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AG Garland Says Quiet Part Out Loud!
Chicago police officers investigate a shooting on Thursday, May 30, 2013. (Photo by Stacey Wescott/Chicago Tribune)
I dream of one day getting a government grant to investigate why drivers in black cars are always the last to turn their headlights on. For a couple million of U.S. money, I’d happily sit in a lawn chair with a clipboard and yellow pad beside the Interstate, and tick off the colors of the cars that are still running unlighted well after dusk. Then I’d construct impressive Excel spreadsheets and use those to generate attractive tables and graphs. With proper funding, I could make that project last for years.
I was reminded of my idea by a recent piece in the Washington Post that detailed a study by Andrew V. Papachristos, an associate professor of sociology at Yale University. Papachristos studied murders in Chicago and discovered if you spend a lot of time around criminals, you’re a lot more likely to be shot. Who’da thunk?
As Papachristos reported: “More than 40 percent of all gun homicides in the study occurred within a network of 3,100 people, roughly 4 percent of the community’s population. Simply being among the 4 percent increased a person’s odds of being killed by a gun by 900 percent.”
Now I know you’re thinking this just proves hoary old maxims like “lie down with dogs, come up with fleas,” and it is true that this is yet another example of university research expending lots of time and money to prove something we all know to be the case.
But it is very useful in the current context. The antis are saying that our division of society into good and bad people is unrealistic and — of course — racist. They argue there is no such thing as a good person, and no one — whether Nobel laureate or gangbanger — is really to be trusted with a gun. Conversely, they argue there are no bad people, just people in bad circumstances.
Well, Prof. Papachristos apparently has demonstrated the opposite. There are those in the world who are bad people. If you are one of their friends or neighbors, you are likely to catch a bullet, whether intentionally or by accident. The obvious answer to the problem? Remove bad people from society. If you can by some alchemy make them into good people, by all means do. If not, sequester them far from the rest of us.
Knowing that requires no affiliation with Yale, but it’s always good to see elite academics stumble into the truth.
HOUSTON, Texas (KTRK) — ABC13 has learned thieves snatched more than 30 guns from a powerless pawn shop, taking advantage of the business impacted by the storm.
According to a source, the suspects are believed to have gone through the ceiling of the shop and mainly stole handguns, which are now on the streets and in the hands of criminals.
According to the Harris County Sheriff’s Office, two employees went to check on the EZ Pawn shop at 4702 Highway 6 after the storms on Saturday morning and realized they were burglarized.
Due to the power outage, the store’s surveillance cameras were not working, leaving officials with no description of the thieves.
The Bureau of Alcohol, Tobacco, Firearms, and Explosives is leading the investigation.
“Stolen firearms in Houston are a significant problem, whether they are stolen from a gun store or a person with a house or vehicle,” Noel Rangers, ATF Houston assistant special agent in charge, said.
Within the city, the Houston Police Department said burglaries have increased at night since the natural disaster. Officers said people have been charged with felonies for burglarizing businesses during the outages.
“We have the ability to send messages to licensed gun dealers that it is critical to properly store their firearms prior to any natural disaster, especially when losing power becomes critical because a lot of their security cameras are hooked up to power,” Rangers said.
According to Rangers, it is difficult for them to track stolen firearms used in crimes, which is why gun owners need to know their serial numbers.
“Often times these firearms, there are several makes and models that they are vastly produced and if a gun owner doesn’t record the serial number when it’s recovered in a crime, we aren’t able to determine where that firearm came from,” Rangers said.
Possessing a stolen firearm is a federal crime that can result in up to 10 years in prison.
Situation: Pushed to the wall by an overwhelming force of angry protesters, under attack with rocks and blunt instruments, the peace officers open fire.
Lesson: Within their range, according to law, blunt force weapons including clubs and thrown objects can constitute deadly force. Any member of a mob may share its culpability.
It’s a chilly March day with snow on the ground and still falling in an American city policed by a force of some 2,000 sworn, armed personnel. Protests have been rife, all the more so after an armed citizen attempting to disperse a rowdy group of vandals has shot and killed an 11-year-old boy. The small contingent of uniformed men at a street intersection has been urged not to start any shooting, because they’ve been informed many of the protesters are carrying concealed weapons and are fully prepared to use them.
Hatred has focused on the uniformed law enforcement personnel. The protests were born in long-standing discontent that has boiled over. On one side is the growing throng of protesters and on the other, society’s designated “Forces of Order.”
The former virulently hate the latter.
These protests have been born in what the participants see as systemic discrimination against them, and unfair treatment of them and their kind. As they look at the uniforms arrayed against them, the protesters see the very embodiment of the oppression they perceive and abhor. They hate and fear them the way the Jews of Warsaw hated and feared the Nazis.
Those protesters have grown increasingly angry. They shout epithets at the uniformed people assigned to be there, comparing them to a certain kind of lower life form normally raised as food. Some members of the crowd are agitating more vehemently than others, especially one tall, burly black man.
One particularly aggressive member of the mob loudly challenges the authority figures to shoot him. Some of those in the crowd are visibly armed with heavy sticks. Others see the hated uniforms as targets for thrown missiles. Soon they are hurling snowballs, then rocks. People in the crowd are screaming, “Kill them!”
It has begun with a few of the locals verbally and crudely harassing a single one of the “uniforms.” Responding to his call for backup, eight brothers in the same uniforms have arrived to back him up. All are white males. Meanwhile, the crowd has grown exponentially. It is escalating further.
Emboldened, one member of the crowd approaches and swings a heavy stick at one of the peace officers. It impacts with a loud thwack and, struck in the head, the peace officer falls. He regains his feet, gun in hand.
A single gunshot rings out.
Some people hear a man shout, “Fire!”
Several of the men in uniform do just that.
The series of gunshots doesn’t last long. When it is over, 11 members of the crowd have been struck by bullets. One is mortally wounded: Patrick Carr will die two weeks later. Four more are dead or rapidly dying on the snowy street. They include Samuel Gray and James Caldwell, and the youngest to die, Samuel Maverick, 17.
Among them too is the tall black man who was a leader of the crowd. Some witnesses will say he was the first to fall.
His name is Crispus Attucks.
