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John Lott on DC gun law
He has an op-ed in the Washington Times today.
"The city's brief focuses only on murder rates in discussing crime in D.C. Yet, in the five years before Washington's ban in 1976, the murder rate fell from 37 to 27 per 100,000. In the five years after it went into effect, the murder rate rose back up to 35. But there is one fact that seems particularly hard to ignore. D.C.'s murder rate fluctuated after 1976 but has only once fallen below what it was in 1976 (that happened years later, in 1985). Does D.C. really want to argue that the gun ban reduced the murder rate?
Similarly for violent crime, from 1977 to 2003, there were only two years when D.C.'s violent crime rate fell below the rate in 1976. These drops and subsequent increases were much larger than any changes in neighboring Maryland and Virginia. For example, D.C.'s murder rate fell 3.5 to 3 times more than in the neighboring states during the five years before the ban and rose back 3.8 times more in the five years after it. D.C.'s murder rate also rose relative to that in other similarly sized cities."
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"striking him at least once AS HE FLED"
You don't see this as a problem?
"striking him at least once AS HE FLED"
You don't see this as a problem?
Nope.
entered the store brandishing a BB gun that looked like a semiautomatic weapon and demanded money.
Lack of judgment on the career criminal's part does not constitute any wrong doing on the clerk's part.
Depends on what he was doing a split second before he was hit and on what else he might have been doing as he "fled". He might have had his gun aimed at the manager or clerk. Regardless of where the gun might be pointed at any given instant, if he's got a gun in his hand and is within range, he's a threat, unless one believes that no criminal has ever shot a victim after having been given the money or whatever else they were after. Now if they'd written that the manager pursued him outside of the store, then I might have some doubts about the legality and/or morality of the shoot, but the simple fact that the perpetrator managed to turn his back on the manager in the instant before he was hit doesn't seem convincing in and of itself.
I agree.
Anyone else remember a while back in Richmond, VA there was a kid, about 14 years old, I think he was, out very late at night, riding a bicycle, with a broken .22 rifle that he had duct-taped a magazine to in order to make it look more like an "assault rifle"? He approached a guy who was sitting in a parked car, pointed the rifle at the guy and demanded money. The guy was a CCW permit holder. He pulled his gun (I seem to recall it was a .40 semi-auto) and shot the kid, killing him.
The outcry was amazing - how could this awful man kill a "child"? My question was where the kid's parents? This happened at about 2 a.m. When I was 14, if it was 2 a.m., there was one place my butt had better be: in bed asleep. The guy was cleared because he had what appeared to any reasonable person to be a rifle pointed right in his face, so use of deadly force in self-defense was justified.
Poor decision-making on the part of the criminals.
Taking the report at face value - i.e. the robber had already taken the cash and was fleeing, there could well be a problem, at least in my jurisdiction. This is extremely fact based, however.
I can think of a likely scenario where said shopowner is in trouble; for example, as noted above, he pursued robber outside. Or robber was shot in back as he was leaving the store. In either of those scenarios, I think shopowner faces some legal issues, at least in my jurisdiction. As well he should.
In other equally likely scenarios, of course, he is entirely justified. It boils down to whether he has a reasonable fear of immediate bodily harm. The facts as provided don't tell us enough, which is why we should refrain from drawing conclusions from press reports (or blog posts!).
In any case we now have nice dead criminal.
We won't have to deal with this scummy duech bag a second time and waste taxpayer dollars once again.
Yeah for the store manager..ooooooo Go baby
> As well he should.
Why?
There's no question that he's an armed robber, someone who was clearly willing to inflict serious injury for a few dollars.
Injury to him does not impact any good folk.
Why should his decision to flee protect him?
After all, if he wants to be safe, he can give up his line of work.
Here is a classic example of why crime rates drop in Virginia and not in D.C. Recently released Armed robbers who try to rob again are taken out of the equation by the people, not the criminal justice system.
"Friday, Sep 07, 2007 By JIM NOLAN TIMES-DISPATCH STAFF WRITER
A man who robbed a South Richmond Baskin-Robbins ice-cream store with a fake gun Thursday night was shot to death by the store's gun-wielding manager.
Richmond police said the suspect entered the store brandishing a BB gun that looked like a semiautomatic weapon and demanded money.
After a clerk handed over cash, police said, the store manager grabbed a semiautomatic handgun from behind the counter and fired multiple times at the thief, striking him at least once as he fled.... Investigators said the suspect had been released from prison roughly nine months ago after doing time for robbery...".http://www.timesdispatch.com/cva/ric/news.apx.-content-articles-RTD-2007-09-07-0211.html
The Armed citizen not only defended his own life he defended the community from future acts of violence.