What represents a perceived “threat?”
“A piece of advice always contains an implicit threat, just as a threat always contains an implicit piece of advice.”
Jose Bergamin
On Tuesday of last week, LAPD officers were involved in a high-speed vehicular chase of at least two suspects who had been involved in a hit-and-run accident.
The chase ended in a high-rent residential section of Los Angeles when the suspect vehicle stopped as suspects exited and fled the scene on foot.
Multiple LAPD units responded.
One suspect was ultimately captured by police. The other(s) remain at large.
However, the plot thickened when, in the middle of all this, a female resident of a home in the affected area came out of her house with a pistol in her hand and was immediately confronted by uniformed LAPD officers. She was not involved in the original incident, nor the ongoing chase/search.
Of course, responding officers had no idea whom she was, nor what she was doing there.
It should come as no surprise that officers immediately commanded her to drop her gun, repeated multiple times.
Police reports indicate that she did not drop her gun but instead turned toward them and pointed her pistol in their direction.
Police officers quickly responded with gunfire to what they perceived as a deadly threat.
As a result, the woman received a non-life threatening injury(s), at least one bullet-wound to her shoulder. She is recovering at a local hospital.
No officers were injured, nor were any of the original suspects.
The incident subsequently gained above-average profile when it was revealed that the injured woman is a popular author, and her husband (who had no involvement in the incident) is lead-singer in a rock band!
Investigation is on-going, of course, but here are some important lessons from which we can all benefit:
1) Many home-owners, who are also gun-owners, and who own gun(s) ostensibly for protection of their home and person fail to understand the perceived threat they represent when they’re outside their home while holding a gun in their hand.
Police officers (or anyone for that matter), who don’t know and instantly recognize you, probably have no idea whom you are, nor what your intentions are. All they know is that you can start shooting at them in less than a second, not nearly enough time for them to react and protect themselves in any meaningful way.
And, it really doesn’t matter in what direction the weapon is originally pointed. Any person holding a pistol (pointed in any direction) can easily produce deadly gunfire, in your direction, in well under a second!
2) In reality, real-estate boundaries don’t mean much during critical incidents.
Prosecutors will predictably take a dim view of a visibly armed homeowner (particularly one with a gun in his hand) who exits the relative safety of his home in order to “confront” suspicious people, even someone within the building’s “curtilage”
3) My advice is to refrain from stepping-into potentially injurious incidents in which you were not otherwise involved, particularly when you go armed.
“Voluntarily injecting oneself into a developing crisis” is not associated with continued good health, as we see!
/John
