"I understand the man who shot him is real upset, and I think he should be... He shot an innocent man."

"He should have stayed in the house like a normal person would."

Wandering 72-year-old man with Alzheimer’s gets shot to death. At the top of the NYT article the scene is described almost poetically:

No one is sure how, in the frigid hours before dawn last Wednesday in this small north Georgia community near the Tennessee border, Mr. Westbrook ended up nearly three miles from home with a handful of other people’s mail, jiggling Joe Hendrix’s doorknob.

Mr. Hendrix, 34, stepped onto his porch with a Glock pistol in his hand and his fiancée inside on the phone with a 911 dispatcher. He fired four shots. One hit Mr. Westbrook in the chest.

On a cold and damp day Tuesday, Mrs. Westbrook buried her husband of 51 years...

Further down, there are more details about how it looked from Hendrix's point of view. It was "Just before 4 a.m." and:

At least twice, Mr. Westbrook climbed onto the small porch, tried to open the door and rang the doorbell....

“When you listen to the 911 calls, it’s evident to me that there was fear displayed at least by the female who lived there,” [the sheriff] said.

Note the plural: "calls."

As Mr. Westbrook came around a corner of the house, Mr. Hendrix took his gun and repeatedly called for him to identify himself, he told the police. Then he fired the shots. Mr. Hendrix told investigators that Mr. Westbrook continued to approach him, so he fired the shot into his chest.

So it wasn't just a man jiggling the doorknob at a strange hour and then waiting for an answer only to be met by a man who steps right out and fires 4 shots. There was activity around the house and beyond the porch area, in the middle of the night. The couple inside were scared and enough time passed to make more than one call to the police. Hendrix went outside to investigate, tried to interact with the intruder, and only shot when the man kept approaching.

“When we sat down and told him the age of the victim and the diagnosis, he broke down and became emotional,” Sheriff Wilson said.

Most of the article is about whether to prosecute Hendrix (and the usual material about Stand Your Ground law). Commenters over there are quick to blame guns, but I think homeowners have a right to defend themselves against someone trying to break into their house at night. Hendrix tried to talk to the man and couldn't see that he was old and didn't know that his mind had deteriorated.

Mrs. Westbrook says she's not sure whether Hendrix should be charged. The article begins with the line "Deanne Westbrook had tried everything to keep her husband, Ronald, in the house." No one wants to say anything unkind to a woman who lost her husband and who tried to treat him well, but if we're going to ask whether Hendrix was reasonable, shouldn't we also ask if Mrs. Westbrook was reasonable?

What more could she have done? Didn't she know that her husband went out and behaved in a way that would scare people at night and that he would not be able to explain himself when people asked him what he was doing or to stop when he was told he'd better stop? He needed supervision and constraint.

"He should have stayed in the house like a normal person would." That was the wife's quote. I see ambiguity in it now.

By the way, you don't need to look far in the NYT archive to find articles about people with Alzheimer's where the suggestion is that others ought to show them the exit from this life. They're all jiggling at the doorknob.

"Wow, is it cold out. The deer must think the same thing, as I haven't seen a thing."

Scott Walker goes deer hunting.

ADDED: Walker on Fox News, more or less running for President:



ALSO: From Walker's book "Unintimidated":

We soon began to get a steady stream of death threats. Most of these Dave and his team intercepted, and kept from Tonette and me. They were often graphic (one threatened to “gut her like a deer”) but for the most part they amounted to little more than angry venting.
But one afternoon, as I prepared to go out to the conference room for my daily press briefing, Dave came into my office and shut the door. “Sir, I don’t show you most of these, but I thought you ought to see this one.” He handed me a letter addressed to Tonette that had been picked up by a police officer at the Executive Residence in Maple Bluff. It read:

HI TONETTE, Has Wisconsin ever had a governor assassinated? Scotts heading that way. Or maybe one of your sons getting killed would hurt him more. I want him to feel the pain. I already follow them when they went to school in Wauwatosa, so it won’t be too hard to find them in Mad. Town. Big change from that house by [BLANK] Ave. to what you got now. Just let him know that it’s not right to [EXPLETIVE] over all those people. Or maybe I could find one of the Tarantinos [Tonette’s parents] back here. Lots of choices for me.