Perspective
The above incident took place at the intersection of Devonshire and State Street in Boston, Mass., on the fifth of March 1770. It became known as the Boston Massacre, and it so aroused the ire of the American colonists it became the most strongly smoldering tinder in what would half a decade later become the roaring bonfire of the American Revolution.
Leading up to the incident, the Colonies in general and Boston in particular were politically polarized. On one side were the Tories, the Royalists who swore by King George. On the other side stood the Whig party, characterized by their opposition to Britain’s policies in dealing with the American colonies. Allied and mixed in with the Whigs were the Sons of Liberty, also known as the Patriots, many of whom would later be among the Founding Fathers of the United States.
Hostilities had been strong. Those uniformed peacekeepers were British soldiers, part of a large contingent led by General Thomas Gage and tasked with keeping a lid on things in Boston, a city considered to be a hotbed of potential revolution. When the colonists called the British soldiers “lobsters” and “lobsterbacks,” they weren’t just talking about the distinctive red coats of their uniforms. The lobster was seen as low on the evolutionary scale — a bottom feeder, a cockroach of the sea — and shouting that epithet against them was the equivalent of calling one of today’s police officers “pig.”
Eleven days prior to the Boston Massacre, a civilian customs service man opened fire on a crowd that was throwing rocks through the windows of a Loyalist-owned shop, one striking the owner’s wife. The shot killed an 11-year-old boy named Christopher Seider. Two thousand Colonials angrily attended the child’s funeral, and the anger was still fresh among the crowd on the night the British troops opened fire at the intersection of Devonshire and State.
The Boston Massacre, as it quickly became known, inflamed passions throughout the colonies. Perhaps in hopes of tamping down unrest, the soldiers who fired were charged with murder, as was their commanding officer Captain Thomas Preston.
Adams For The Defense
To the surprise of many in Boston, John Adams was chosen to lead the defense team. Already a noted lawyer, having entered Harvard at age 16 and admitted to the bar eight years later, his sympathies lay strongly with the colonists rather than the Crown. Those who knew Adams said he was concerned defending the unpopular soldiers would hamper or kill his career.
Adams said, “If these poor fools should be prosecuted for any of their illegal conduct, they must be punished. If the soldiers (acted) in self-defense … they must be tried, and if the truth was respected and the law prevailed must be acquitted.”
The Trials
Captain Thomas Preston, was the first to go to trial. After three hours of jury deliberation, he was found not guilty.
Many colonists were upset by that, but there were explanations. Legal observers of the day felt the prosecutors did a sloppy job, while John Adams managed the defense magnificently. Preston himself would later write to General Gage, “The Counsel for the Crown or rather the town were but poor and managed poorly … my Counsel on the contrary were men of parts, and exerted themselves with great spirit and cleverness.” (1) Testimony differed whether Preston shouted “Fire.” Some witnesses failed to identify Preston correctly. Reasonable doubt had been established.
Many observers then and historians now felt Adams packed the jury. The panel included multiple friends of the captain, one of whom had been known to say prior to trial Preston was “as innocent as a child unborn,” and if he happened to be on the jury, he would never convict him.
When Adams defended the remaining soldiers in the next trial, he would have a steeper hill to climb. Preston, armed only with a saber, had obviously not fired a shot. The dead became so by gunfire, and it was the soldiers who ultimately pulled the triggers.
In their book John Adams Under Fire, Dan Abrams and David Fisher would write of the Preston verdict, “John Adams won his case, but doing so made his defense of the eight soldiers that much more difficult. The jury determined that Captain Preston had not given the order to fire: Therefore, the soldiers must have done it by themselves, without orders. They were responsible, and it put their lives in far greater jeopardy.
The penalty upon conviction was death on the gallows. Making the situation even more precarious, the blood lust in the town had not been satisfied. Blood answers blood, but Preston, the lead officer, walked away. The soldiers were different. The people knew soldiers from the streets; if they didn’t know these particular men, they knew others just like them. They’d had their encounters, and there’d been far more bruises than friendships. Men were slain for demanding their God-given rights. Would no one pay for that?” (2)
Adams famously said in the trial of the eight remaining soldiers, “Facts are stubborn things; and whatever may be our wishes, our inclinations, or the dictates of our passion, they cannot alter the state of facts and evidence.” He added, “It is more important that innocence be protected than it is that guilt be punished, for guilt and crimes are so frequent in this world that they cannot all be punished. But if innocence itself is brought to the bar and condemned, perhaps to die, then the citizen will say, ‘whether I do good or whether I do evil is immaterial, for innocence itself is no protection,’ and if such an idea as that were to take hold in the mind of the citizen that would be the end of security whatsoever.” (3)
Adams’ trial strategy was to establish straight up self-defense. In a final argument replete with references to case law and legal scholarship he exhorted the jury, “In the case here, we will take (Private) Montgomery, if you please, when he was attacked by the stout man with the stick, who aimed it at his head, with a number of people round him, crying out, ‘Kill them! Kill them!’ had he not a right to kill the man?
If all the party were guilty of the assault made by the stout man, and all of them had discovered malice in their hearts, had not Montgomery a right, according to Lord Chief Justice Holt, to put it out of their power to wreak their malice upon him?
I will not at present, look for any more authorities in the point of self-defense; you will be able to judge from these, how far the law goes, in justifying or excusing any person in defense of himself, or taking away the life of another who threatens him, in life or limb; the next point is this:
That in case of an unlawful assembly, all and every one of the assembly is guilty of all and every unlawful act, committed by any one of that assembly, in prosecution of the unlawful design they set out upon.”
While many saw Crispus Attucks as victim and martyr, Adams painted him as an instigator who not only earned the massive 770-grain .69 caliber Brown Bess musket ball that exploded his liver but triggered the entire tragedy.
Witnesses described Attucks as being armed, not just with a stick, but with a bludgeon resembling a piece of cordwood. In her book The Boston Massacre: A Family History, professor of history Serena Zabin summed up the thrust of John Adams’ theory of the defense: “Here, then, was the storyline for the four judges and jury to hold on to as they sorted through contradictory and confusing evidence. Adams offered his listeners — and the future readers of the trial transcripts — a convenient shorthand for understanding a complicated event. An unruly crowd, separate from both the town and the soldiers it was taunting, drove soldiers to think that they needed to defend themselves from Boston’s inhabitants.” (4)
The trial of Captain Preston lasted five days; that of his subordinates went seven, the court keeping hours of 8 a.m. to 6 p.m. In the end, Corporal William Wemms and Privates John Carroll, James Hartigan, William McCauley, William Warren and Hugh White (the initial focus of the mob’s anger) were found not guilty.
