You people keep telling yourselves that. The truth is you could have done something about it. Now 2 innocent people are dead.
Actually, I disagree with you. Remember, the police can't do anything until someone actually breaks the law, or makes a threat in their presence.
Thank goodness that someone can't just go up to a cop and say, "Joe threatened to kill me, I need you to lock him up" or "take away his guns!"
It's a terrible thing, but sometimes you have to be responsible for taking action to defend yourself. If the police didn't tell them that they might very well need to take up arms to do so, then the police were wrong. But remember that we don't live in a police state.
Mark
Once upon a time back in deep East Texas I had a schoolmate. We’ll call him Loy. Loy was a black guy that was well-known in our community — good-natured and fun-loving, but a bit of a troublemaker. Nothing major, you understand — he just played a little pool and drank a bit. We white kids all liked Loy all right, and he was popular among the black kids at school as well.
Anyway, a few years after we graduated from high school, while I was away in the Navy, I got a letter from a friend saying that Loy had killed a guy. It seems that old Loy had taken a fancy to a friend’s wife, and sure enough they had started having an affair. Things had gone on this way for several months, until the husband (Loy’s friend) had found out about his wife stepping out on him to be with Loy. Then everything went a little crazy.
It happened this way: one afternoon Loy was shooting pool in this little shack-type bar down in Wamba. (Wamba, pronounced “WAM-bee”, is an unincorporated community, located north of Texarkana down in the riverbottoms. The population of Wamba is almost entirely black.) As Loy lined up a shot, the screen door to the bar flew open, causing Loy and the other bar patrons to look up. In the doorway was the cuckolded husband with a deer rifle in his hands.
“I’m gonna kill you, Loy _______!” he screamed.
Unfortunately for him, Loy took such threats seriously. He knew his friend had found out about the affair, and he had taken steps to prepare in case a confrontation came. As the jealous husband made his threat, Loy bent down behind the pool table, picked up the twelve-gauge shotgun he had brought with him, and promptly blew the jealous husband’s head off.
The arrest went by the book. The police came, Loy was cuffed, witnesses were interviewed, and the body removed. The DA charged Loy with murder and ordered him to be confined in the county jail in Boston until his trial.
Now, Bowie County is not exactly a hotbed of diversity and tolerance, and a black guy accused of murder can pretty much expect to be found guilty, whether he did it or not. When the trial date finally came, an all-white jury had been empaneled, and Loy’s trial began at the Boston courthouse. It went quickly.
The verdict: not guilty. The killing was ruled as homicide in self-defense, and Loy was released.
And that’s pretty much it. I haven’t been back to Bowie County in many years, and am no longer in contact with anyone living there. I don’t know if things are better there or worse. For all I know, old Loy’s still there in Wamba, shooting pool and schtupping other people’s wives.
MORAL: Even if you’re a black guy living in a backwards-ass, segregated place like Bowie County, Texas, if a guy threatens to kill you in front of witnesses, you’re allowed to blow his head off before he gets a chance.
True story.