America the Absurd

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I checked a bit and there are some pretty strict laws against this. Unfortunately this seems to be an issue where the "letter of the law" and the "spirit of the law" seem to be pretty disjointed. The spirit of the law relates to "hacking" into an external mail system, like say, that of the Pentagon. It's just silly when a husband "stumbles upon" (i.e. no hacking occurs) his wife's email password, which may have well been saved in a browser cookie and OFFERED to him, get's charged for a FELONY offense. A family computer is typically a shared family resource, and it's almost inevitable that other family members will see your "stuff" unless you are uncommonly security conscious. It's preposterous to even joke that someone could end up a FELON because of such a situation.

I agree with your points here, but I find it interesting that these aren't the issues listed in the article. The issue was that the gun was unlicensed, which implies that the other stuff was not taken seriously.

 

I think that's my biggest question as well. If he's a security guard, and his position allows for him to carry a gun (it should be noted that not all security guards are equipped with guns - some just have things like batons or pepper spray) - then why the heck wasn't he licensed? It would seem to be me that the company that employed him could be in some trouble too if they allowed an unlicensed security guard to go around carrying a gun.

But there clearly is information that we are missing here, because it seems very strange that anyone who works in some capacity where you'd need to carry a firearm, would not be licensed to carry said firearm.

 

I suspect they charged him with what would stick. I doubt they could seriously charge him, in the given circumstances, with attempted murder or reckless endangerment. He could, apparently, be charged with a weapons violation.

At a guess, the position didn't require a firearm, though they may not have had any prohibition against one. The guy decided (whether it was with supervisors knowledge, or even their encouragement and suggestion, is a seperate issue) to bring his own, since security work is dangerous and all. Except that it wasn't licensed and he apparantly didn't know the first thing about firearm safety.

Mind you, that's just a guess.

 

That thought occured to me as well. However, any gun owner should know that you need a license to carry a gun around. AFAIK, the only time you do NOT need a license is when you only have the gun in your house (and in some states, that right is extended to one's car as well).

 

Wow, lots of misconceptions flying around here ...

Who said he was waving a gun around? The article said he fired one shot.

Was the guy carrying a weapon? Did he threaten the guard? Did he burgle the car after assaulting someone? Was he a known felon with a violent history?

What was the lighting like? Was there anyone else around at the time? Was the guy a very large person? Was the car broken into or was the lock jimmied?

Were there other possible accomplices in the area? Did the guard know if there were other possible accomplices in the area? Was the owner of the car in the area?

What was the weather like? Was visibility good or poor? Was the guy wearing heavy clothing? Did the guy immediately flee the scene or did he try to 'front off' the guard first? Did the guy and the guard struggle/grapple before the chase? Did the guard have any backup en route?

I could go on, but I strongly doubt that anyone here has the answers to these questions. All of them inform the situation beyond what we could possibly know from a secondhand account, and all could potentially contribute to explaining the guard's actions (assuming we even really knew what they were ... we're only told that he chased the guy and fired a shot that was not intended to hit him).

Many security guard companies (probably the majority, really) provide guard services that do not include armed guards. This is primarily because they don't want to carry the associated risk of liability that goes along with providing armed guards and does not really indicate the level of danger involved in the guard's job. Clearly the guard was not supposed to be armed, as he was not licensed. If his company provided armed guards and assigned him to an armed guard job that night, they would ensure first that he was licensed and did not have a criminal history. So it's very likely that the guard's job as described by his employer did not include being armed, and may even have expressly prohibited it. But the guard may have felt that his life was more important than observing the arbitrary rules of his employer.

Still, he should have at least been licensed of his own accord, and I believe that Texas is very lenient when it comes to issuing concealed weapons permits. He stuffed that part up, and it's his own fault.

Actually police officers are allowed to shoot at fleeing felons. They often don't, as many other factors contribute to their decision-making, but they can. Think of, for example, a kidnapper fleeing a police officer, who looks like he's probably going to get away. Things are never so black and white as to be able to apply an 'always do this, never do that' standard.

