Things That Just Piss Me Off

In Texas the law says you can protect your property and your neighbor’s property from criminals. Gun control people want us to believe this is a bad law and that we should not be allowed to defend our property and our family.

Media coverage by liberal newspapers like the NYTimes slant the story to suit their agenda. rather than reporting the news, they choose to write it in a way that is intended to make you feel sorry for the criminals who were breaking into the house.

Questions and Doubts in a Texas Shooting Case
By RALPH BLUMENTHAL

Even before the police called the night of Nov. 14, Stephanie Storey said, she knew that her fiancé of two days, Miguel Antonio DeJesus, was dead.

She knew it, Ms. Storey said, because she had not been able to reach him all day, and because she was watching the news at 9 o’clock when she saw his body.

It was lying on a front lawn decorated for Christmas in a middle-class subdivision in this Houston suburb ringed by refineries, not far from the body of his sometime construction partner and childhood friend from Cali, Colombia, Diego Ortiz.

Yes, just two poor childhood friends lying on a lawn.

Both men, illegal immigrants, one with a prison record, had been riddled with shotgun pellets fired by a retired computer manager, Joe Horn.

Disregarding the operator’s pleas to stay inside, (Horn) confronted the fleeing pair in his front yard and, saying “Move, you’re dead,” fired three blasts of 00 buckshot from his 12-gauge, striking them in their backs. Both ran short distances before collapsing and dying, leaving behind a tire iron used to break open a window, a lock-punch and a pillowcase holding jewelry and about $2,000 cash from the neighbors, a Vietnamese family that ran a local dry-cleaners.

Just two childhood friends hanging out.

“I knew it was getting hard for them,” said Ms. Storey, 39, a medical assistant from Katy, west of Houston. But she said she doubted that Mr. DeJesus, an avid salsa dancer who had courted her on and off for seven years and wore paint-splattered clothes to job hunts outside the Home Depot, had made a career of theft. But she said she knew he had another identity and false Puerto Rican papers; his real name was Hernando Riascos Torres.

Hard to doubt it when that tire iron, jewelry, and money were there. Let’s just ignore the whole illegal immigrant with a prison record and false papers thing. These were stand-up guys.

Either way, Ms. Storey said, they did not deserve to die. “We saw they were doing the crime; we can’t dispute that,” she said. “I’m not saying they were saints, but I’m sure they’d prefer to be behind bars than dead.”

This goes to having more concern what the criminals would prefer instead of the right to protect ourselves from criminals. This whole soft on the criminals thing carries over into the courtroom and the entire justice system.

There is a move against the death penalty even in extreme cases right now. Opponents of the death penalty claim it is not a deterrant against violent crime. It is a deterrant, but how do you measure how many people DID NOT murder anyone because they were afraid of the death penalty?

How many prosecutors have been able to use the death penalty to get someone to give them information by offering to not seek the death penalty in return for information they need to solve more serious cases and arrest more murderers?

This is directly related to the attacks on laws that are on the books that allow citizens to defend themselves, their families, and their property. The right to keep and bear arms is in the constitution and those who oppose that right are against the constitution, plain and simple.

I personally think Joe Horn could have used more restraint in this case. The police arrived just as he was firing his gun. In this case the criminals would have likely been caught without his action.

But to use this case to try and convince people that laws that allow us to protect ourselves should be appealed is ridiculous. If you are a criminal and in the process of committing a crime and you get shot, I find it very hard to feel sorry for you.