"Yemen wedding celebration to ‘Gangnam Style’ ends with three dead when dancer accidentally shoots AK-47."

"The horrifying mistake turned the dance floor into a bloodbath and sent guests running in horror."

Replete with viral video.

"A man in camouflage who alarmed Madison neighbors when he walked down a street with an uncased shotgun Saturday morning..."

"... turned out to be a hunter thwarted by city parking."

The Madison Police Department said in a statement that the man, a University of Wisconsin-Madison student, had been hunting outside the city and was unable to find parking close to his residence. He decided to walk home from his parked vehicle with an uncased shotgun, police said.

"Why do you think so many American Christians identify as political conservatives?"

The American Conservative asks the novelist Marilynne Robinson, who answers:

Well, what is a Christian, after all? Can we say that most of us are defined by the belief that Jesus Christ made the most gracious gift of his life and death for our redemption? Then what does he deserve from us? He said we are to love our enemies, to turn the other cheek. Granted, these are difficult teachings. But does our most gracious Lord deserve to have his name associated with concealed weapons and stand-your-ground laws, things that fly in the face of his teaching and example? Does he say anywhere that we exist primarily to drive an economy and flourish in it? He says precisely the opposite. Surely we all know this. I suspect that the association of Christianity with positions that would not survive a glance at the Gospels or the Epistles is opportunistic, and that if the actual Christians raised these questions those whose real commitments are to money and hostility and potential violence would drop the pretense and walk away.

Where are the calls for scissors, bottle, and bicycle-pump control?

"An emotionally disturbed man wielding scissors stabbed or slashed at least five people, including a father and his toddler, in a park along the Hudson River on Manhattan’s Upper West Side early Tuesday, according to the police."

Meanwhile, last Friday, in another Upper West Side park, "a man approached [a] woman as she was pushing her 8-month-old baby in a stroller. The attacker had a broken bottle and grabbed the woman but she fought back and hit him several times with a bicycle air pump, the police said. The mother and her child escaped unharmed. There has been no arrest in the case."

If you are a gun-control advocate, I know your response to my snark: No one died in either of these incidents. If the emotionally disturbed man had had a gun, the 5 victims might be dead, and if the mother with the stroller had had a gun the broken-bottle man might have died or if broken-bottle man had had a gun then she and the baby might have died.

Isn't this the city of your dreams — a kinder, gentler place where everyone is armed only with household objects, objects with manifold peaceful uses, and not those terrible guns, objects designed only to kill?

I do a Bloggingheads with Glenn Loury that's ostensibly about whether Obama has weakened and what the NYC police are doing after stop and frisk.

The folks at Bloggingheads put it this way:

On The Glenn Show, Glenn and Ann check in on Obama a year into his second term. Has his vacillation on Syria and the Fed hurt his credibility? Ann argues that the Larry Summers controversy exposed an anti-science crowd on the left—but maybe a small dose of delusion is healthy. Turning to the end of NYC's stop-and-frisk program, Ann worries that emotions adulterated the public debate. Are liberal gun-control measures breeding a nation of victims? Finally, Glenn criticizes the secrecy of the security state under Obama.

There's an awful lot going on in that diavlog, and I think we talk past each other more than usual. "Ann worries that emotions adulterated the public debate" is a terrible summary of what I say. 

Go to the link if you want to hear the whole thing. I'll excerpt a part that deals with something I care about: the unlikelihood that anyone is really making truth their highest value.



I'm highlighting what I had to say, so click to continue the video when you get to the end of this clip if you want to hear Loury's response. The lead-up to this clip is about the trouble Larry Summers got into at Harvard when he suggested that there might be a biological explanation for the scarcity of females in the highest levels of math and science.

