57Coastie wrote:C-dub wrote:If Clanton had a gun, why didn't he shoot the man that had already killed a mother and shot her baby?
It appears to me that he didn't have to, so he didn't, and it worked out OK. Indeed a brave man, and even braver for not taking a life unnecessarily.
Jim
Agree. Quoting the first article:
BEXAR COUNTY, TExas - He was sitting in his house off of Oldham Road in Bexar County, when 62-year-old Roger Clanton said he heard four gunshots.
Despite his age and his handicap (Clanton needs a cane and sometimes a wheelchair to get around), he said he did what he had to do.
Leaving his cane by his bed, Clanton said ran outside with his gun in his hand.
There he saw a woman, 20-year-old Katie Fierro, shot to death, a baby shot in the head, and a man with a gun.
"I wasn't going to let him shoot that baby again," said Clanton.
So Clanton stood between the shooter and the baby.
Clanton said he told the man “don’t even think about it.”
He only
heard the shots that killed the mother and wounded her baby. He ran outside, interspersed himself between the presumed shooter and the wounded baby and told him not to do it again. The shooter complied and went inside. There was no reason to shoot him as that would have been at that point an act of retribution, beyond the law.
If the shooter had raised his pistol and acted like he was going to shoot again, Clanton would have been well within his rights to shoot Landon Keller. But the shooter didn't, and Clanton in his wisdom, did not either. Had he just up and shot Keller, he might well be facing charges himself.
This is one of those cases that tugs at our heartstrings, and our innate sense of justice demands that Keller should have been shot down for what he did. But, we CHLs are law-abiding people.....or we are supposed to be. We are allowed to use our weapons in defense of self or others, but we are not allowed to mete out justice. Had Clanton shot Keller, that's exactly what he would have been doing, as Keller was no longer shooting when Clanton arrived on the scene, and Katie and Cayden Fierro were already down. Had Keller still been actively shooting, Clanton would have been well within the law to shoot him. But he wasn't, and Clanton didn't. A very difficult, but mature decision. Honestly, in the emotion of the moment, I don't know if I personally would have been up to it. But Clanton did do the right thing. Good man.
As it happens, Keller took his own life anyway, so no meting out of justice by either Clanton or the Justice System was ultimately necessary. Given that, what would Clanton's shooting of Keller have accomplished except to put Clanton in the situation of having to question if his actions were correct, possibly having to defend himself in court at the worst, and having to go through the whole investigative process and possibly a grand jury at the least? Providence prevented him from having to face any of that, and he accomplished his mission of preserving baby Cayden from further harm.