My own guess on this, and it's only a guess, is that the guard had the misfortune of a 'supercop' being the first responder on the call. Cops come in a variety of forms. Some are very hyper about enforcing the letter of the law at all times, othes not so much. The latter, imo, is preferable. The first responder cop has to discern fairly quickly who the good guys are and who the bad guys are, and judiciously go from there. Using this case as an example, oftentimes a cop with good discernment would soon see that the thief was the bad guy and that the gaurd was the good guy, and when it was discovered that the guard was armed unlawfully and fired a shot, but that no one was injured, a more informal yet still effective redress might be applied, such as they might lecture the guard and take his gun, and tell him to get a license before he carries one around again, but not take it any further than that. Supercop, on the other hand, feels it's his duty to apply the letter of the law in all cases, so he arrests the guard and kicks the whole matter up to the prosecutor's office, from which point there is no going back. In this case, the good guy gets screwed with.

Supercop is also the kind of guy who will arrest you if your neighbors make a 911 call because they hear you and your wife arguing at 2:00 a.m., because he feels that he's saving the world from the potential danger you're putting it in by being a man in a domestic disturbance call. And he may also charge you with trafficking in child pornography because he observed a picture of your 9 year old daughter in a swimsuit on your desk when he responded to the 911 call. That sort of thing.

In most states, simply pointing or leveling a firearm at someone is considered a violent felony. Hence the need for discernment once again. That standard is useful in charging people who deserve it (think gang members flashing pistols around), but is not appropriate for everybody (think a father who pointed a pistol at a gang member who was menacing his family).

That he fired a single shot into the air does not necessarily mean that he doesn't know the first thing about firearm safety. It only means that he used poor judgement in that instance. But again, we don't even know all the details. Was he possibly returning fire? Anybody who has never been in a situation like that can be pretty much guaranteed that they will do something essentially without their explicit knowledge. Cops who are involved in shootings rarely know how many rounds they've fired, for example. You don't really 'think' about anything in the sense we're all familiar with ("I wonder if now would be a good time to fire into the air? Hm, could be dangerous, Then again, this situation is already dangerous. Hm...!"); you react.

That the guard may not have had sufficient to training to react properly is another matter and a separate question.

 

Only if one or more of my children or wife was in the car, which often happens with car-jackings. This is little different case, so although it is legal to shoot someone who attempts to steal your car, at least it was (I'm not sure if they changed the law, or not), no probably not. But you can be sure a cop would.

As for shooting the gun into the air, it was 2:00 AM at night, in a parking lot, and he only fired one shot. So get some perspective.

If it is a "concealed weapon," I guess a handgun would probably require one. Note: that you don't need a license to carry a rifle or shotgun in Texas. But a handgun is probably treated a bit different. So I guess if the security guard had a rifle or shotgun he would be OK.

 

I had presumed a cop wouldn't. Shooting someone can result in death or maiming. It seems very excessive for a theft case.

 

This is true. All of the above change the way a reasonable person would act. None of them, however, justify firing a shot into the air. If the parking lot in question were in the middle of the wilderness, with no reasonable chance that anyone other than the guard and the suspect were within range, that might justify it, though I'd still be a little nervous about it.

I think it depends on whether or not someone's life is on the line (though lawyers in the know can correct me). In the case of a kidnapper, the suspect may have an innocent victim at his disposal, thus someone's life may well be on the line here. In the case of a car thief (assuming no kiddies are stuck in the car), this is not the case.

The first rule of firearm safety: NEVER point the gun at anything you aren't willing to shoot. I don't care if you know it's unloaded. I don't care if you know that you know that the safety's on. I don't care if you know that you know that you know that the firing pin is in your other hand and there's a cleaning rod shoved down the barrel. NEVER point a gun at anything you aren't willing to shoot. The reason? Unloaded guns can still have loose powder in the barrel. Safeties can fail. Cleaning rags can be sufficiently explosive to propell the rod with lethal force. And most importantly of all: you could be wrong.

The second rule of firearm safety: NEVER fire a gun in any way in which you don't have control over where the bullet ends up. That means no firing into the air, no firing at rocks, and no firing at water, especially at shallow angles. If you do any of these things, the bullet may very easily end up somewhere you never expected it, including in your friend, neighbor, camping buddy, or even yourself.

This guy broke both those rules (I'm hoping he wasn't willing to shoot an unarmed, fleeing suspect in the back), so I conclude that he knows neither the first thing nor the second thing about firearms safety.

