Thread: Castle Doctrine

BD1:

Apart from a bizarre, totally inexplicable & not really applicable outdoor shootout that occurred when I was 17, this is the closest that I can come:

Stage setting: New Years Eve/Day '70-'71, 618 Tasker St., South Phillie (Stationed @ USN Hospital Philadelphia). 4th floor walk-up in one of the squillions of tarpaper "brownstones" in this primarily Italian neighborhood. The kitchen of each apartment in my building was divided from the living area by the stairwell landing & had a separate lockable door (naturally, effectiverly unlocked from the kitchen side). The building to the right as you looked out the front door was occupied by my landlord & his family. The building to the left was occupied by some minor Rizzo (an infamous mayor)administration ward heeler & his family. The neighbor was reputed to be mobbed up. My landlord was terrified of this guy, & of his older sons, one 22, one 19.

Something woke me up. I had a dim impression of some sort of noisiness having recently gone on outside our living area door. Got up, woke up Mary & went out into the landing (euphemistically, the "hall"). The kitchen door was standing open & snow was blowing into the kitchen & landing through the open kitchen window. Tea, Coffee, flour, corn meal, grits (O great awakening for some of our native Philadelphian neighbors) & sugar cannisters were dumped all over the place, making an unbelievable mess. There were left-behind tools scattered around, mostly on or under the windowsill, all of which I still have. One of those was a nifty KaBar with the old-style laminated blade. The others included a small pry bar, a huge screw driver, a nice little electrician's pocket knife & (weirdly?) a pack of sandpaper. Looking (& then climbing) out the window I saw two double lines of footprints with clear sole markings leading from the suspicious neighbor's 4th floor back door to our window (we didn't have a door) & back.

Called the cops. They arrived immediately. A pair of them. Young. One black, one white. Neat, trim & professional. Gratifyingly concerned. Until they scoped out the scene. They looked at one another, & then one of them climbed out the window & began walking up & down over the tracks in the snow, obliterating them, while the other began vigorously picking up & handling all the tools. I diffidently objected, asking about fingerprints & messing with evidence. They explained that many burglaries took the form of breaking into one place, going on to another across the roof terraces & that this was obviously one of those. I said something like "Aw, come on." & then they turned into werewolves. "What do you think these guys were after? Why did they dump all this shit out of your kitchen cannisters? Were they after drugs? Looks like they were after drugs. You got any drugs? You use drugs?" When they left I had the feeling I had barely escaped doing time for being burglarized.

Didn't have a gun up until that moment in Phillie. Nothing to hunt. All I had in B'ham was an old 16Ga Smith double & a Remington single shot .22 my grandfather had given me & a .30/30 winchester 94 & a 2.5" SS .410 from my old man. Never felt the need for a pistol. The hospital's Operations Officer cut through the shit (I've rarely run into the bureaucratic foulups the military is supposedly famous for) & cut me some quick leave. I flew home, bought a lousy .38 revolver from my uncle, packed it & the LC Smith with a box of #1 buck & flew back "home."

Now. What have we here? I think that this little episode exposes some of the complexities inherent in armed self-defense. Given that I'm confident (based on my behavior during the weird 17yo gunfight episode) that I wouldn't hesitate to shoot if I thought it neccessary:
a) Would I have caught these guys? probably not. They obviously fled when I started making noise.
b) Would I have been justified in waxing the dudes (neighborhood skinny labled the two older sons of the supposedly mobbed-up neighbor as the malefactors) if I had cought them? I, personally, think so, but even in Alabama I'd probably be on shaky ground because of the unusual relationship of the living area to the break-in site.
c) Since I already knew of the supposed relationship between the Phillie mob & the father, would I have been justified in shooting these people, no matter what the provocation, since doing so would very likely have place my wife at risk somewhere down the line?
d) In this admittedly trivial case, the police, for whom I have an automatic, sort of knee-jerk admiration & affection, acted as accessories after the fact. I'm still a little scarred by it. It was my first, & niaive, confrontation with blatant political corruption. Quo vadis?

I still haven't figured out where I stand philosophically on that particular episode, & I'm still shocked by it nearly 40 years later. I do know that since then I've had some sort of effective loaded gun hidden (or ostentatiously displayed out of little kids' reach) but easily at hand in every room in my house, & plan to shoot anyone who might break in, so I guess as a matter of practicum I've made my decision.

Oh. Center of mass. Of course. I can finally hit things with a handgun, but going for wings & thighs is idiocy, & will quickly get yo' ass selected out of the gene pool.

Doc