Same. Glad they didn't get charged and that they didn't hurt any innocents.Originally Posted by JCL
Same. Glad they didn't get charged and that they didn't hurt any innocents.
#RESIST
re: "Why this apartment"
Every apartment I've ever lived in had an at least once annual mandatory fire-extinguisher inspection. To say nothing of e.g. fix the AC. If you weren't home they let themselves in. If they let themselves in while you weren't home you can pretty much be guaranteed they were snooping through anything left out. So if this guy had his AR "in a bag upstairs" someone who had previously let themselves in to do legitimate work might have told one of their shitbird buddies "hey, here's a free gun". Or a free whatever this guy had we don't know about.
IDK that there needs to be anything more to the story. But it's entirely feasible he just had shit worth taking. I usually go to great lengths to make sure if someone I don't know doing work is in my residence so am I. FWIW in TX if you're renting (house, apartment, doesn't matter) the boilerplate lease everyone uses has a 1-2 month keybox clause where the last couple months of the lease the landlord can put a keybox on the property and any swinging dick can swing by at any time to take a look around. So it's not just apartments where randos have unwanted access. If you don't pay attention to that clause in the lease and don't have any of these Eye of Sauron surveillance systems it's entirely possible that someone can case the interior of your residence without you ever knowing. 100% legally.
Bit of a thread drift - I know, shocking - but all of this talk of shooting through doors reminded me of a scene from Burn Notice.
Lots of righteous armchair quarterbacking in here.
Literally every sign from this shows intent to harm by the perps. I won't second guess for a second the homeowners decision. He had no idea how many guys were outside and what they might be armed with.
To those that say "I'd let one in before shooting" I say bullshit.
Not to mention apartments often have high turnover. One can be mistakenly targeted based on the prior occupants.
That doesn't change the fact that he potentially could've shot the neighbor across the hall. We all know that your backstop matters
Given how fast this occurred, the general gun skills of most people, and the apt complex hallway setup (as is the case with all apt buildings) - I would argue his rounds have a high likelihood of missing the bad guy(s) and going through the neighbor's door/wall no matter if his door is open or not. I would be interested in the recommended tactics of how to actually shoot at these guys to mitigate that risk. I'm not a pro at fatal funnels with granny in her rocker across the way but the first thing that comes to mind is try to shoot at a downward angle so bullets impact concrete and not wall or door.
I would say step 1 is aim. Very few bad guys are going to stick around and return fire when their buddy is down in the doorway
In the video the rounds that went through the door ended up hitting the concrete wall on the other side of the hall.
A concrete wall is a pretty good backstop for anything short of a .50 BMG.
Without hearing a detailed articulation from the shooter it's impossible for me to know exactly what decisions he made.
But we have video proof that the rounds he fired ended up in probably the best backstop realistically available to him. In fact, I'm going to wager that the concrete wall across the hall was a much better backstop than the interior walls of the apartments which are much more likely to be made of just wood and drywall. I would have to see the plans for how the building was built, but it's entirely possible his shots through the door posed the least risk to any of his neighbors of any shots he could have fired.
Again, without hearing his articulation I can't say he intended any of that or that he took the construction of the facility into full account in his decision making.
If he didn't and just shot without any intelligence, he got lucky. Keep in mind we're discussing being "lucky" in the context of having been sufficiently unlucky to that point that he was facing an immediate lethal threat from two armed criminals. Certainly doesn't seem like his lucky day, you know? To quote the philosopher Ice Cube, if you had to use your AK it probably wasn't a good day.
It is also entirely possible he made an intelligent decision on the vector of his fire considering the potential risk to neighbors.
As I said earlier, I wouldn't ordinarily advise shooting through a door. But if we hit the pause button on a rapidly evolving situation where life is on the line and the dude can tell me that if he shoots through his door at this angle his backstop is a concrete wall, but if they get in the apartment his backstop is a couple of sheets of drywall and his neighbor's living room I'd happily tell him to shoot through the door.
Reasonableness involves all related factors. If someone can articulate that they chose to use lethal force when they did because they saw that engaging later would have posed a greater risk to innocent people it's hard to throw rocks at the decision.
It would be good for folks to look hard at this thread and see how a particular factor can dramatically complicate a self defense claim. This is a pro self defense website populated almost exclusively by people who not only own guns, but are 100% fine with the use of lethal force in self defense. And here we have a very clear example of a self defense situation with wildly differing opinions based on one key fact: Shots were fired through the door.
Not blindly, mind you...because the person legitimately in the apartment interacted with the criminals through the ring camera. He was able to see what was happening on the other side of the door. So he wasn't just shooting at some noise. He had unmistakable proof of a violent felony in progress.
And look how a little factor like that door is complicating the hell out of people's judgement about it.
And, ironically, the video makes it worse.
If it was just a news story about a person opening fire as two armed felons tried to bust through his door odds are there wouldn't be anywhere near as much scrutiny of what happened. But because there's a video that people can watch over and over again at their leisure it can get really complicated.
"You can't shoot through a door!"
The fact that it's a bad idea in many situations to fire through a door doesn't mean that it is unjustifiable in all situations. But people can fixate on details like that and allow it to define everything else that happened in the event.
And so even if a jury gets pulled from a population that is highly favorable to armed self defense, you can end up in real trouble over this kind of detail.
Last edited by TCinVA; 08-31-2023 at 07:44 AM.
3/15/2016
One never knows if the occupant of the apartment had thought this thru before any attempt to break in. something we all should do. I have thought about the "backstop"many times and from my recliner to my bedroom to where the BG would be and whats the backstop. Who's to say he didn't know the angle of where he stood to where the neighbors door was along with the brick hall way.
Plan before you need a plan.
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