Privates Matthew Kilroy and Hugh Montgomery were found guilty of manslaughter. Though they could have been hung, their sentences were commuted to being branded on the thumb with a small capital “M” to mark them permanently as having been convicted of manslaughter.
They served no additional incarceration beyond the months spent in jail awaiting trial. It is generally believed by legal analysts they were the only two shooters convicted because the jury determined they were the only two who fired with intent to kill.
Analysis And Lessons
If reading the above gave you a sense of déjà vu, you are not alone. Today we see outrage and riots when, for example, a Kenosha policeman shoots a supposedly unarmed man who turns out to be armed with a knife, combative, and in physical contact with the officer who fired.
We see a nation divided in politics: Think today’s Left and Right, particularly at the far ends of each. This same division is found in the media. Compare today’s CNN versus Fox to 1770 Boston: The colonies were inflamed by Paul Revere’s widespread condemnatory pamphlet A Short Narrative of the Horrid Massacre in Boston, which was only partially balanced by a Loyalist pamphlet sympathetic to the soldiers titled A Fair Account of the Late Unhappy Disturbance at Boston. If past is indeed prologue, let’s look at some lessons.
Lesson: Standing up for unpopular defendants is not necessarily a career-killer. Though some saw John Adams as a turncoat licking King George’s boots, he remained a solid figure in the Patriot movement. He was one of the Founding Fathers as things went on, and of course, became the second President of the United States.
Lesson: Jury selection is critical. Many legal scholars believe a packed jury was the reason for the verdicts, and had the jury box been filled with Sons of Liberty instead, several British soldiers would have hung from Boston gallows.
Certainly, friends of defendants shouldn’t have been allowed on the jury. (When the Revolution broke out, several of those Loyalist jurors fled to England and remained there.) However, the composition of the jury was not the only reason most of the defendants got off completely, and two received only a “slap on the wrist” brand on the hand.
Lesson: Disparity of force is for real. Though the term “disparity of force” does not appear to have been used in these trials, it is a long-standing but little-understood legal principle which remains in effect today. It means if an unarmed attacker is so likely to cause death or great bodily harm if his attack continues, such power to harm is the equivalent of a lethal weapon and warrants the defender’s recourse to deadly force.
There can be many elements of disparity of force, but the one clearly in play here was the overwhelming force of numbers presented by a mob that far outnumbered the British soldiers. The use of blunt force weapons (clubs, thrown objects) by the crowd was also in play.
We cannot avoid the comparison to situations today where frozen bottles of water are thrown, flagstaffs and hard, heavy placard poles are wielded, and illegally powerful lasers which can cause permanent blindness are aimed at LE officers’ eyes. It is obvious the jurors agreed with John Adams’ argument the soldiers were in deadly danger and were justified when they opened fire.
Lesson: “I only followed orders” was no excuse then or now. Witnesses differed whether Preston ordered his men to fire. Preston himself denied it, but prior to the trials the enlisted men sent a note to the judge claiming they fired under orders and would have been executed had they disregarded those orders.
Adams, wisely, did not lean on this argument when he defended the soldiers. It should be noted the gunfire did not occur in a single thunderous volley. Eyewitnesses described the sequence of shots as separate; one, Thomas Wilkinson, testified the shots came “with the regularity of a clock striking.” (5)
Lesson: We need to fully understand the legal principle that each member of a mob shares responsibility for the danger they create, and the defensive force that comes back on them. That principle was in play in the Boston Massacre trials, but cannot be applied in some of today’s situations, described by a police supervisor who writes under the pseudonym of “Spencer Blue” as homicidal aggressors being sharks swimming in the protective sea of peaceful protesters. Violent actors in the midst of peaceful people do not necessarily call for unleashing deadly force on the entire crowd.
Santayana warned us those who do not learn from history are doomed to repeat it. If the Boston Massacre planted the seed for the American Revolution that left 25,000 dead, the comparison to events of today is ominous, indeed. While the uniforms and weapons change over time, patterns of human violence historically repeat themselves. As we see the antagonistic violence sometimes demonstrated today by both far Left and far Right, it appears almost as if some radical fringe groups are hoping to ignite a Kent State or Boston Massacre theater of martyrdom for their respective causes.
Footnotes: (1): Abrams, Dan and Fisher, David. John Adams Under Fire. Hanover Square Press, 2020, p. 114. (2): Ibid., Abrams, p. 116. (3): https://founders.archives.gov/documents/Adams/05-03-02-0001-0004-0016 (4): Zabin, Serena. The Boston Massacre: A Family History.Houghton Mifflin, 2020, p. 217. (5) Ibid., Zabin, p. 155.
The cops aren’t perfect, none of us are. However, the world is way worse without them. Photo by Matthew DaleyIf you follow the mainstream media, you can’t help but notice that America is pretty ghastly these days. Academics and woke commentators who are apparently too dim to determine their own genders scream breathlessly about how racist, misogynistic, bigoted and hateful we all are. Over the past few years, these people have believed so fervently in their cause that they were willing to trash academic buildings and burn down American neighborhoods just to make their point.
Of all the manifest foolishness about which we modern Americans appear to be verklempt, I’m not entirely convinced, but “Defund the Police” might be the stupidest.
Have those who trumpet such stuff ever met a real, live human, much less a criminal? If left to our own devices, people are reliably bad. Since the very beginning of time, that’s the reason mankind has banded together to form societies and governments. Without such structure, the world invariably descends into a state of tragedy, chaos, violence and pain.
There are exactly two ways to generate grand-scale violent chaos in the world. Neither is particularly pleasant up close. The first is to dismantle or overwhelm the structure and institutions that keep the chaos at bay. Think Portland, San Francisco or Haiti. The second, and worst, is to give the agents of chaos the reins of state power. Examples of this sordid state would include Sudan, Iran, Russia and North Korea.
