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The title of the story linked above is pretty self-explanatory. A girl sneaks a boy into her house, apparently the boy hides in a closet. Dad thinks someone broke in, ends up shooting the boy.
Its one thing to kill someone you are 100% sure you want to kill. Its another, VERY different story, to look down on a person you just killed and realize you made the worst mistake of your life.
I’ve said it a hundred times but I haven’t said it enough: Keeping a loaded firearm for defense without proper firearms training is like getting on a car for the first time, turning it on and getting on the highway. It’s a disaster waiting to happen.
Any clown pulling the trigger is a shooter. Now, someone that has received advanced training and keeps it up to sustain the level of proficiency, that’s who your’re supposed to be. Someone that actually trains to fight with his gun. Not in the sense of the old west gunslinger and professional duelist, but a modern day gunfighter that has trained for the martial use of his weapons.
My old instructor used to say, “we don’t train shooting machines here, we train hitting machines.” Anyone pulls the trigger and shoots, not everyone hits what they are shooting at in a violent dynamic encounter. There’s a big difference. My first firearms instructor when I was 14 or 15 years old insisted on target recognition. “ID the target before you put a round in it”. Till this day, I believe that’s the most important lesson I’ve ever learned regarding firearms. The truth is that for most normal people, far more often than not whatever went “bump in the night” will be something you do not need to kill. Yes it can be a home invader, but far more likely it’s the dog, the cat, one of the kids that went down stairs to get something to drink in the middle of the night. It’s the friend that stayed over for the night. It’s the wife that is a day early back from that trip or the son that “broke in” through a window in the middle of the night because he forgot his keys and didn’t want to wake everyone up.
Lesson of the day folks: ID your target before shooting. Once the round leaves the barrel you can’t take it back.
FerFAL
Fernando “FerFAL” Aguirre is the author of “The Modern Survival Manual: Surviving the Economic Collapse” and “Bugging Out and Relocating: When Staying is not an Option”.
2 comments:
I guess the other lesson here, which should be a public service announcement in schools is, boys, respect the integrity of someone's home by not sneaking in to their house to sleep with their 14 year old daughter.
Ferfal, while your point about proper target identification is correct, if it went down the way the homeowner claims, it the kids' fault - both the 17 year old victim and the 14 year old that invited him to the house in the middle of the night.
The father heard a noise, grabbed his gun and went downstairs. The dog barked at the guest room. The father yelled that he was armed and for the intruder to identify himself. The dog barked again at the guest room door. The father yelled another warning then entered the room. The 17 year old ran out of the closet and was shot dead.
While this is a huge tragedy for all involved, IF IT WENT DOWN AS THE FATHER CLAIMED, I don't think the target was necessarily mis-identified.
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