If you shoot someone, you will pay.
You will pay emotionally.
Even if the shooting is completely totally justified, you will second-guess yourself and doubt yourself and feel sick about it. You will lose sleep. You will probably even lose friends.
At least you will be alive to feel all of those negative emotions, however.
Chances are good you will be sued by the family of the person you shot.
Even if they don't sue you, there are all sorts of ways for them to make your life unpleasant, some of them legal, some of them not legal.
Even the most awful, slimy, dirtbag is somebody's son, somebody's brother, somebody's father, somebody's uncle.
Jeffrey Dahmer's parents were both very upset the day their cannibal serial killer son was beaten to death in prison with a toilet plunger handle.
If you can avoid shooting somebody, it's best to avoid it.
However, there are situations where the bad guy won't allow you to avoid it.
Here's the link to the story I talked about earlier in this thread.
Lots of verbal warnings, but the homeowner still had to shoot. Ugly, ugly, ugly.
http://www.swtimes.com/articles/2006/06/12/week_in_review/news/monday/news06.txt
Magazine Shooting Investigated
By Dug Begley
TIMES RECORD •
[email protected]
After what the local sheriff called “an extremely tragic and unfortunate incident,” a 22-year-old Magazine man died during a confrontation with a Logan County homeowner.
Sheriff Mark Lambird said the incident is still under investigation, as authorities wait on a toxicology report on Casey Steele Weber following the shooting early Saturday morning.
“We’ll have more after we get the reports and finish our investigation,” Lambird said Sunday evening.
Right now, Lambird said what police do know is that Weber approached a home in the 200 block of Diamond Lane, about three miles northeast of Magazine, and started demanding to see a man he identified by first name.
“Nobody by that name lives there or around there,” Lambird said.
Through a door of the residence, the homeowner, who police have not identified, told Weber no one by that name lived there, but Weber would not go away, police said.
“He went to the side of the house and started beating on a window to the man’s daughter’s room,” Lambird said.
The man’s daughter and her cousin, both girls between the ages of 9 and 12, were awakened, so the homeowner went outside the home and tried to tell Weber to leave.
“He told him no one lived there by that name and to go away, and he had a gun,” Lambird said.
The homeowner’s wife hid the girls in a bathroom and was preparing to call 911 when Weber broke a window of the house with a bat he found outside and tried to enter, Lambird said.
“The homeowner was scared and fired a single shot with a shotgun,” Lambird said. “He thought he missed him.”
He didn’t, and Weber fell back outside the home. When police and EMS arrived, Weber was already dead from a shotgun wound to the left chest.
Logan County Prosecuting Attorney Tom Tatum II and a deputy prosecutor were also called to the scene, Lambird said.
Tentatively, Lambird said the incident looks like a justified shooting.
“But we’ll make a determination and turn it over to the prosecutor,” he said. “But it was a tragic occurrence.”
Lambird said the homeowner is “having some problems dealing with it.”
“They were scared out of their wits,” he said of the homeowner and his family.
Officials are still piecing together why Weber came to the home, Lambird added.
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