What exactly does the “Defund the Police” crowd actually expect to result from that? If you take the cops off the streets, do you really think people are going to behave themselves, respect boundaries and treat each other nicely? Urban spaces left without authority figures inevitably descend into a Mad Max-grade state of apocalyptic anarchy … every single time. Now, hold that thought …
If you see something American that needs to be changed, then,
by all means, make an effort to do so. However, hating on the cops
or shouting, “Death to America!” is not the way to do it. Photo by Ted Eytan
Vote With Your Feet
In the single month of December 2023, there were more than 300,000 migrant encounters on the U.S.-Mexico border. And those are just the ones we caught. There’s no telling how many more slipped through unawares. Now, let’s put that in perspective.
Ours is a nation of 328 million people. In a single month, there was one migrant apprehension for roughly every 1,000 American citizens. Again, that’s just one month. There were 2.5 million for the entire year. That’s one apprehension for every 130 Americans. That, my friends, is simply not sustainable.
Though compelling as that observation might be, it’s not the point I want to make today. The shocking images of illegal migrants swamping the border and thousands of unaccompanied military-age males overwhelming processing centers in sanctuary cities are unsettling enough. However, I want to peer beyond such inflammatory stuff.
What I would like to do today is explore the individual motivations behind this phenomenon. What would drive a person to leave everything he has ever known and trek halfway around the world to a foreign land where he doesn’t speak the language? I would assert that what is driving that unstoppable train is not money or freedom. Distilled to its essence, it is American cops.
There’s a reason everyone in the world wants to come here. It is that ours is the greatest beacon of freedom and stability the world has ever known.
Why Do They Want to Come Here?
Most of the world is poor. Christ spoke of that in Matthew 26:11 when He said, “The poor you will always have with you, but you will not always have me.”
No amount of wealth redistribution will ever obliterate poverty. I’m not saying we shouldn’t ever strive to help those less fortunate, but we need to have reasonable expectations.
Nope, folks aren’t swarming across the southern border because they harbor any reasonable expectation of a mansion with a swimming pool and a supercar in the driveway. They are surging here by the literal millions because they are seeking safety and stability. The rathole countries they are fleeing are literally overrun with drugs, gangs, war and violence. They are risking everything coming here in search of reliable, dispassionate authority, the very thing that the woke Left wants to rid us of.
A Taste of Reality
We have no idea how good we have it here. I have seen LGBTQ activists protesting in support of Hamas. Seriously? Do you know what Islamic fundamentalists do with gay people? When given the opportunity, ISIS operatives like to make snuff videos wherein they duct tape homosexuals to chairs and throw them off of tall buildings.
In 2022, the Iranian Morality Police beat a 22-year-old woman named Mahsa Amini to death for having the audacity to walk outside with her head uncovered. Thanks to our horribly botched withdrawal from Afghanistan, nowadays, a woman with the bad grace to be born in that forsaken country will live out her entire life without feeling the sun on her skin. It seems to me that American protestors need some perspective.
So, if you really think the problem is America, American cops, and the occasional errant misgendering, I just don’t know what to tell you. Grow up, maybe?
America is far from perfect, but everybody else on the planet is infinitely worse. To my countrymen who are forever screaming about injustice, either stop whining or go someplace else. There should be plenty of room in places like Venezuela, Afghanistan, Ecuador and Sudan. For their part, the Venezuelans, Afghans, Ecuadorians and Sudanese all seem hellbent to come here.
Situation: One of our greatest 2A advocates compiles the stories of four women who survived because they had handguns — and a fifth who wasn’t allowed to have one.
Lesson: “Use enough gun.” Get the bullets where they need to go. Have the gun where you can reach it immediately, and if the law doesn’t allow this, fight for reform.
It would be hard to find a more ferocious warrior for gun owners’ civil rights than Tanya Metaksa. The anti-gun magazine Mother Jones called her “one of the most powerful lobbyists in America,” and the Associated Press described her as “a blunt, no-nonsense voice for the gun lobby in Washington.” I had the privilege of meeting her and hearing her speak back in the day.
She would introduce herself as “Metaksa, not Metaska. AK, as in AK-47.” A year prior to her retirement from the NRA’s Institute for Legislative Action, where she served as Executive Director, the Harper Collins subsidiary Regan Books published her book Safe, Not Sorry: Keeping Yourself and Your Family Safe in a Violent Age.
I thought the most powerful part of that book was the section in which Tanya focused on women who had faced homicidal attack. Four of them prevailed, because they were able to reach handguns in time to fight back and win. One of them could not, because the law in that place and time forbade her to. Here, thanks to Tanya, are their stories.
Armed Home Invader
Friday, May 10, 1996, 6:23 AM. The slender Ms. Sammie Foust had left the sliding glass door of her master bedroom slightly open after letting her cat in. She was in bed watching morning TV when the intruder burst in on her. Metaksa quotes her, “He was wearing a stocking mask, dark clothes, and while all the newspaper articles said he was wearing gloves he actually had socks on his hands. By the time I knew what was going on, he had one hand over my mouth and the other was holding one of those box-cutter razor blades at my neck.”
He demanded money. She gave him her purse. He shook it empty and wasn’t satisfied. Waving the blade in her face, he demanded the “big money.” She pointed to her jewelry box; he dumped that too, and still wasn’t satisfied.
That’s when he began beating her.
The first punch hit her in the eye, a blow so hard and damaging she would never see the same way through that eye again. To distract him, she pointed to some other jewelry elsewhere in the room.
When he turned to look for it, Sammie finally went for her gun.
She would tell Tanya later, “The fact that I had a loaded gun at hand is more than bizarre. I’d spent the two days before the burglary cleaning out drawers and I had stuff spread all over the place. When I opened one drawer, I found two guns, a .25 and a .32. I knew I owned them, but I didn’t remember where I had placed them. Lying next to the little one were four bullets, so I thought, ‘well, I ought to see if I can load it just in case I ever need it,’ and I put the bullets in the magazine. I wasn’t even sure I was putting the right bullets in the right magazine because they were real hard to make fit, so I put the magazine in the gun and pulled back the slide and everything worked. Then I put the safety on and set the gun on the stand by the bed. Never thought any more about it…. And, at that, I don’t even know why I thought to do it, because the last time I fired a gun was when I was about 14 years old, and that was either a rifle or a shotgun. I’d never fired a pistol in my life. I don’t know why he didn’t see it, as it was in plain sight.”
But now it was in her hand, and she had the presence of mind to take the safety off. And when he turned back toward her, she was ready.
She shot him in the mouth.
