TexasCHLforum.com

Actually, if no conviction is given, the guy should get his CHL back. I didn't know you lose your CHL if there are charges filed alone with no conviction.

That about sums it up.

Many of us (not including myself here) have no tolerance for a person who had a child when they were 18, attending a soccer match, and arguing with a coach. The fact that he pulled a gun is really only icing on the cake. I think many on this forum would have liked this guy to be in jail even if he had drawn a banana instead of a pistol. I think many on this forum might have even cheered on the husband to follow through with an assault including injury to the father.

I will point out, many dads won't go to their kid's soccer game period. Many dads are AWOL and don't have any meaningful relationship with their children. Many dads who are 18 when they father a child never even see their children.

Prejudices run pretty high, from what I can tell, with respect to this story.

I think it's a shame that the police didn't arrest the husband for assault. Man with gun = bad guy, everyone else = victim, right?

SlowDave wrote: And I'd offer that if you are ripping on a coach of a kids sports team, maybe you should get a life.

If by "you", you mean me specifically, then you are barking up the wrong tree. Read some more of my posts.

If by "you" you mean the "collective you", then I still think you are wrong. If your kids are on a sports team, and you are paying for their participation, you are buying equipment and sacrificing time to get them there, then you have every right to expect the coach to treat them fairly. If you don't understand that, then you don't have any idea what you are talking about.

Liberty wrote: To not not discuss these incidents is to overlook realistic scenarios and understandings on just how things can go wrong. If any of us ever find ourselves in the position of any of the these 3 major players perhaps we might have learned something from this to prevent things from going as wrong as they did here.

Here is the problem with this logic, Liberty-

The summary of most of the comments is like this:

1. The father, who was initially "yelling at the coach", is a complete jerk, a coward, an idiot, etc. You cannot learn from his behavior because these judgments only serve to separate his actions from those of normal people. So nobody on this forum is saying to themselves, "you know, I'm also a complete jerk, a coward, and an idiot. I should learn something from this situation". Instead everyone is saying, "oh I would never get into that situation, because unlike this guy, I am not a complete jerk, a coward, and an idiot".

2. The husband, who "shoved" the father, was justly defending his wife who was being mercilessly verbally abused by this cowardly jerk. Nevermind that his actions were not justified by law clearly by any of the evidence that has been made public, or that this same prejudice against the cowardly jerk seems to have permeated even the law enforcement people on the scene so the guy who actually committed an assault did not get charged (yet). So the normal, prejudice and assumption based position here only teaches us the lesson of "we can break the law sometimes by assaulting someone and get away with it, as long as we are defending a helpless woman, and the other guy happens to be a cowardly jerk". This is not the kind of lesson we need to be learning.

Anyway if the dad was such a coward, then the woman didn't need any help defending herself.

This whole situation is way too biased, and too many people are breaking their arms patting themselves on the back for how much better they are than the dad who was arguing with the coach. I can tell you from direct experience, arguing with the coach is routine in kids' sports, whether you want to admit it or not. Sure, maybe you are one of the parents who does not argue with the coach, and maybe you are right that the other parents shouldn't do it and it makes them look like a fool. But it still happens, with regularity, and people do it who are not cowardly jerks or otherwise those whom we can easily castigate. Most of the time they are just regular people who get too excited and emotional when they think their child has been treated unfairly, and most of the time they think the coach is the one on some kind of power trip trying to exercise some unfair advantage over certain kids for no good reason. Sometimes they are right, and the coach is the one who is the power-tripping jerk. So they get too excited and get in arguments, big deal?

Right on, KBCraig.

Way too much projecting and assuming. Even the thin facts we have do not support these assumptions. I'm just glad we have laws in this country and it's not 100% court of public opinion.

Greybeard wrote:Quote from Oct. 20 Channel 11 text: "Apparently, the coach's husband tried to stop Burke from yelling at his wife, and that's when the two men got into an argument in the stands. The police report states that the victim pushed Burke, and then Burke pulled a handgun and pointed it at the victim's head."

The dude who pulled the gun was also a victim.

And so was the coach.

There's plenty of blame to go around.

XtremeDuty.45 wrote:mr72,
I am just going off the story...

Authorities tell NewsChannel 11 that Burke was watching his child play at the Berl Huffman Complex when he apparently got mad at the coach and started yelling at her. They say the coach's husband tried to settle him down, and then those two got into a fight in the stands, and that's when Burke pulled a gun.

So from that he was yelling and the husband did try to settle him down THEN the fight was started. Im not saying the report is correct but thats all we have to go off of. So thats what I am doing. All I did was read and retain the info from which this thread was started.

