Not making any commentary on OC v. CC, I think in this specific situation it was pretty much guaranteed to lead to trouble. Unrelated to the method of carry, the trouble started here:
Simonsmeier; Danny Price, 32; Shannon Wheeler, 25; and Amanda Zastrow, 26, were arrested at a Turner Street home after they were called to help with a dispute between roommates, said Capt. Greg Hagenbucher of the Wausau Police Department. The incident began when a woman living in the home asked a man, also living in the home, to leave, Hagenbucher said. When he refused, the woman called friends to help.
If a friend called me needing this kind of “help,” I’m going to tell her to call the cops. As armed citizens, we ought to be nobody’s “muscle.” If you have a domestic dispute, that’s a job for the guys who come, as Tam likes to say, dripping with qualified immunity. I mean, you can take guns out of this situation entirely and it’s still just a bad idea. Guns just make things more likely to go from misdemeanor to felony in a hurry.
Though, I will say, I’m not sure that the shotgun was among the equipment OC’d, but anyone showing up to my door wielding a shotgun I’m going to assume is a deadly threat and act accordingly. Just saying.
Yes, because non-residents don’t have the right to evict someone living at a residence (if that’s what was going on). Certainly not with guns.
Yep… and cops are more likely to know that, and can at the least advise the person who called them on what their options are.
Cops may not “evict” but they can politely suggest it might be better for all involved if someone went and got a hotel room for the night on general principle. Or at least that would have been an arrow in the quiver in the bad old days of “peace officer-ing.”
Yup, thats my city…
That area is less reasoned discourse and more “Hey, Ya’ll, Watch this!” I have several friends on the Wausau PD, and the majority of their ‘No shit, there I was…’ stories come from that neighborhood.
I don’t know, calling the cops can get you maimed or killed too.
Patrick you got that right. Don’t call the cops unless you are willing to have somebody die.
As bad as the police culture has gotten, I’m pretty sure most domestic calls don’t end up with a corpse.
Better advice might be, don’t have friends who think armed force is the solution to roommate disputes. Nothing in the article indicates that the male roommate was in the wrong, much less that he did something wrong to the extent that the police should be involved.
Only time I’ve gone out armed to a person’s house at their request was over 20 years ago when a friend of my mother’s called and requested that I come over, because the outside alarm had gotten set off at her house, her husband was on a business trip, and it was in the middle of a snowstorm and the police said it would at least an hour before they could get someone there because of the traffic accidents and the like.
Turned out to be a deer looking for some relief from the snow. It took off when it saw me come up the driveway.
I think that’s a bit different. It wasn’t a specific threat, and you weren’t being called out to be the muscle in a dispute between parties. I wouldn’t hesitate to help out a friend who was in a similar situation, and wasn’t sure there was even a threat at all.
It’s the same thing for me if I hear something downstairs at night. I don’t expect people to call the cops for every bump in the night. That’s arguably a waste of their resources. But I’m not big on getting involved in other people’s disputes.