The tiny bullet had no immediate effect. He lunged at her and she shot him again. She would later tell Tanya Metaksa, “That one got him in the chest and the coroner said it was the one that ultimately killed him. At the time, it didn’t even slow him down. He slugged me again and grabbed hold of me. All I could think about was ‘Dear God, don’t let me pass out,’ and ‘Don’t let go of that gun.’ I have never gripped anything so tightly in my life. As strong as he was, he couldn’t get the gun out of my hand. We were fighting breast to breast, so the gun was between us.”
Sammie fired yet again, hitting him in the abdomen. She told Tanya, “He continued to fight, if anything he fought harder, and that’s when we fell back through the dining room doorway to the master bedroom. We were still breast to breast. He was slamming me into walls and tables, beating me in the head, doing pretty much what he wanted except getting the gun away, and I managed to get off one more shot. That one was at a down angle and ended up in his groin.”
Sammie fell, and the hulking attacker landed on top of her and began to strangle her. She said, “He weighed almost 200 lbs. and I was pinned down. There was just nowhere to go and I thought it was over for me. He’s choking me, I can feel I’m about to lose it, I don’t know what to do, and I think I’m going to die. I’m not very religious, but in my mind I started to pray. I asked God to forgive me; I even asked him to forgive the son of a bitch who was killing me, and I prepared to die.”
And she adds, “At that very moment, he puked blood all over me and died.”
James Wayne Horne died at 36, with a record for prior burglaries, and a toxicology screen with so many drugs it raised the eyebrows of even seasoned cops who investigated this justified homicide. Sammie Foust survived, albeit with permanently impaired vision, some permanent throat injury, and severe dental damage from the beating. She would later tell Metaksa, “I am very, very regretful that someone had to die, but I’m equally glad it wasn’t me. That was the choice I had to make. I made it and I chose to live.”
Armed Robbery
Charmaine Klaus worked in a convenience store in Michigan, where company policy was employees could not be armed. Tanya Metaksa noted there had been a series of armed robberies of such establishments in the area and, “The thieves would rob the stores, then take the clerks out in the woods, where they tortured and killed them.
The store’s supervisor had told the managers and clerks not to carry guns. If a robbery was attempted, they were to give up the money. If they wanted to take you out of the store, simply refuse to go … (Charmaine) told her husband about the new rules and he got angry. Neither of them liked the odds of getting caught unarmed by a crew like that. After some discussion between them, they decided she would carry and simply not tell anyone about it.” Mrs. Klaus’s gun of choice was a discreet little Smith & Wesson .38 Special.
At 10:30 PM on the night in question, at end of shift, Charmaine was in the back room finishing accounting when clerk Darlene Ramsey, 19, rushed in to tell her a masked man with a gun was entering the store.
He came in shooting.
As Ms. Ramsey tried to close the back room door, the gunman fired through it and then burst in, and instantly opened up on the young clerk. She fell, shot in the chest and the abdomen.
But by now, Charmaine Klaus had her revolver in her hand. She would later tell Tanya Metaksa, “I shot him. Unfortunately, the bullet hit a tooth and broke up. Even though it lodged in his throat and he was bleeding very badly, he continued the assault. I had a Smith .38 revolver; he had a Colt semi-automatic Super .38.
He just kept shooting, but he was somewhat disoriented because of the shock of being hit, and missed me. Bullets whizzed by my head and I started to crawl under the desk. He was in the hall (by then), firing at me through the door. And then he decides to come back into the room and I’m under the desk, blocked from doing anything. He grabs Darlene and shoots her point blank in the head. Then with his last bullet he shot me.”
Charmaine Klaus continued, “I could see he had the gun up by my head and at the last moment I moved my head and put up my hand. His bullet went through my hand and into my jaw. Now his gun was empty so he left, just running out of the store.”
Charmaine survived. Darlene Ramsey did not. Her murderer, Albert Joseph Hartford, Jr. survived and was captured, identified thanks to Charmaine’s bullet and his blood she spilled on the floor, and was convicted and sentenced to life in prison. Charmaine told Tanya, “I’ll spend the rest of my life working to see we don’t lose our right to self-defense.”
Stalker And Abuser
When the man Dottie Collins fell in love with put her through an escalating pattern of abuse that turned into physical beating, she dumped him. He retaliated by ramming her car with his. She called the police, who arrested and jailed him, and she went to the magistrate and swore out a restraining order.
She also acquired a pistol.
She told Metaksa, “I bought the gun, a small .25 caliber semiautomatic, after he ran me off the road. The day after I bought it, I had my son buy a box of shells and load it. I never shot the gun, in fact I’d never shot a pistol before. I know some people raise hell about small guns, ‘Saturday Night Specials’ or some such. All I can say is on a particular Friday night a ‘Saturday Night Special’ saved my life.”
On that Friday night, she had just gotten into her car and put it in “drive” when the abuser appeared, leaning over the hood of the vehicle and shouting, “You’re dead!” He fired, and the bullet grazed her right temple. Stunned but still conscious, she fell sideways onto the front seat.
The assailant came around, smashed a side window, and entered. Said Dottie Collins later, “He got in the car and shot me twice more. One bullet went in above the knee and came out below it. It turned out to be a fairly clean wound. My leg gives me some trouble, but the bullet didn’t hit any bones or anything. The other one caught me in the left forearm, shattering the bones. Chances are I’ll never regain full use of it. I’ve already had surgery and there is more to come to rebuild the bone.”
She had fallen across her pocketbook, where she kept her pistol. She was able to retrieve her .25, point it from her awkward position, and fire til it was empty. “I had no idea if I hit him or not,” she told Metaksa later. “I couldn’t see anything at the time, but I could feel the car go over the embankment and drop about 30 feet. The last clear thought in my mind was when Roger got out of the car. He screamed at the top of his lungs, ‘I hope you’re dead, I hope I’ve killed you!’ From then on it’s a blank until I woke up in the hospital.”
She awoke to at least some good news. Her would-be murderer was in custody, and being treated for the bullet wounds she had put in his hand and jaw, causing him to flee the scene. At the time Safe, Not Sorry went to press he had not yet been adjudicated, so Tanya did not include his last name.