I am not trying to start my own argument here.

However I think the news story is probably very unreliable. You see, man with gun = bad guy in the news. This does not sound like a balanced account of both sides of the story. In fact I find it highly unlikely that the guy who was arrested with the gun would describe the incident using these words, but very likely that the guy who did the pushing would describe it in exactly those words.

XtremeDuty.45 wrote:What he did was illegal too. Yelling at someone can be abusive. He was in public and he was yelling at a coach.

I didn't realize you were a witness.

Nobody knows the nature of his argument with the coach. But I guess we like the 2nd Amendment, but not so much the 1st? Or in this case, neither.

txflyer wrote:
IANAL, but my reading of 42.01 says it can be illegal:

§ 42.01. DISORDERLY CONDUCT.

The guy was not charged with disorderly conduct.

It would be outrageous to charge a parent who is having an argument with a soccer coach with disorderly conduct.

I guess anything is possible. It is therefore possible that the guy was indeed uttering such speech as to constitute disorderly conduct, and the police have not charged him with it. I seriously doubt it.

txflyer wrote:In this situation at least one of them (and most likely both) forgot rule 23:

Your number one option for personal security is a lifelong commitment to avoidance, deterrence, and de-escalation.

This illustrates how this whole situation doesn't fit the normal "rules".

You can't avoid, deter, or de-escalate a conflict that you, yourself have instigated.

Rule #1 has to be "don't instigate a conflict". Then you don't find yourself in the precarious position of trying to avoid, deter, or de-escalate your own conflict.

However it is not illegal to instigate a verbal conflict. There is nothing illegal about confronting your kid's soccer coach, be it a male, female, or Air Bud, even with harsh words, four-letter words, or other inflammatory language. That makes you an obnoxious jerk, but not a criminal, and it does NOT justify a physical-force response by any third party, even including the spouse of the coach!

Now, you may choose, based on your own moral compass, not to critique your child's coach in public, or in private. You may choose not to ever criticize, with clam or aggressive language, any woman (other than Hillary Clinton), out of some chivalry. You might find it offensive or obnoxious for a parent to confront their 7 and 8 year old's soccer coach, but just because you don't like it does not make it illegal!.

However, once someone, including the woman's husband, intercedes into the situation and employs physical force, then the instigator of the physical force has broken the law. You may think it is chivalrous or otherwise acceptable for a husband to defend his wife who is receiving a tongue-lashing by pushing or hitting the obnoxious jerk, but chivalrous or acceptable does not make it legal.

So our standards of acceptable conduct in this case may be at odds with what constitutes legal conduct.

At this very point in time, I think the only public information we have is that an obnoxious jerk instigated a perfectly legal verbal conflict with the coach, and then the husband stepped in and escalated that conflict with a physical assault. Then perhaps, depending on facts which we do not yet know, the obnoxious jerk may have responded with an unlawful use of force by drawing his weapon.

While I am never claiming that the obnoxious jerk in this case was right to confront the coach (I have no idea, since I did not witness the confrontation), but it wasn't illegal.

I am going to stop posting on this now until we have more detail.

Well the consequences for being an obnoxious jerk can be deadly if you are carrying a concealed handgun.

Charles L. Cotton wrote: the bottom line is two guys are facing criminal charges over a soccer game.

Absolutely!

Someone on another forum posted about "CCW Zen", and referred to the way carrying a gun can change your behavior in subtle ways. One way it should change one's behavior is to pick your battles much more carefully; or put differently: if you can pick, have no battles, just like it says in Romans 12:18. Better than Zen.

OK, I stand corrected.

Charles L. Cotton wrote: The thing that's wrong is your analysis of both events and the forum members response to both. Your generalization is both inaccurate and unfair.

Chas.

Sorry to disagree, Charles.

I think in both cases, it was on the margin of being legal, and in both cases the action of the shooter or would-be shooter were unwise even if barely justified.

poppo wrote:But making blanket statements like you are doing without all of the facts is the 'scary thing'. I for one will wait for all of the facts before making any character judgments.

I think this is kind of an interesting psychology study.

For example, as a group, we seem to think that it's acceptable to leave your own house even after you have called 911, confront two unknown men whom you suspect may have been committing robbery on your neighbor's property, and shoot both of them dead right there. That makes you a hero.

But on the other hand, if some guy gets into a shouting match with his kid's soccer coach and then gets assaulted by a third party, then as a group, we think that he is a fool to even draw his weapon without even firing it in defense of his own life or well-being.

Something is wrong with this.