Wednesday, November 30, 2011

Justified Domestic Shooting in Omaha


on what happened in this little house on the prairie.
Lorenzo Bush, 26, died of his gunshot wounds about 11:40 p.m. Sunday, shortly after he ran out of the home at 3508 N. 55th St.

His wife, Regina Bush, was questioned by police and released Monday morning.

According to 911 and investigators' reports, Lorenzo Bush attacked his wife and choked her, ripping her shirt and pulling out clumps of her hair. She managed to get a gun that he had and shot him, according to the reports.

Two children, ages 3 and 2, were at the home, according to the 911 dispatches. Christine Coker, mother of Regina Bush, confirmed Monday morning that her daughter had been questioned by police and released.
If half of what they say about Lorenzo it true, then it must have been a justified shooting.

What do you think? Please leave a comment.

19 comments:

  1. why didn't she pick up the phone and call the police instead? They would have responded in time and no one would have died right?

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  2. Jim,

    Naturally--isn't it better to die a non-violent death than to defend yourself? Isn't it better to submit to evil than to take action against it? That's what a gun-control advocate has to believe.

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  3. That address is a couple of miles from where I lived until I was about four. That area has some pretty sketchy neighborhoods and some beautiful old homes. Warren Buffett's house is about 3-3.5 miles south of the scene of the shooting.

    I do wonder who the gun belonged to. I'm thinking it's more likely that it was the wifebeaters than anyone else's. But it's a good thing in the gunzloonz' mindz (such as they are) that it was available for him to be capped with or else she might have had to stab him with a kitchen implement of some sort.

    Greg Camp:

    You're completely full of shit. You conflate my resistance to shitheadz wit teh gunz to me wanting to die to prove that I'm more noble than you are. You're a fucking moron. Not once, in any post or comment that I've ever written have I advocated for dying to appease any malefactor. What I do advocate for is sane, responsible precautions to avoid being the victim of crime.

    You said in an earlier post that you don't carry your gun to classes. So you what, leave it in the car? is it stowed so that if your car was stolen it couldn't be found and used by a criminal? And, if you do leave it in the car is that any more legal than carrying it on your person while your car is parked on school property.

    You claim that others are unsafe without gunz (not that you or your fellow gunzloonz give a fuck about anyone but yourselves) and then you admit to the world that you don't carry a gun while you're teaching class? I must be missing something in your logic--or there isn't any.

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  4. Democommie,

    It's laws that you support that keep me from carrying in the classroom. That's why I have to leave it locked in my vehicle. Under Arkansas law, it's legal for a concealed carry licensee to have a handgun on campus. I can walk about the lawn, park in the parking lot, but if I carry into a building, that breaks the law. How does that make any sense? But it's the law, so I obey it.

    As for the other part of your answer to me, my point was that keeping guns out of the hands of good people only gives power to bad people. We have a large country with porous borders and lots of guns. You can't keep them from thugs. Why do you want to keep them from the good guys?

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  5. GC wrote:
    "Naturally--isn't it better to die a non-violent death than to defend yourself? Isn't it better to submit to evil than to take action against it? That's what a gun-control advocate has to believe. "

    It's better for no one to die, not the false choices you present here.

    Yes, the police should have been called if possible,

    What the full story is, we will never know, because only one side of this story can be repeated, since one of the two people involved is dead.

    A typical response time is about 4 minutes for a 911 call. I don't think either of these two people would have killed each other in that interval before police could arrest this guy and haul him off to jail, and then the law could have prosecuted him.

    This doesn't appear to have been all that clear cut, if the police held the wife overnight until Monday morning, when the husband died of his wounds Sunday night. If this was such an obvious case of a justified shooting..... would they have held her in jail at all, much less overnight?

    And isn't this another case where guns in the home led to a homicide, justifiable or not? What risk was there in this shooting to the two kids?

    Sorry, but if she could get away long enough to grab a gun and shoot, couldn't she have gotten away long enough to call police? It takes a fraction of a second to push the buttons to dial 911. You don't even need to talk, they can trace the number and determine that help is needed if the phone is simply left off the hook.

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  6. "What risk was there in this shooting to the two kids?"

    Apparently none since neither kid was shot.

    "A typical response time is about 4 minutes for a 911 call."

    So she should have let him choke and beat her for about four more minutes?

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  7. Jim,

    Yes, you're supposed to feel sorry that the scumbag is no longer troubling the living. I mean, he just wanted to choke his wife. Does that earn him a death sentence?

    I can't keep writing like that. Really, I don't understand those who regret the death of this man. And Dog Gone, a person can be choked to death in three minutes. But you think that it's better to let the police handle things. Do you really believe that this thug would have allowed her to dial a telephone? A telephone can't make a goblin stop right now. I doubt that she'd have made it past 9 before he smacked the phone out of her hands. With a gun, all she needed was to point and shoot.

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  8. What risk was there to the two kids?

    Lets see - that they were present when she shot her husband, in the same room.

    If she was struggling with the gun, the direction of the bullet could have gone a lot of places other than into her husband.

    Then there is the issue of a possible ricochet.

    We don't know from this report how many shots she actually fired, or if all of them hit her husband. He does not appear to have died quickly, so it was not a completely clean shot apparently, since he was able to run out of the house.

    If she could get away from him to go find his gun, and take it out of whatever cupboard or drawer it was in, she could reasonably have grabbed a phone instead of the gun.

    Are we positing then that this guy didn't keep his weapon secure as well? That it was just laying around the house loaded with the two kids wandering around? Or are you going with the idea that it was kept somewhere safely?

    If this isn't another example of domestic violence by a gun owner towards a member of his family, I don't know what is. You shouldn't be too quick to praise this occurrence - it doesn't actually argue well for the gun owner in Omaha does it?

