I pray that I never have to shoot someone, but if I do, I can assure you it will be for a good reason. It won't be because an argument got heated and I decided that what the situation called for was me to completely and totally overreact and exercise lethal force over a trivial matter.
Unfortunately, not everyone thinks that way.
They might have even convinced themselves that they think that way, but far too many people believe that violence is a reasonable response to disagreement. That's bad enough, but a store clerk in Chicago took it even beyond that.
He allegedly shot a guy over a disagreement of less than 50 cents.
A convenience store employee was ordered detained after allegedly shooting a customer during an argument over an unpaid balance of about 47 cents.
The shooting happened around 7:26 p.m. October 9 at a convenience store in the 4400 block of West Cortez Street. Prosecutors said Janeiro Jackson, 34, was working at the store when he intervened in a dispute between his manager and a 31-year-old customer over the remaining balance.
The customer shoved Jackson during the confrontation, prosecutors said, and Jackson allegedly responded by firing two shots, striking the man once in the abdomen. The customer’s four children, all younger than 13, witnessed the shooting from outside the store, according to prosecutors. Authorities said there is no surveillance footage of the shooting.
Now, in fairness, Jackson claims the customer was the aggressor, and while the witnesses all will likely claim otherwise, I doubt any of them are going to admit his old man was in the wrong, at least to the police. The lack of surveillance video doesn't exactly help the case here.
Assuming the police have it right, which can be a dangerous assumption at the best of times, Jackson seems to have completely lost sense of himself and overreacted, because it sure doesn't sound like the police recovered a weapon.
And that's the thing about self-defense. You can defend yourself from any attack, but you need to use a reasonable level of force. A butt-whooping doesn't automatically justify you shooting someone, and if there's not a weapon present and someone is just talking, you either tell them to leave your store and call the police when they don't, or you wait for them to produce a lethal weapon. That doesn't have to be a gun, either.
Without that, though, lethal force is unlikely to be warranted.
Now, Jackson is cooling in jail, ostensibly because he shot someone who didn't need shooting.
Though in Jackson's defense, how often have media outlets provided the community with completely ridiculous examinations of laws, particularly on things like self-defense? Granted, this is Chicago, so most of those self-defense laws don't actually apply, but still...
At the end of the day, we need to remember that a lot of people don't respect our right to keep and bear arms, much less our right to self-defense. They'd rather you be a victim. The onus is on law-abiding gun owners to do everything right if we don't want to end up in jail for getting it wrong. That means education and training, because you can never know enough.