Here's another tragedy:
Less than five minutes before a Slinger homeowner shot and killed a man hiding in his back porch, he had been on the phone with nearby police about how they handled his earlier complaint about an underage drinking party next door, according to a prosecutor's decision that the shooting was justified under Wisconsin's new castle doctrine law.
Maybe five years ago we lived in a granny unit behind a larger house.
The guy up front was out of town for the weekend and had left his teenage daughter in charge of the place- unsurprisingly, she threw a gargantuan kegger. By the time one of the other neighbors got fed up and called the cops there were at least 100 of her contemporaries packed into their back yard getting completely shitfaced. The racket was amazing.
Inevitably, the cops showed up after sundown and the kids stampeded. Given the layout of the neighborhood they had nowhere run to - it was a double block, on the other side of our back fence was another yard. It was dark, they were drunk and the fences were high so most of the panicked teens ended up in our yard.
A clique of drunk girls came into our living room, demanding we let them go out our back door- we had no back door. I was getting out of the shower and heard the wife yelling at someone to get the hell out of our house- I slapped on a towel and leapt into the living room, ready for anything. They were too drunk to be frightened, but I bodied them back out into the yard anyway- being gigantic occasionally comes in handy.
A while later after things had calmed down, the wife said "I hear something outside- I think someone's hiding in the bushes." I was skeptical, but got the flashlight and scanned the yard- sure enough, I spotlighted a skinny dude crouching in the ivy by our old potting shed.
"Hey, the cops are gone, you need to get out of here, dude."
He scampered off.
So.
Let's re-cast this scenario.
Instead of a laid back, Bohemian married couple in their late 30's, let's go with a an older couple, or maybe an older single guy, who gets all his news from Fox, one that took care to stockpile ammo & pick up a few extra firearms back in 2008 because they KNEW that Socialist Kenyan Obama was going to be coming for the weapons of all right-thinking patriots.
How's a paranoid, gun-happy oldster, hopped up on propaganda, fearful of "the kids today" and empowered by a law that basically says "hey, it's totally cool to blow away anyone who comes on your property!" likely to react to those girls in the living room, or the "prowler" in the bushes? Or, for that matter, the sudden migration of 50-60 drunk teenagers through the darkness outside the house?
Yeah.
So, these laws are bullshit.
Hopefully it won't take too many more of these horrible, totally avoidable tragedies for freaked out white people to put down the paranoia crack pipe and leave armed response to the professionals.
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