Multiple Home Invaders
On a quiet Sunday morning, Brenda Hibbitts was alone at home talking with a friend on the phone when she heard her front door come crashing in. Tanya records her saying, “I had my purse sitting by the couch where I was sitting and I just grabbed my gun out of it … I stood up and looked down the hall and there were three people standing there. One was a great big ol’ guy, about six one or six two and two-forty, muscular, looked like a boxer. He was in front and holding a hammer. Two smaller people were behind him …”
Her S&W Model 3913 Lady Smith 9mm was already leveled on them. Mrs. Hibbitts continued, “I looked at them and I said, ‘Get out of my house or I’ll kill you.’ He just looked at me, that was when I noticed he had a hammer in his hand. He raised the hammer and I took a step back. Then he took a step forward and I fired a shot. It was the first time I ever fired that gun. I thought I’d missed him because he had no change in expression at all. The three of them ran into the bedroom next to the hall.”
In the tense moments that followed, Mrs. Hibbitts had a dialogue with the hulking leader of the home invaders. It culminated with his plaintive, “I’ll leave if you just won’t shoot me again.”
She allowed the trio to flee. Police soon caught up with them; they had dumped their wounded leader at a local hospital. All turned out to be wanted for other armed robberies.
At the time Safe, Not Sorry came out, they were still awaiting trial. Mrs. Hibbitts was unharmed. She would later tell Tanya Metaksa, “I was raised around guns. I don’t shoot like my husband and son do, but I know what I’m doing with a gun. Since this happened I’ve started practicing with a pistol and learning how to shoot a rifle and a shotgun. I’ll always have a gun and I’ll always keep this one. In fact, I just might have it bronzed.”
Disarmed By Law
In 1991, the state of Texas had no provision at law for private citizens to carry guns in public. Newly minted chiropractor Dr. Suzanna Gratia didn’t want to risk losing her professional license over a gun charge, so she took her S&W .38 Special Airweight out of her purse and kept it, legally, in her vehicle. That’s where it was, in a parking lot a hundred yards away, when she had lunch with her parents in a Luby’s Cafeteria in Killeen.
Mad dog killer George Hennard drove his truck through the windowed front wall into the restaurant and then emerged, armed with two pistols and shooting everyone he could see. He murdered Suzanna’s father when he attempted to disarm him, and as Suzanna’s mom cradled her dying husband, the bastard executed her, too.
Hennard murdered 24 victims and wounded 19 more before police arrived. Wounded by their gunfire, he blew his own brains out. Suzanna had been as close as 15 feet to him and, a good and experienced pistolera, could have easily shot him down — but when she reached reflexively to her purse, her gun was in the car, leaving her helpless to stop the massacre and prevent her parents’ death.
Suzanna Gratia went on to become a wife and mother, and one of the strongest voices ever for the responsible armed citizen movement. Her testimony helped Texas get shall-issue concealed carry, and today Dr. Suzanna Gratia-Hupp is still an influential champion of gun owners’ civil rights. I was present when she gave a speech at a SHOT Show in Texas years ago.
In the front row were several reporters from the mainstream media, many of them snickering and sneering before she spoke. But by the time she was done, some of them were wiping away tears, and not a one of them had anything negative to say in their news reports of her talk.
Lessons
Tanya Metaksa made the first lesson abundantly clear. As Mark Moritz famously said, “The first rule of gunfighting is, Have A Gun.” Listed here in the order in which Ms. Metaksa presented them, the four armed women had a much better outcome than the one disarmed by what were then the laws of her state.
Have your gun where you can get to it in time. The only one of the four armed defenders here to emerge unscathed was Brenda Hibbitts, the only one to get her gun in her hand before the actual fight started. This is probably not a coincidence.
As Robert Ruark put it so well, “use enough gun.” We look at how much injury Sammie Foust sustained while waiting for the wounds inflicted with her tiny .25 auto to take effect, and at the fact Dottie Collins’ assailant was still capable of vigorous, conscious, purposeful physical activity after she shot him in the face with her .25. It’s easy to say, “Get a bigger gun!” There’s validity in this, but it doesn’t go far enough. Charmaine Klaus’ attacker was still able to kill after she shot him in the face with a .38 Special, and Brenda Hibbitts’ assailant was a “psychological stop” who remained up and running with a 9mm hollow point in his chest. On the good people’s side, Charmaine Kraus was shot in the jaw with a powerful .38 Super but was able to stand, move about, telephone her husband, calm customers verbally, and talk to police when they arrived, all after sustaining the wound.
Experts agree shot placement is key. Not “chest” or “head,” but heart or brain. It takes skill, born of training and practice, to achieve that level of hit potential. Yes, and some luck, but luck seems to favor the trained and practiced. The chest is a big place. Old West outlaws like Jesse James and John Wesley Hardin took pistol bullets in the chest and rode away to heal on their own without medical attention. There’s a lot of “head” that doesn’t contain central nervous system, and the skull and maxillo-facial structure have lots of hard, angled bones comprising a natural protective helmet, as three of the above-cited women discovered. Read Dr. Jim Williams’ book Tactical Anatomy, available at tacticalanatomy.com.
As important as shooting skill is, we can’t ignore the fact three of the four who successfully shot their assailants did it with guns they had never fired before. With the lack of prior commitment, it’s unlikely any of them would have taken mandatory training, and a strict training requirement as urged by some anti-gunners would have left them unarmed, helpless and probably dead.
Coming back to training, though, do you doubt if Dottie, horizontal in the front seat, and Charmaine caught under a desk, had been trained and experienced in shooting from awkward positions, they might have been able to fire from there with immediate effect?
Above all, they had the courage to fight back, and they prevailed. We salute these strong women, and we tip the American Handgunner hat especially to Tanya Metaksa for bringing their stories to us all. Their experiences were too valuable and too instructive for us not to share with you.
Situation: A man is beating a woman and child. He is armed with a bat. You are the only one effectively capable of stopping him.
Lesson: Aimed fire works at close range. Deadly force against a violent criminal attempting to disarm you is justifiable. And even the most righteous shooting can have devastating reverberations.
October 16, 2018, Clarksville, Indiana. Dusk is fading into darkness. It is early evening at the River Chase apartment complex, a pleasant neighborhood where families barbecue and children play on lawns. It is not the sort of place where one expects deadly violence to break out.
Until it does.
