The Other McCain

"One should either write ruthlessly what one believes to be the truth, or else shut up." — Arthur Koestler

When the Good Guys Win

Posted on | January 20, 2013 | 25 Comments

“She was very brave, she stayed on the phone with the dispatcher the whole time — talked all the way through it and was still on the phone with dispatch when we got into the house.”
— Ken Golden, Bryan County (Okla.) Sheriff’s Department

“I had to do what I had to do. I was scared out of my mind.”
— Kendra St. Clair

“The perversity I want to understand starts in the ’60s. What happened? This: intellectuals took over the elite.”
— David Gelernter, Drawing Life: Surviving the Unabomber

When Instpundit linked the story yesterday and I Tweeted it as the “feel-good story of the year,” some people evidently got the mistaken idea that I was being sarcastic, which I wasn’t. When a 12-year-old girl shoots a burglar, that’s good news:

BRYAN COUNTY, Okla. — A 12-year-old girl did what she had to do to protect herself from an intruder in her home on the Texas border.
She hid in a closet and shot him when he tried to open the door.

Here’s the 911 call Kendra made:

The suspect, 32-year-old Stacey Adam Jones, was apparently a very bad guy. He had been a suspect in the case of a missing girl a year earlier.

What I had in mind, in calling this the “feel-good story of the year,” was something that David Gelernter observed in his 1997 book, Drawing Life: Surviving the Unabomber. While doing some historical research, Gelernter came across a photo caption in a magazine from the 1930s, showing police with the bodies of two robbers the cops had shot dead in an ambush, a feat that the caption writer called a “neat trick.”

Cops shoot two bad guys — neat trick.

We don’t see that attitude much among journalists nowadays, Gelernter remarked, because journalism is a profession that has been taken over by intellectuals, and intellectuals have had their heads stuffed so full of ACLU rhetoric about police brutality and the “rights” of criminals that it’s impossible for them to believe that (a) criminals are bad people and therefore (b) it’s a good thing for criminals to get shot.

A few years ago, my younger brother shot a knife-wielding crackhead who broke into his house. The intruder was undeterred by the barking dog and failed to heed my brother’s warning, so he was dispatched with a blast of 12-gauge buckshot. My kids still laugh at the laconic matter-of-fact way my brother described the incident. What happened? “I shot him.” Did you kill him? “Yep.”

Crackhead with knife. Homeowner with shotgun. Neat trick.

Americans used to think that way, and the intellectuals who have tried to teach us to think otherwise — to view criminals as “victims of society” — should be regarded as accomplices to crime.

Law-abiding citizens have the right to armed self-defense, and anyone who advocates the infringement of that right is a bad person.

My friend Robert Waters wrote two books I highly recommend: The Best Defense: True Stories of Intended Victims Who Defended Themselves with a Firearm and Guns Save Lives: True Stories of Americans Defending Their Lives With Firearms. You have to wonder why nobody in Hollywood has thought to turn those true stories into a movie, or at least a cable TV series, but of course the intellectuals have taken over Hollywood, too. That’s the only possible explanation for why you haven’t heard more about the story of Kendra St. Clair.

Twelve-year-old girl shoots intruder. Neat trick.

 

 

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Category: Constitution, Crime, Intellectuals, Oklahoma

Comments

25 Responses to “When the Good Guys Win”

  1. If It Just Saves One Child … | hogewash
    January 20th, 2013 @ 1:21 pm

    […] here. Share this:TwitterFacebookLinkedInEmailPrintLike this:Like2 bloggers like this. This entry was […]

  2. richard mcenroe
    January 20th, 2013 @ 1:34 pm

    IIRC the NRA actually syndicated a series about true stories of self-defense that could be found on local TV, even in Los Angeles.

  3. MrPaulRevere
    January 20th, 2013 @ 1:36 pm

    It’s too bad this home invading POS is expected to survive.

  4. Dai Alanye
    January 20th, 2013 @ 2:00 pm

    Good story, but does EVERY video need to have a commercial attached?

  5. ThomasD
    January 20th, 2013 @ 2:05 pm

    Suspected in the disappearance of another child? Something that will not be brought up at his trial?

    A trial pending because that sonofabitch is still drawing breath?

    Not sure I’d call it a win, maybe a favorable draw…

  6. ThomasD
    January 20th, 2013 @ 2:08 pm

    Armed Citizen

    It is a running section that appears in every one of their monthly publications. Each incident described includes a citation to some other unaffiliated publicly available news source.

