She'll never try to "help anyone again. Good.
by digby
A "good guy" with a gun got probation. And she's boiling mad about it:
Duva-Rodriguez didn't manage to stop the shoplifters when she rattled off several rounds outside an Auburn Hills Home Depot on Oct. 6, although she did flatten one of their tires.
What she did do, however, was spark a nationwide debate - or at least add fuel to an already raging fire.
The shooting came just days after a massacre at a community college in Oregon, an event that led GOP presidential candidates Donald Trump and Ben Carson to call for "more guns" to help fight crime.
But Duva-Rodriguez's attempt at being a good samaritan badly backfired.
She was widely pilloried for pulling out her piece when nothing but property was at stake. Gun experts slammed her, saying she was lucky not to have killed an innocent bystander. Prosecutors called her decision to fire her weapon in a busy parking lot "disturbing" and charged Duva-Rodriguez with misdemeanor reckless use of a handgun.
Duva-Rodriguez did not contest the charge in court, but she was hardly contrite.
"I tried to help," she told WJBK after her sentencing on Wednesday, before wryly adding: "And I learned my lesson that I will never help anybody again."
Her lawyer was even more defiant.
"We need more people like Tatiana Duva-Rodriguez in our society," defense attorney Steven Lyle Schwartz told the Associated Press.
I wonder if Donald Trump would be for summary execution of shoplifters? Probably. Meanwhile "good guys" like this woman are multiplying rapidly in our society as more and more people indulge their Wale Mitty "hero" fantasy and carry guns in public, endangering us all.
There are now about 12.8 million concealed carry permit holders in the U.S., up from 4.6 million in 2007, Ingraham reports. And a recent Gallup poll found that 56 percent of Americans [!!!]say the country would be safer if more people carried concealed firearms.
Despite anecdotal evidence that "good guys" with guns are good for public safety, scientific evidence is much harder to come by. A recent study by Mount St. Mary's University found that people without firearms training had either dangerously itchy or dangerously slow trigger fingers. "Carrying a gun in public does not provide self-defense unless the carrier is properly trained and maintains their skill level," the study's authors wrote.
Duva-Rodriguez saw herself as somebody's savior. She was in the Home Depot parking lot when she heard a scream. A loss prevention officer was chasing a shoplifter with a cart full of stolen power tools. When the man loaded the tools into a waiting getaway car, Duva-Rodriguez pulled out her pistol and fired two rounds.
"I made a decision in a split second," she told judge Julie Nicholson on Wednesday, according to WJBK. "Maybe it was not the right one, but I was trying to help."
That is, of course, the problem. One split second decision and someone could be killed. For no good reason. After all, she could have gotten the license plate number and called the police who could have arrested the shoplifter and that would have been that. Instead, she risked the lives of bystanders and the shoplifters who, unless things have changed drastically, we don't execute for their crimes.
She's learned her lesson. She won't try to help anymore. Thank God. But I am seriously worried about the 12 million and counting other "good Samaritans" out there who are just like her.
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