"[K]ids who came to their maturity during the 'Age of Fail,' whose formative experience of American exceptionalism is that America is exceptionally crappy, are pissed..."

"... and are willing to work hard for politicians who are willing to do something about it." If we assume that — as The Nation's Rick Perlstein does in "Is Peter Beinart Right About a ‘New New Left’?" — then...

... another scenario looks like this: young citizens motivated by left-leaning passions run into a brick wall again and again and again trying to turn their convictions into power. The defining story of our next political era becomes not a New New Left but a corrosive disillusionment that drives the country into ever deeper sloughs of apathy.

What if, in other words, the harbinger election didn’t take place in New York...

Beinart had been talking about Bill de Blasio...

... but in Colorado—where a hyper-ideological, insurrectionist, corporate-money-soaked minority... recalled two progressive legislatures for daring to favor background checks for gun purchases even though Coloradans want background checks by a margin of 68 to 27 percent.

Beinart wants to think big. So let’s think big. Given a precedent like that, the result of our current trends might not be more socialism, but once more a stark showdown between socialism and barbarism. Apathy and social misery might make fertile ground for some charismatic demagogue, preaching scapegoating and a narrative of violent redemption…

You say you want a revolution... but what if the revolutionaries are on the other side?

"George Zimmerman in police custody after 'threatening his estranged wife and her father with a gun.'"

"Shellie Zimmerman called police in Lake Mary at 2pm on Monday, claiming he was brandishing the weapon at a home belonging to her parents, David and Machelle Dean."

She's just filed for divorce:

"I have supported him for so long and neglected myself for too long and I feel like I'm finally starting to feel empowered again."

She is now wanting custody of their dogs - a Rottweiller named Oso and a mixed breed named Leroy - and a share of the money he gets from a lawsuit against NBC....

It was also revealed this week that she is reaping more than $4,000-a-month from his defense fund despite splitting from him weeks after he was cleared.

And here she is last week on TV:


IN THE COMMENTS: Michael says:

There will be money and fame for her if she reveals her husband as a violent man with a hair trigger and a racist streak. Good for two or even three weeks on the talk circuit, modest book advance, a bit of coin in return for collaborating on the movie. Will be interesting to see if the money or the fame get spent first.

That would be: She's the new Levi Johnston. How's he doing now? UPDATE: "Police later said they did not find a gun on Zimmerman's person."

"At least we know the color of the gun."

Comment posted on this Madison, Wisconsin news report:

Two men entered a Vilas Avenue apartment Sunday night and robbed the three men inside, according to Madison police.

Police said the two robbers were in their teens to early 20s with medium builds and they entered the apartment in the 1200 block of Vilas Avenue at about 11 p.m. One of them carried a black semi-automatic handgun and they ordered the victims to the ground....

I suspect the news media are avoiding what I've termed "counter-Trayvonism," but why tell us the gun is black?

Civil War cannon mortar.

Closer look:


(Click to enlarge.)

Right in front of the Iowa State Capitol. Come on, Iowa!

Obama's Organizing for Action exploits the memory of Columbine.

In my email inbox:

Ann --

My son, Daniel, was a smart, quiet kid.

He'd just become a straight-A student, and he was overcoming his shyness as a new member of the debate team.

On April 20th, 1999, my beautiful and bright 15-year-old son was killed by two teenagers with guns in the library of Columbine High School -- one of 12 innocent kids who lost their lives for no reason at all.

It's been 14 years since that horrible day -- 14 years of fighting so no family has to grieve like ours did.

These tragedies keep happening, and so far, Congress has failed to take common-sense action to stop them -- even though nine in 10 Americans have agreed that expanding background checks would help close the loopholes that put guns in the hands of dangerous people and prevent future violence.

Today, OFA and allied organizations are standing up for a national Day of Action to ask members of Congress: What will it take to finally act to prevent gun violence?

I hope you'll join in -- say you'll do one thing this week to show Congress you want action to prevent gun violence.