    You're a little too hasty in jumping up and down cheering for the domestic execution of one spouse by another. Due process in court would have sorted out who did what to whom, and punished proportionately.

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  9. "As for the other part of your answer to me, my point was that keeping guns out of the hands of good people only gives power to bad people.'

    Fear. It oozes out of your pores.

    It appears from this:

    http://www.omaha.com/article/20111128/NEWS97/711289899/1199

    that the decedent was a dick. It also appears that he owned the gun he was shot with.

    Apparently Mr. Bush was a former boxer who, even with hammerin' hands, needed a gun to be a man. Well, now he's a dead man. And you guys are thrilled but still think pieces of shit like him should be allowed to have gunz until something like a murder happens?

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  10. The woman was being attacked right then. Due process is a wonderful idea when there's time, but she was being threatened with death right then. Yes, in an ideal world, we would try all wrongdoing in a court, but in an ideal world, there'd be no wrongdoing in the first place. Now, I don't know if the gun was lying (not laying, Miss Star Student) about the house, but we don't generally regard wifebeating men as being all that responsible, now do we?

    What I do know is that if my life is in danger, calling emergency services is too slow. I'll call them after I've solved the immediate problem.

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  11. DG - there is no need to wonder what might have happened with the bullets because it already happened. The kids were not shot, so there is no risk to the kids. What probably would have been risky is waiting another 4 minutes or so to see what the dude would have done with the kids when he finished with the woman.

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  12. Jim and Greg, in response to your first two sarcastic comments, please refer to the title of the post.

    The problem for your side is that anecdotal examples which are really exceptions to the rule, don't convince anyone you're right.

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  13. Greg Camp insists that we know enough about this situation--a man in a house being shot with his own gun while two young children were present--to call it a good shooting. Otoh, when a guy shoots himself in the head, while using a pistol at a firing range, we must wait until ALL of the facts are known to determine if THAT death was a suicide.

    Of course we haven't even touched on the possibility of what would be going on if Mr. Bush had killed his wife after SHE attacked him while he was playing with the two children and that he had been dazed by a blow to the head while fighting her off--but, fortunately, being able to reach his handgun and shoot his assailant. I think Nebraska's castle law would have been his friend. His house, his gun, his right!!


    If only poor Mr. Bush had had a chance to reach his inanimate object prior to being EXECUTED by his MURDERER!!!

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  14. Democommie,

    I'm just going on the facts as presented. If later we learn more, then I'll reassess my interpretation. The supposed suicide at the range looked more like an accident than a deliberate act, while this case looks like a good act of self defense.

    Mikeb302000,

    Anecdotes like this one do actually convince or confirm many people who aren't on your side. I do know that anecdotes, by themselves, are worthless. But speaking conceptually, this story looks like a righteous shoot.

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  15. Jim said...

    DG - there is no need to wonder what might have happened with the bullets because it already happened. The kids were not shot, so there is no risk to the kids. What probably would have been risky is waiting another 4 minutes or so to see what the dude would have done with the kids when he finished with the woman.


    I wrote we don't know what the risk was to the two kids. We DON'T.

    We don't know how close the bullets that killed their father came to hitting one of them. If you stop cheering how awesomely wonderful this shooting was for a moment, and take a look at the photo of the house -- it's a small house. Any bullet which missed hitting the husband could easily in such close quarters go through a wall and hit a kid; or if the kids were in the same room as the struggle have hit a kid.

    Certainly being present in the house while their father fought with their mother, and while their mother shot and killed their father, is going to be traumatic for them for the rest of their lives. The parents were not the only victims of this domestic violence; the kids were indirect victims as well.

    We still don't know the role of the firearm in this incident. We don't know if the husband had used it to threaten the wife, we don't know how well or dangerously it was stored, so we have no information on how accessible it was to either parent, or to the kids it was, when there was no violence.

    We don't know if alcohol was involved - for either parent - that affected their judgment and normal inhibitions, or if other substance use may have been a problem in this home.

    ALL of those things affect whether or not this was a so-called 'justified' shooting. All of those factors are part of a determination if this is just another instance of domestic gun violence or a genuinely justified shooting.

    I'm leaving open, until more information is provided, the possibility that both parents may have been culpable in this violence. But this kind of shooting, in this kind of space, with two kids, and a physical struggle? That doesn't sound to me like something the gun nuts want to be praising.

    Rather it sounds like a good case for police intervention and for possible fitness assessment of the parents - well, in this case the remaining parent.

    Legal remedies are better than violent, individual,lethal remedies, wherever possible.

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  16. Re-reading this, if there was ever an example of someone who conducted themselves in a way that should have disqualified them from gun ownership, it was this guy.

    We should prevent assholes like this guy from ever owning or otherwise possessing firearms in the first place.

    So,what I'm waiting for is to hear the gun nutz here defending this guy's right to own and carry. Also no family court judge in their right mind should have let this man have any kind of temporary custody.

    Any asshole who threatens people, no matter who they are, with a firearm, should lose their right to have a firearm, and to have their child with them other than under unarmed supervised visits.

    Lets have it, gentlemen. Lets here your defense for this guy having multiple firearms.

    Lets here all about HIS second amendment rights. This should be fun.

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  17. Dog Gone,

    "Legal remedies are better than violent, individual, lethal remedies, whenever possible."

    Indeed. In this case, I can't see a legal remedy that would have left the woman alive.

    By the way, it may surprise you to learn that I agree in principle with your statement that the man deserved to have his rights taken away. If he threatened people, he should have been tried and convicted and denied firearms from there on. I've never suggested that thugs have a right to guns. I just don't agree with your method of disarming them.

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  18. So wait, the man had made previous threats and the police still did not respond and lock him up? So obviously the police response in this situation was a lot longer than ~4 minutes.

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