I don't know about most people who own guns, but those two things were drilled into me to the point that I wouldn't even consider doing those things. In fact, the whole point of drilling those rules into me so much was to make sure that I wouldn't do them in a panic.

And, for the record, it is my firm opinion that the problem with America is not all the guns. It's all the people who don't know anything (or at least not enough) about guns.

 

It's one of the hazards of becoming a crook, I guess. But Gaear has it exactly right in his post; it is a judgment call. If a cop draws his/her weapon and tells to you "stop," I would suggest you comply.

 

All things considered, if he was in a parking lot (concrete underfoot), and assuming a shot had to be fired, the air was probably the safest choice. Down would be bad because who knows where the bullet would ricochet to, and horizontal is never a good idea in any direction. What's in question here really is of course whether or not a shot had to be fired, the answer to which is easy to conclude "no" without knowing all the details ... which is the point I'm making - we don't know all the details. If my life was in imminent peril, I would personally be willing to risk the dangers of a shot into the air to protect it. What goes up must come down, yes, but a bullet fired more or less straight up will essentially fall back to the ground like anything else once it's used up its energy going up. It doesn't return to earth with the same force or ballistics with which it left the muzzle of the firearm. I guess I wouldn't want to get hit by a half-inch diameter rock falling from the sky, but I doubt that it would kill me.

I'm not advocating for the guard shooting the guy (and of course he didn't), but once again we don't know the complete nature of the crime. If someone, for example, said "I'm going to run you over!" while stealing a car, I think it would be justified to shoot at it, even if he was initially going the other way to turn around first. I certainly wouldn't miss that opportunity myself, if there was no other way out.

That's all true, and those are all of course sound principals for basic firearms training in order to avoid needless accidents during target practice and shooting drills et al, but out in the world where the real bad stuff happens they become a secondary prority. A firearm is always pointed at something. If a police officer or anyone else is running with a firearm in his or her hand, it is going to be pointing at a variety of things at different times as long as the running goes on. The key is to have the training and the wherewithal to minimize the risks, but they can never be entirely eliminated during the course of discharging (no pun intended) one's duties, if you have that sort of job. Again, if a gun has to be pointed somewhere - and it does - up is a pretty good choice.

Again, as applied to non-emergency situations, that's all well and good and true. Unfortunately it can't be fully carried through in a justified gun battle. The risks can only be minimized. If we held cops to that standard, they would never be allowed to get into gun fights because they don't hit their targets 100% of the time, and the bullets that miss end up ... wherever ... down range, where who knows whom or what is waiting to be hit.

Sometimes risks have to be taken. Any of us would take them if our lives or those of our loved ones were at stake. We wouldn't refrain from shooting somebody who had a gun to our child's head just because we weren't sure that the neighbor next door wasn't sitting on his toilet directly behind the wall where the offender was standing at that very moment.

Or maybe he's the safest gun owner in the world and he simply had to take a risk as described above to protect his life.

If I had been there to observe everything go down and I saw that he was, as Deise described, waving a gun around recklessly while chasing a guy who was beggng to be left alone and then starting cracking off rounds willy-nilly, I would be the first to condemn the guy. But I don't know that that's what happened, and neither does anybody else, as far as I can tell.

Ah, but I'm quite sure you would take the necessary risks if your life was on the line, NOG. Any sensible person with a survival instinct would.

Likewise, you and me and I hope every other sensible person here wouldn't do those things while camping or boating or hunting or at the gun range, etc.

 

This all indicates to me that, beside the fact that threatening was the only purpose of the shot, maybe he shouldn't have fired his weapon.

If he were actually trying to use the car as a lethal weapon, then I agree. But then we're at the point where shooting the suspect is justifiable.

Down is better, and police and military training reflects this. When trained police run with guns drawn, they hold them down, and usually to the side or in front of them. Same thing with the military. If you ever watch any of those TV shows that shows soldiers training to raid a building, when one soldier passes in front of another soldier, the other soldier lowers his weapon to the ground, he doesn't raise it into the air. And that is the point of those rules: they're observed everywhere, because accidents can happen anywhere. So, soldiers and police point their guns, when they have to, at things they're willing to shoot. Things like cement, asphalt, dirt, etc. And, for the record, a lot of rounds will penetrate all of those, not ricochet off. Especially if it's just left the gun.