The evening of the shooting at Columbine High was the most hopeless I've ever felt.

Since Daniel's death, I've found a way to honor him: by trying to prevent other families from feeling this pain. I've advocated locally and nationally for smarter gun laws -- even helping achieve a statewide ballot victory here in Colorado.

In December, when I heard about the shooting in Newtown, I sat in my office and broke down. I was watching another community torn apart by guns -- more parents grieving, more kids who would never see graduation, or a wedding, or a family of their own.

And in the wake of another tragedy, nine in 10 Americans agreed that it was time to act -- expand background checks to close the loopholes that put guns in the hands of dangerous people.

But Congress disappointed us, putting politics above the safety of our kids.

That's why this week, we're asking: How many parents will have to go through what I did before we say "enough"?

You should be a part of this, too. Tell Congress you're going to keep asking until they act:

http://my.barackobama.com/Do-One-Thing-for-Gun-Violence-Prevention

Thank you,

Tom

Tom Mauser
Littleton, Colorado

Using the Christopher Lane murder to argue for gun control.

Promoters of gun control seem willing to use any shooting as an argument for gun control, but the murder of the jogging Australian baseball player is especially inapt. Here's Steve Clemons polemicizing in The Atlantic:

I have been greatly affected by sad news from Oklahoma today, another case of a victim of gun violence that deserves as much attention and public concern as the more grisly mass slayings we have heard so much about and which still have not produced progress on gun control....

The young college baseball player... was allegedly shot and killed by three juveniles, one of whom confessed to the police saying,  "We were bored and didn't have anything to do, so we decided to kill somebody."

The accused teenagers were in a car. Lane was jogging by the side of the road. If it's really true that they were simply bored and wanted to amuse themselves by killing that particular man in that situation but they didn't have a gun, they could have run Lane down with the car. Wouldn't that have been easier than taking aim while driving? And if their mental state really was what the reported confession makes it sound like, wouldn't that have been more entertaining?

***

In last night's post about this murder, I said "Why is this murder story the lead story? I've got to assume it's counter-Trayvonistic." That is, unlike The Atlantic, some commentators are presenting this story as an example of black people targeting a white person, as if to rebalance things after media made the Trayvon Martin incident the symbol of a larger racial problem. I recommend noticing who's doing what in America's endless discourse about race, but what I want to add here is that Trayvon Martin — according to evidence presented at trial — beat George Zimmerman's head against the pavement. As Zimmerman's lawyer put it in the closing argument, Martin armed himself with the concrete curb. The pavement was appropriated as a deadly weapon, and Zimmerman used the gun in self-defense.

Promoters of gun control portray handguns as a special sort of object, because they are useful only for wounding or killing other living beings and they are designed and possessed for exactly that reason. Concrete curbs and automobiles are designed, purchased, and used for nonviolent purposes, though they can be repurposed to maim and kill. If you like gun control, this difference is important. If you don't, you'll probably say: Because there are so many ways to inflict violence — including innumerable household objects and the bare fists of whoever happens to be stronger — decent people have a right to bear arms in self-defense.

***

Only yesterday, in New York City, a cab driver, in a rage, turned a car into a deadly weapon.

“It was like a damn movie,’’ said the bike messenger, Kenneth Olivo.

He and rogue hack Mohammed Himon, 24, of The Bronx were heading north on Sixth Avenue when the cyclist cut off the cabby, law-enforcement sources said. Himon, in his yellow cab, chased Olivo to 49th Street, where the cyclist allegedly banged on the taxi. Himon “wanted to turn, but he didn’t want to wait . . . He wants to be Number 1,’’ Olivo said.

“I told him to calm down . . . He gets angry, he honks his horn, and he accelerates, and that’s it — I’m on the hood of the car, and the woman is under his car . . . He accelerated, because I couldn’t escape him.”