Brandon Haycraft, 31, lives there. He is a tormented man. His baby has died a short time before, while lying in bed next to him, and he is swamped by guilt. He has been caught up in a cycle of substance abuse. One co-worker will later describe him as “a mean drunk.”
THC is in his bloodstream now, but the marijuana hasn’t mellowed him. He has taken anti-depressants, but they aren’t helping. Neither is booze. At the moment, his blood alcohol content is 0.228%, almost three times the legally drunk limit. He has told his significant other that he’s going to die tonight one way or the other, and he might just take her with him.
His prediction is at least partly correct.
Meanwhile …
Among Brandon’s many neighbors in this peaceful area is Adam Nesvick, 37. On this seemingly normal Tuesday evening he is home alone for the moment, preparing a dinner of tacos for the rest of his family who are due to arrive at the apartment soon.
He is interrupted by the sound of loud shouting. This is a neighborhood where children commonly play outside at this hour, and at first, he thinks it’s just kids getting a little rowdy. Glancing out the window, he sees his wife’s car has just pulled up, and he goes outside to meet her.
The tableau before him is unexpected. He notices his wife is on her cell phone, and he hears her scream, “My God, he’s going to kill her!” He’ll later learn 911 dispatch is on the other end of his wife’s conversation. A neighbor cries out plaintively, “My God, isn’t someone going to do something?”
And now Adam sees the cause of the trouble. His neighbor across the street is brutally punching his girlfriend in the face as she sits on the ground, feebly trying to protect herself. Her daughter, age nine, swings what appears to be an aluminum T-ball bat into the big man’s back, trying to stop him from beating her mom.
Adam watches in horror as Brandon rips the bat away from the child and throws her some six feet away.
Adam and Brandon both weigh about 240 lbs., but Adam is five-feet-nine while Brandon stands six-feet-two and is rippled with muscle. He’s also now armed: He has the metal baseball bat. Adam realizes he can’t deal with this bare-handed.
Adam runs back inside his apartment for his gun.
He’s had a carry permit since he was 18 years old. His current carry gun is a SIG SAUER M11-A1, fully loaded with 9mm Speer Gold Dot 124-grain +P bonded hollow points. He’s left it on his desk in an IWB Comp-Tac holster, and now he pulls it from its Kydex scabbard and sprints back toward the door, the pistol in his dominant right hand.
When he emerges from the door, he can see the situation has degraded. Before, the man had been punching the downed woman in the head, brutally. Then, she had been down on her butt as he beat her; now, she is down on her back on the front lawn with the boyfriend hulking over her, holding the bat horizontally in both hands across her throat, trying to crush her larynx.
The beatdown has turned into attempted murder in progress.
Closing to a distance of about 15 feet from attacker and victim, Adam stands in the street, levels the gun at Brandon and shouts, “Get the f**k off of her! Sit the f**k down or you’ll be shot!”
The big, angry man turns to face the rescuer. He flings the bat at Adam. It lands halfway between them on the lawn, some six or seven feet from the armed citizen who is still standing in the street.
Safe for the moment, the little girl runs into her apartment, followed by her mom. Brandon sits on the steps and puts his head in his hands. Adam lowers his SIG to a ready position. The man has obeyed his commands. Adam hopes it is over.
It isn’t.
Attack
The lull in the action lasts about 30 seconds. Then Brandon rises, his muscled body tensed with rage, and screams at Adam, “You don’t know me, motherf**ker!” He starts moving toward Adam and yells, “You gonna shoot me, motherf**ker? You aren’t going to do anything with that [gun], you fat ass!”
Adam is backing away from him, the pistol raised again now, and he is shouting, “Stop! Don’t do it! Stop! Stop!”
But the antagonist can move forward faster than the defender can backpedal, and is closing the distance fast, and at last there is only one thing left to do.
Shots Fired
Under the streetlights, the sky nearly dark, the green Trijicon night sights on the SIG glow like beacons. Adam Nesvick puts the front sight high on his attacker’s chest.
He fires as fast as he can hold the front sight in place. He sees blood squirt toward him from the man’s chest. Suddenly Brandon falls, pitching forward at about a 30-degree angle, and lands heavily face down in the street, motionless.
And, just that quickly, it’s over.
Immediate Aftermath
The Clarksville Police arrived quickly, some 30 seconds after the last shot had been fired. Adam’s wife Shannon had described the situation to the police before they got there, and none of the cops felt a need to take Adam at gunpoint. Per protocol, however, they patted him down, handcuffed him, and placed him in the back seat of a patrol car.
Adam said later, “I remember sitting in the back of the car praying for the soul of the man I had been forced to shoot, praying for the mom and daughter, praying for the well-being of my family, praying the police understands the situation and I actually get to go to my daughter’s wedding in four days and am not sitting in jail. While I was in the car, I noticed my left hand and arm were covered in blood spatter.”
It didn’t take the police long to sort things out. Haycraft had not survived. Nesvick’s aim for upper chest had been true. One of his four hits had pierced the man’s aorta, accounting for the blood spurt and spatter, and another had smashed the spine; that bullet, Nesvick opines, was likely the shot that finally dropped the attacker.
Immediate Aftermath
Nesvick’s first realization he wasn’t in trouble was probably when a female officer approached him while he was still handcuffed and confided, “You know you’re a hero to that woman and little girl.” Adam later told American Handgunner, “That remark helped steady my nerves and ground me.” He added, “I … was approached by the Chief of Police for our town and he said, ‘What you did was heroic, you probably saved their lives.’ He told me they had had prior dealings with the man and he was a dangerous individual.”
Says Adam, “Fast forward another hour and I’m sitting in the office area of the police station waiting to make my statement, watching the forensics officer check in the evidence … I saw them check in my gun, and there was blood on the slide. They checked in the bat, and they checked in a chunk of hair that had come from the mother, and a few other miscellaneous things.”
Adam continues, “While I was sitting there, finally in some kind of light, I noticed blood stains all over my shirt and pants. He was really close when I shot him. Anyway, I gave my statement, keeping it simple and to the point. The biggest thing I remember them pressuring me on was ‘Was it an accident? Did you inadvertently fire?’ My answer was ‘No, officer, I was scared shitless, but it was a conscious act to fire because I knew my life was in danger.’ I had my wife bring me new clothes so they could put mine in evidence, and I walked out and got in the car. The officers thanked me repeatedly for being cooperative.”