Down range isn't wherever, and that's your mistake. The cop still controls where the bullet goes. They may miss, but it's not flying randomly in any direction. And yes, 'downrange' isn't always better than 'uprange', but at least it's a single, controlled direction.

But this risk didn't have to be taken, and that's why I object so much. If the suspect were genuinely threatening the guard's life, the guard should have shot him. Since the guard didn't, I assume the suspect didn't. Thus, there was no justification for shooting at all. Just because you have a gun, doesn't mean you have to use it.

Yes, but I would do so by conscious choice; not frantic, desperate, thoughtless reaction. If my life were on the line, I'd be quite willing to shoot the person threatening my life. And in doing so, I woulnd't break either of those safety rules. I wouldn't be firing randomly into the air and I wouldn't be pointing my gun at something I wasn't willing to shoot. You seem to think these rules only apply to the training grounds. They don't. They're taught on the training grounds so they can be used in real life.

 

Hmmm. Interesting topic. If the security guard was carrying an unauthorized weapon, and he discharged it in a situation wherein his life was pretty clearly not in danger (ie: the suspect was running AWAY from him!) then that's a problem in many ways -- shouldn't have the gun to begin with, by logical extension shouldn't be firing it with such poor judgement.

However, I want to weigh in and say that a lot of these piece o' crap thieves possess a namby-pamby "oh, if I get caught I'll only get a minor slap on the wrist" mindset and they rely on the lax laws and act like they have a right to do whatever they want to the property of others. I don't buy into the whole "oh, they're poor, cut them some slack" nonsense -- being poor is not an excuse for such crimes. Coming from that mindset, I really don't have a problem with car thieves being killed in the middle of committing their felonies. I know that sounds harsh, but trying to equate them with innocent people just minding their own business and then getting shot is a wholly illogical comparison. Criminals don't give a damn about the rights or liberties of others, so why should I care about theirs when they are right in the middle of urinating on the rights of others?

 

Car thieves being killed? Unless there's an accident (you punch a guy in the head, he falls back and breaks his skull) or they are using weapons, I'd say that goes way over the top. You know, the whole "Thou shalt not kill" thing seems to have a lot of influence with some people, for whatever reason... and I'm pretty sure there's not a sidenote with "unless they are no-good stealing *****s" to clarify it. There can be acceptable exceptions, but to put thievery in there would mean that a used car is worth more than someone's life, and I personally find this unacceptable.

Anyway, back to the OP case - personally, I consider firing a weapon to scare off a would-be robber an acceptable use of firearms, and no more illegal than most others. For a security guard not authorized to use firearms on the job, it might constitute a breach of work protocol and get him in trouble with his employer, but I'm surprised that he'd be arrested for it. Would he need a license to carry a weapon in Texas, or only if it's concealed? Here I think you need to apply for a permit to have a weapon, but I think it wasn't a big deal to get one... before you needed to have been a licensed hunter, current or former worker in the police/military, or work at a job with a high risk factor, but I think they removed it. You do need to have a clean file with the police, a medical certificate showing that you have no psychological issues, and to have completed a gun safety and use course, though. Personally, I'm fine with the all those.

Hmm, actually, one more question - can someone have sued this guard for disrupting the peace (or whatever the local legal term is) by shooting in the air at night?

 

Allow me to elaborate briefly: I don't think that police or the like should shoot on sight, or that this guard should have discharged his weapon in this particular instance. But if a thief does happen to get killed while in the commission of a theft, then I don't lose too much sleep over it -- I'll save my sympathy for the innocents shot down in the crossfire between rival gangs.

I know many people say I should be more tolerant, but I don't see the need to be tolerant of criminal behaviour. In today's society with tons of charities and programs to help people stay or get back on their feet, there is no valid reason for people to steal.

 

There's usually no valid reason for people to speed, either. Do you think it's just fine if someone going 5 mph over the limit dies by police action?

If the thief does something stupid and gets himself killed, I have little sympathy, but that's less to do with the crime and more to do with the stupidity.

If the thief turns violent, and gets himself killed because people are legitimately resisting his violence (police or otherwise), I have no sympathy at all, but again, that's due to the turn to violence, not the thieving.