The woman, a British tourist named Sian Green had "her left leg... severed below the shin, and part of her right leg was left hanging by just the skin. "

Yeah, Mohammed Himon. Let's see if anyone jams this story into their larger "global jihad" template.

"Countercultural in these times means conservative."

"Fred is off the central planner’s grid; the antipode of the collective, an unroped stray escaped from the herd. Milverstedt is a freelance freedom fighter battling the steady encroachment of Bloomberg’s nanny state. From this remove, the man’s two major vices are power and speed. He expresses those vices through the language of two powerful machines: semi-automatic firearms and overpowered motorcycles. Who else would email JPEGs of his tight target grouping? Or extol the virtues of his AR-15?! That, my friends, is the difference between liberals and us conservatives. We brag on our vices; the progs apologize for theirs, then legislate reparations."

Excerpt from David Blaska's post about Fred Milverstedt, one of the co-founders of the Madison alternative newspapers, Isthmus, which I used to link to more than I do these days (now that Meade never comments there anymore). Milverstedt left Isthmus long ago, and one thing he's done since then is write a book: "One More Ride: Fred and the Craft of Motorcycle Meditations."

Sample book text:

If there ever was a time on the bike when I really thought I might need a gun, it was a day when Barbi and I were out on the Shadow on a high ridge in western Wisconsin overlooking a series of lesser hills rolling away to the south. We’d stopped, parked the bike on the shoulder and got off to admire the view.

We were on State 33, not an untraveled road but a good piece from the New York Thruway. On this stretch, there was no other traffic, no other people, no houses or barns except those dotting the valleys below.

Around the curve comes a pick-up truck, slowing as it moves into sight. It stops next to us, not on the shoulder but the middle of the road. There’s two young guys inside.

Seldom one to make snap judgments, give or take now and then, I make one here.

These guys are crackers....

"Last Thursday, a woman in Charlestown, Indiana and her boyfriend stayed up all night, armed with a rifle, to hunt down whatever it was that had been attacking small animals in her neighborhood."

"After spotting and shooting a creature prowling in the shadows by the woman's pool, they were shocked to find that they'd just killed a leopard, an animal that's not native to North America, much less Indiana."

The Chief of Police backs up the cop after he shoots a man to death, but not when he sends email with language that might be sexist/racist.

And now the people who loved the dead man and wanted the cop punished for the shooting are out to bring down the Chief of Police for caring more about offending people with speech than killing a man.

This is happening right here in Madison, where the local citizenry can be presumed to feel twinges about tinges of sexism and racism in anybody's speech, and you can imagine why the Chief of Police wanted to cut any attachment to the utterer of the purportedly toxic words. But by chance — or not by chance — the person to be detached was previously protected when the sensitive citizens cried out about the gun violence, the police brutality visited upon the young — now dead — man.

What specifics do you need to unravel this complicated problem in Madison politics? Why was the man shot? Details here, but the short answer is that — in the police version of the story — the man grabbed for the police officer's gun. What did the email say? From the first link, quoting Madison Police Chief Noble Wray's complaint to the Police and Fire Commission, the police officer (Steven Heimsness) sent a message to another officer that read: "Sometimes they forget they are not in Africa anymore. The social mores are not the same." (Heimsness said he was writing about someone who was from Africa.) And, referring to "a Latina woman on the force," he wrote — to male officers — "Ay caramba" and "Jesus Christo."

There were also some references to violence:

"I should have blasted that guy with the knife through my window the other day. At least I would have got the weekend off" (from September 8, 2012)...

The shooting that killed the man happened Nov. 9, 2012, take note.

... and "I'm ready to go on a shooting spree up in dispatch."

"The American Medical Association has officially recognized obesity as a disease..."

"... a move that could induce physicians to pay more attention to the condition and spur more insurers to pay for treatments."

The question whether something is a disease is really beside the point, unless you define "disease" to mean: that which is helpful to view as disease.

This reminds me of those plastic surgeons who say that small breasts are a "deformity."

