Posted by
John Caile on Wednesday, July 02, 2008 1:00:32 PM
By now most people have at least heard of Joe Horn, the 62-year old Pasadena, Texas resident who saw an apparent burglary of his next door neighbor's house and called the police. While waiting for the cops to arrive, he noticed that the two men had left the neighbor's house and were heading toward his yard.
Unfortunately for Joe, after calling 911 and reporting what he saw, instead of hanging up, he did what too many people do - he stayed on the line with the 911 operator. Thus Joe's excited, anguished conversation was recorded for all to hear (and misconstrue), including his obvious increasing anxiety about the escalating situation, his fear that the police would not arrive in time, and telling the operator that he was going to go outside to stop them. The 911 operator, who was not a sworn police officer, but a civilian employee, kept telling Joe "don't go out there."
As a result, the 911 recording has been played over and over by the TV talking heads, usually accompanied by some tsk-tsk commentary, complete with the requisite furrowed brow and shaking head, just in case you needed any further convincing of their position on Joe Horn's actions. In virtually every case, the press types expressed "concern" over Joe's "shooting unarmed men," or referring to Joe's "ignoring the commands of the 911 operator" as well as describing Mr. Horn's behavior as "taking the law into his own hands."
But 911 calls are often very misleading. No 911 call can ever properly capture what is actually happening at the scene. Additionally, the psycho-dynamics of a lethal force encounter are intense, frightening, extremely stressful, and more to the point, very disorienting - what people say often has little in common with reality. This is the very reason that self-defense firearm instructors like myself train their students NOT to stay on the line with 911.
This case will doubtless result in Joe Horn becoming a poster boy for the anti-gun Left. When a middle-aged white guy shoots two Mexican illegals, you know they are going to go after him with, ahem, both barrels. Which of course raises the question as to how this case would have been handled by the media if Joe Horn had been black, and the two thieves white.
But none of the press, nor any of us for that matter, were sitting on the Grand Jury, a jury made up of people who heard testimony from police, detectives who arrived at the scene, and even from Joe Horn himself. That this group of ordinary citizens then ruled there wasn't even enough evidence to indict (charge) him at all, let alone charge him with any major crime, should cause reasoning people to consider that Joe Horn might simply have done the best he could under a horrible set of circumstances.
After all, even the venerable Justice Oliver Wendell Holmes once rightly observed that it was entirely "unreasonable [for society] to demand sober reflection" of a citizen when they find themselves in the very situation that Joe Horn did.