Markus Kaarma Convicted of Deliberate Homicide - Minimum 10 Years

Markus Kaarma

NPR

More than 30 states have laws that allow people to use deadly force if they have a reasonable fear for their life or property. But this week, a Montana jury said that type of law has its limits, finding a homeowner who shot a teenager in his garage guilty of deliberate homicide.

In the early hours of April 27, a motion detector alerted homeowner Markus Kaarma someone was in the garage of his home in Missoula, Mont. He went outside and almost immediately fired four shotgun blasts, killing 17-year-old Diren Dede, a German exchange student.

Prosecutors contended 30-year-old Kaarma was the aggressor and had purposefully lured an intruder into his garage to hurt him.

During the two-week trial, witness Tanya Colby testified to what Kaarma had told her just days before the shooting.

"He said 'I'm tired. I've been up for the last three nights with a shotgun wanting to kill some kids,' " Colby said.

Kaarma, his girlfriend and their infant son had been the victim of a burglary in their garage just days before the shooting. But Deputy Missoula County Attorney Karla Painter said Kaarma left his garage door open that night to exact vigilante justice.

"He had one thing on his mind, and that was revenge," Painter said.

Woman Stands Her Ground Against Kids with Squirt Guns.

"What are you doing with a real gun! Why are you pointing it at my kids? They are only kids!"

“I didn’t know what to think,” said one neighbor. “It was like a joke to her (George). She laughed about it. I just hope the kids don’t have nightmares from it.”


If the video link doesn't work, it can be seen here.

Billie Jo George, 24, was subsequently arrested and charged with four counts of recklessly endangering another person, discharge of firearms, propulsion of missiles onto roadways and disorderly conduct. She was committed to the Berks County Jail on $75,000 bail.

Here is our responsible gun owner from her facebook page

It get's even better as to her status as "a responsible gun owner".

It seems this is not an isolated incident since a similar shooting happened in NC a few months back.

What was the NRA's position on carrying guns in public in the "good old days"?

Oh yeah.

Funny, but responsible gun owners weren't inconvenienced in the old days.  It also seems to me that they are far more inconvenienced by irresponsible people toting guns.

Lawful Las Vegas Gun Owner Shoots a Man Who Mistakenly Knocked on his Door - No Charges

Local news reports (via Southern Beale)

A man who accidentally banged on the door of a stranger’s house early this morning was shot by the homeowner, Metro Police said.

The victim had been at a birthday party at a nearby house in the 9200 block of Wittig Avenue, near Fort Apache and Elkhorn roads, Metro Lt. Ted Glaude said. He and a friend left briefly, and when they tried returning about 2 a.m., they confused the two houses and knocked on the wrong door, police said.

Officer Laura Meltzer said the homeowner called police, believing the men to be burglars, and fired a single round.

The bullet hit one of the men in the chest.

Paramedics took the injured man to University Medical Center, where he was being treated for injuries not considered life threatening, officials said. An earlier erroneous report said the man had died.

No arrests had been made as of 11 a.m.

Another Stand Your Ground Murder - Sparks Nevada

USA Today

The arrest this week of a 73-year-old Nevada man in the shooting death of a trespasser has elicited debate on the state's "stand your ground" law.

Wayne Burgarello was charged with murder and attempted murder in the February shooting of two people in a Sparks duplex.

According to a police affidavit filed this week, on Feb. 13, Burgarello entered a vacant duplex he owned where two people were staying without his consent.

Burgarello entered with two guns and fired several rounds, followed by a pause and a final shot, killing Cody Devine, 34, and seriously injuring Janai Wilson, 29, the affidavit said.

Burgarello said the shooting was self-defense. He told police he shot after Devine, who was lying on the floor, appeared to move his arm parallel to the ground as if he had a gun.

According to the affidavit, Burgarello told police: "I don't know which arm it was. I think it might have been the left arm. That makes sense because there's another person next to him. The arm came up ... right at the center of me. I think I said, 'Who are you? What are you doing here? Something like that. I don't know if I said anything or not. The arm came up like a gun, and I reacted."

The gun-rights fanatics love to say, "Aha, he didn't get away with it."  They say this in response to the made-up gun-control position that every single person who cries "stand your ground" gets away with it.  Of course we don't say that.  Some get away with it, some don't.

The main point is that the stand-you-ground mentality is encouraging more people to shoot first and ask questions later. The fact that some of them don't get away with it means little to the people who are killed and injured unnecessarily.

Massad Ayoob on the Castle Doctrine and Stand Your Ground Laws

Notice how he conspicuously avoided any discussion of how we determine if the threat was what it was supposed to be when the criminal gets away or ends up dead. For Ayoob, and most of the gun-rights nuts, every gun owner is to be believed. I guess this is their extreme version of innocent until proven guilty. It's convenient for adding up the numbers and protecting each other, even when they do wrong.

Underlying this gun-rights extremism is the faulty premise that the gun owner's life is worth more than the other guy's.  Can you shoot someone for looking at you sideways?  Yes, absolutely, as long as afterwards you exaggerate just a tiny bit the look.  This, of course, goes hand in hand with the famous advice about center of mass.  Dead guys cannot tell us their side of things.

If you think that doesn't happen and if you think the increase in justifiable shootings has nothing to do with gun-rights fanatics like Ayoob preaching his bullshit, you'd be wrong, dead wrong.

Testing the Limits of "Stand Your Ground"--can you really get away with murder?

Calling these laws "get away with murder" may not be as inaccurate as the "pro-gun" side might like to admit with lots of murderers and would be murderers finding that if they say they were scared or protecting their home that they might actually be able to pull a George Zimmerman.  Although, it didn't work as well as Michael Dunn had hoped it would in his case: even though he may actually get away with murdering the one person he intended to kill.

It was those stray shots that got him found guilty (attempted murder).

Wonkette addresses this truly US legal phenomenon in the post: OUR COLD DEAD HANDS--These People Trapping And Shooting These Teenagers Are Not Very Nice, No, Not At All

Thankfully, with a lot of states broadening the scope of what counts as “self defense,” several brave Responsible Gun Owners have taken to killing folks for the sake of finding out what kinds of homicide are justified. No applause necessary; these everyday Second Amendment Heroes just see it as their civic duty.

Some people see these wonderful new laws that prove that life is worth less than property and that the concept of "right to life" by not having life arbitrarily taken is something that means they can see if they can indeed "get away with murder".

Wonkette's conclusion:

And so our glorious experiment in ground-standing continues; future cases will no doubt help us gain a better understanding of just when it becomes OK to purposefully set a trap for a human being you want to kill. We bet there will be lots of volunteers from the Responsible Gun Owning community to serve as the armed portion of those experiments, and tough shit for those who get killed, because they never should have been there in the first place.

These laws prove that the US is in no way a "Christian Nation" which believes in the sanctity of life.

Texas Dad Fatally Shoots Boy Found in Daughter's Bedroom

USA Today

"He should have let the authorities handle it."

Too many gun owners don't believe in that. And after they shoot someone, they know the right things to say.  "He was reaching for something."  And, "I was afraid for my life."