ADDED: Instapundit notes a discussion about a call for more "public health" research on guns and quips "[M]y suggestion to the 'public health' community is to focus on actual diseases, rather than politically-disapproved behaviors." But all you have to do is crank the rhetoric forward one turn and guns are a disease.

AND: I googled "guns are a disease" and got over 29 million hits, including: "Doctors target gun violence as a social disease" and  "I am a physician and guns are a disease" and "Treat gun violence like disease, Medical College expert says."

"[I]n a hypothetical state with no guns and no religion, we’d expect a suicide rate of 17 (per 100,000)..."

"In a state where everyone had guns, and no one practiced religion, we’d expect a suicide rate of 39. If everyone were religious, but no guns: 11. Everyone religious, everyone owns a gun: 21. From a political perspective, there’s really something for both the left and right to like here."

207 years ago today, Andrew Jackson — the future President — committed "a brutal, cold-blooded killing."

I've read a few descriptions of this incident, and this one is especially interesting:

By May 1806, Charles Dickinson had published an attack on Jackson in the local newspaper, and it resulted in a written challenge from Jackson to a duel. Since Dickinson was considered an expert shot, Jackson determined it would be best to let Dickinson turn and fire first, hoping that his aim might be spoiled in his quickness; Jackson would wait and take careful aim at Dickinson. Dickinson did fire first, hitting Jackson in the chest. Under the rules of dueling, Dickinson had to remain still as Jackson took aim and shot and killed him. However, the bullet that struck Jackson was so close to his heart that it could never be safely removed. Jackson's behavior in the in the dual outraged men of honor in Tennessee, who called it a brutal, cold-blooded killing and saddled Jackson with a reputation as a fearful, violent, vengeful man. He became a social outcast.

More here:

Though acceptable by the code of the times, many people considered it a cold-blooded killing. I presume the rules of engagement were for each man to draw and fire at the same time, upon hearing the signal, but if one fired, there was no "second round" until the other man fired. The implication is that magnanimity would have required Jackson to fire into the air rather than taking a slow deliberate aim at 24 feet.

"We predicted a moment like this. If the information were attacked it would immediately spread."

"The unintended consequence is it’s become incredibly demanded information — it’s everywhere."

NYPD Commissioner Raymond Kelly said, “It’s something that obviously is a concern.”

To Wilson, they merely prove his point: The “great thinkers in nanny state-ism” will do anything to maintain power.

He also bristles when gun victims — like the families of the Sandy Hook school victims — lobby government.

“I’m unhappy they were able to leverage their victimhood for the reduction of liberties of their fellow citizens,” Wilson said.

“They’re playing small ball,” added Wilson. “We’re playing a much bigger game.”

He’s such a passionate believer in his plastic gun that he laughs at the notion of someone killing him with it.

“That would be so ironic,” he said. “Even in death, it would be hilarious.”

Laughing at death, laughing at the government, it's 3D-printed-gun designer Cody Wilson — who's also a law student (at the University of Texas).

Wilson has not merely designed a 3D-printable gun, he's 3D-printed himself as a character on the national scene. Nice creative work, Wilson!

Now, will he become a lawyer?

Another law student in the news is John Cochran, who just won $1 million on "Survivor." He too designed himself as a fabulous character:

The first time, I went into [the game] so anxious that people are going to perceive me as a nerd, a socially awkward freak. And I'm formally still the same socially awkward, freaky, nerd guy. But the difference is that instead of those eccentricities and quirks being a source of embarrassment or anxiety for me, I've just accepted it as a reality of my existence... And that's immensely liberating because I got to focus on the game this time instead of how I'm perceived, which ruined my game the first time. Being able to focus on the game I've loved for half my life was a dream come true.

Nice creative work, Cochran! Cochran was asked — by Jeff Probst — whether he was going to go on to be a lawyer, and he said he didn't think so. He said he'd like to be a writer. He said he wrote a paper on the "Survivor" jury system when he was at Harvard, so I expect some cool books analyzing "Survivor."