It took a while for the prosecutor to call Adam to confirm he considered Adam a hero, and he definitely wasn’t going to be charging him with anything. At this writing, no lawsuit has been filed, and the window for plaintiffs to do so will have closed by the time you read this. The prosecutor’s finding actually came sooner than that.
Wave3 News reported soon after the shooting, “‘He did approach the individual who was assaulting the lady and her child and did, at gunpoint, instruct him to leave them alone and sit down on the curb,’ said Clark County Prosecutor Jeremy Mull. Police said the man complied for a while, but then tried to attack the neighbor and ignored warnings to stop. When he came at the neighbor, police said he shot him. ‘Based upon what we learned last night, I’m of the belief that it was self-defense, that it was justified under the law and therefore there was no arrest made in the case,’ Mull said. ‘In a case where an individual was acting violently and had just violently assaulted a child and a defenseless lady. Due to his intervention, the assault was terminated, and this individual was ultimately killed in an act of self-defense.’”
The legal side of it was, for all practical purposes, over. It had clearly been a justified homicide. But there were still the emotional and psychological elements to deal with.
Personal Aftermath
It is common for defensive gun usages to happen at or near one’s home. Often, family members are present, and it’s a traumatic thing for them to experience. You’ll recall Adam’s wife, Shannon, was outside the house and in fact the first to call 911. She told American Handgunner, “When Adam stepped out with the firearm, I told 911, ‘My husband has a firearm, he has a permit, he’s trying to get the guy to sit down.’ I heard the dispatcher say ‘Weapon involved’ or ‘Weapon on scene.’ My husband walked over to the curb and had the husband sit down. I saw the woman and girl run into the house. A car blocked my view of Brandon, I couldn’t see if he was sitting or lying.
In 30 seconds, I saw the man jump up and come rapidly toward my husband and when they got about 10 feet apart, my husband started backing up. He was telling my husband, ‘You aren’t going to do anything with that, you fat ass.’ He began to lunge at Adam, and Adam fired. I thought it was three shots. He collapsed. I saw blood squirting everywhere.”
Altered perceptions are extremely common in these incidents. Far more often than not, auditory exclusion or auditory muting will occur. Adam Nesvick was no exception. He told AH, “I had auditory exclusion so bad I didn’t hear everything he said as he came at me while I was screaming ‘Don’t do it!’ When I fired, I remember hearing muffled gunshots. I heard little pops, but I was deaf as a post for three days later.”
Another extremely common phenomenon is tunnel vison. Adam told us, “When the woman and the little girl went into the house and he got up, I realized ‘Oh, my God, this is going to happen, I’m probably going to have to shoot,’ and I hyper-focused on him from then on.”
When multiple shots are fired, relatively few participants remember the round count correctly. This was true here as well. Adam and Shannon each thought Adam had fired three shots, while one eyewitness insisted five shots were fired. All were incorrect: Evidence incontrovertibly proved Adam had unleashed four rounds.
After you’ve been in an incident like this, people treat you differently. Dr. Walter Gorski, the great police psychologist who is credited with defining “post shooting trauma” as something separate and distinct from Post Traumatic Stress Disorder (PTSD) referred to it as Mark of Cain syndrome.
Sometimes, you are excoriated as a murderer. On the opposite end of the spectrum, you may be treated like a hero. The latter of course is better, but can still leave you wondering whether people still see you as the good neighbor, the good professional, the good worker at your job; instead, they see you as “He Who Killed,” and it changes the way they treat you, which in turn can change the way you feel about yourself.
Little kids had always seemed to play outdoors in their neighborhood; after the shooting, not so much. The mom and daughter whom Adam had rescued spent a couple of days in the hospital, refused to look at Adam or Shannon after coming home, and soon moved away. Other neighbors started moving away too.
That said, though, Adam reports, “No one really dumped on us. One of the little kids, who was a friend of the little girl who used the bat to try to get Brandon to stop beating her mom, saw us on the street and gave us a big thumbs up. Brandon’s best friend told me, ‘I’m sorry he died, but you did what you had to do.’ The apartment complex gave us a $50 gift certificate to go to dinner on them.”
Sleep disturbance is a virtually universal experience among those who’ve had to kill to survive. “I didn’t sleep for three days afterward,” Adam told us. “This eventually went away. I had flashbacks for a long time and still do occasionally, but not as bad or as vivid. Shannon had really bad flashbacks. We were comfortable talking about it, and that got us through a lot. Shannon got counseling. I got help from friends who had been through similar things, maybe more help than I would have gotten from a psychologist.”
In 2020, the Nesvicks moved to another state. “I thought getting away was the best thing, not being in the place every day where I had shot someone,” Adam explained.
The police gave him his gun back a month later. He was deeply touched to note the cops had not only wiped the blood spatter off the SIG but had cleaned and oiled it too.
His SIG went away. It carried too many unpleasant memories. Today Adam carries a CZ P10C.
Lessons
Excellent marksmanship, delivered at speed with the front sight visually indexed, put every shot where it needed to go and quickly ended the attack. The SIG M11-A1 had a full magazine of fifteen 9mm rounds. If Brandon had gotten it away from Adam, that was enough to kill the rescuer, his wife Shannon, and Brandon’s own significant other and her little girl, and any other witness who came into the line of fire. Adam Nesvick’s defensive gunfire very likely saved more lives than his own.
Adam had worked hard to develop shooting skill. He had learned from friends, read many books, and participated in gun-related internet forums. After the incident, he decided to seek formal training, and took a class from nationally recognized instructor John Murphy of Virginia. John told me Adam was very competent. Indeed, it was John Murphy who put me in touch with Adam and brought his story to these pages.
A lot of gun owners think home carry — wearing a handgun on their physical person when at home — is paranoid. If we think about it, the practice is a minor inconvenience for which in trade the homeowner gets instant access to a loaded gun when deadly danger suddenly presents itself. Had the SIG been on his hip instead of on his desk, Adam might have been able to back down Brandon before the latter put his bat to the throat of his victim. But there is no telling for certain.
You’ve all heard of “suicide by cop,” the self-destructive person who forces a lawman to kill him. This incident is a case of “suicide by armed citizen,” not the first such I’ve seen.
Adam Nesvick did the right thing. The criminal justice system immediately recognized that. Adam doesn’t consider himself a hero. He’s the only one who doesn’t.