-defense-gun-use/index.html

Also, "Other research on the effects of guns in the hands of victims and prospective victims consistently indicates that victims who use guns for self-protection are less likely to be injured or to lose their property than otherwise similar victims who either do not resist at all or resist without a gun (e.g., Cook 1991; Kleck 1988; Kleck and DeLone 1993; see others reviewed in Kleck 1997a:225-226). There is scholarly debate about how often guns are used for protective purposes; while some scholars stress the low estimates implied by the National Crime Victimization Surveys (NCVS [e.g., McDowall 1995]), at least fifteen surveys indicate far larger numbers of uses, ranging from 700,000 up to 3.5 million or more. As yet, no other survey has even approximately confirmed the low NCVS-derived estimates (Kleck 1997a:149-159, 187-189; Kleck and Gertz 1995)."
here's a pretty comprehensive examination. 15 studies place the estimate at over 700,000 a year, and only one has a lower estimate. It's from here: http://www.guncite.com/Kleck-Hogan.html

 

[CM156_v1legacy]

The only exception is when they brandish firearms, in which case a burglar has to kill them in self-defense in order to stay alive.

Try using that defense in court.

In your world, using force to expel an unlawful intruder = bad, but said intruder using force to prevent being expelled = good.

Your assuming that criminals are smart and logical people. Were they smart and logical, they wouldn't be criminals in the first place. Criminals don't think about the punishments as much as they do rewards. That's why deterrence doesn't work, my friend.

Also, you cannot provoke a situation and then claim self defense in such a manner. Suppose person A walks up to a child and starts punching them. The mother of said child attempts to defend her child by punching person A in the face. Person A is not legally able to claim self defense against the mother.

As a final note, you're illustrating why we on the pro-KABA side often call the antis "pro-criminal".

 

[asinann]

A burglar finds a witness, the witness either becomes a murder or kidnapping victim.

Uh, no, that just doesn't happen. There's no motive for that. Not unless you employ a retarded three strikes out system and it's someone who's been arrested twice before. In that case they have nothing to lose.

When a burglar finds someone home they normally LEAVE. If they do not leave, they will kill or kidnap whoever is there.

Or are you going to claim to be a criminologist?

 

[Locque]

I'm a little uncomfortable with how many people are okay with shooting someone breaking into their house. Call me a pussy, but wouldn't shoot someone running off with my TV set or whatever. And if I had a gun, I'd like to think my first instinct would be to say "freeze", and not kill anyone unless it becomes a life or death situation. Also, while it's definitely true that there's no proof this guy's intent was to rape anyone, there is evidence that does cast his motives into question at very least.

 

[ecoho]

she should have aimed higher or just a little to the left, now she has to go through the horors of a trial were some prick lawyer is going to try and get this guy off by makeing this little girl cry.

 

[RobfromtheGulag]

It'd be interesting to hear the answers to why he broke in to the house. Perhaps he was hoping for something more portable than a TV, and was looking for jewelry or money in a shoe box.

This is a fairly light-hearted story as these sorts of things go. The kid's safe, the perp's not dead, everyone's happy. But I postulate that assuming he was a burglar rather than a pedo he would have been scared by the kid and fled upon seeing her. Especially seeing her with a gun.

It sure bodes well for the gun nuts that the girl got the gun first. Imagine if no one had been home, or she'd been asleep. Now all of a sudden you have an intruder with a gun that he didn't even start out with.

 

[spartan231490]

You are plain wrong. By your reasoning there would've been never a burglary where the criminal did not attack / kill a witness that suprised him through a panical reaction.

And you'll know how such cases are 'lightning strike odds' rare, which pretty much equals never.

And the few cases where it happens are caused by gun culture, not because of what the average burglars does or doesn't do.

When a burglar finds someone home they normally LEAVE. If they do not leave, they will kill or kidnap whoever is there

Now all you need to do is prove that happens in a significant number of cases.

Fair warning: A paranoid story on a gun lobby website, or a news article about one case ever is not a significant number of cases.

Good luck.

Here's a source, it's from the bureau of Justice and was posted in the comment you're quoting. Also, your comment about attacks during burglaries being caused by gun culture is incredibly ignorant and offensive.
This paper dicusses a massive amount of studies regarding gun control and crime in general.
http://www.guncite.com/Kleck-Hogan.html