  7. richard mcenroe
    January 20th, 2013 @ 2:13 pm

    These were televised reenactments drawn from that.

  8. DaTechGuy
    January 20th, 2013 @ 2:37 pm

    I don’t think the killing of the guy is something to celebrate, Your brother did the right thing, it was just but it’s a shame it had to be that way.

  9. Thousands Of Gun Owners Turned Out For Rally In Albany, NY | The Lonely Conservative
    January 20th, 2013 @ 3:48 pm

    […] That’s how he billed himself, but now they’re seeing his true colors.In related news, check out the story of the 12 year old girl who saved her life by shooting an intruder in her home. Good for her.Tweetvaso linkgoogle_ad_client = […]

  10. richard mcenroe
    January 20th, 2013 @ 4:03 pm

    He’s alive and that freak’s future victims are safer. Whiskey for my men and beer for my horses seems totally called for.

  11. richard mcenroe
    January 20th, 2013 @ 4:04 pm

    these days yeah, pretty much.

  12. Adjoran
    January 20th, 2013 @ 4:37 pm

    Good for her!

    “Journalism” – if it was ever worth saving – effectively died the day editors figured out they could hire fresh-faced college grads with J-school degrees instead of spending years grooming reporters from scratch, starting at copy boys to covering parades and garden clubs to high school football to the crime blotter and only finally to city hall.

    As soon as they starting doing that, the control of the “profession” passed to the J-school professors, a group of Marxists in tweeds and turtlenecks drawn from the pool of English Department assistant professors not qualified to teach Shakespeare, Romantic poetry, or the 20th Century American novel. It was Lenin’s dream come true, and has been our living nightmare.

  13. Adjoran
    January 20th, 2013 @ 4:40 pm

    Take the pledge: “I swear NEVER to buy any product for which I have been forced to watch a commercial or a popover ad on the internet to get to ‘free’ content.”

    Learn it, love it, live it, and spread it.

  14. robertstacymccain
    January 20th, 2013 @ 6:13 pm

    Pete, crime is a people problem.

    Crime isn’t caused by guns, or poverty, or drugs.

    Crime is caused by people. And we have a name for people who cause crime: criminals.

    While I don’t have access to the criminal record of the crackhead who made the ill-fated decision to break into my brother’s house, I’m going to take a wild guess that he was not a first-time offender. In fact, I’d be willing to bet $50 he had the proverbial “record as long as your arm,” stretching back to juvenile offenses committed when he was 13, 14, 15.

    There is a predictable pattern: Petty criminals do a series of relatively minor crimes — theft, burglary, assault, drug offenses — and either (a) get away scot-free, or (b) receive fairly light punishment.

    The punishment fails to deter them from their criminal habits, and they keep at it until they end up in either prison or the graveyard. This is no one’s fault but theirs, and the sooner these menaces to society are taken off the street, the fewer people they will be able to vicitimize. However many people this crackhead victimized before he broke into my brother’s house, that list is now finite; his future victims will number zero. And that’s a good thing.

    Heaven knows how many peoiple

  15. Kah Zuhl List
    January 20th, 2013 @ 6:17 pm

    Disagree, McCain. And not because I’m some squishy liberal/intellectual who thinks we just need to understand criminals’ circumstances better or some such nonsense.

    Your brother and Kendra were absolutely justified in what they did. But, as believers, we find the basis for that justification in verses like Genesis 9:6: “Whoever sheds the blood of man, by man shall his blood be shed; for in the image of God has God made man.”

    Because all life is valuable — with the value of that life stemming NOT from the actions of the human living that life, but rather from The Image their life inherently reflects — no loss of life is something to “feel good” about.

    Justified actions? No question. Prevented harm presently and potentially in the future? Of course. But “feel good”? No way.

  16. Kendra St. Clair (age 12) - 1: Stacy Jones - 0 - BitsBlog
    January 20th, 2013 @ 6:17 pm

    […] tip video: Robert Stacy McCain, Other NcCain, Twelve-year-old girl shoots intruder. Neat […]

  17. Becca Lower
    January 20th, 2013 @ 6:42 pm

    My dad’s answer for those people who question how effective the death penalty is as a deterrent to crime: for the criminal who’s executed, it’s 100 percent effective.

  18. Dai Alanye
    January 20th, 2013 @ 6:45 pm

    Most times my finger leaps for the mute control… or for the delete.

  19. JeffS
    January 20th, 2013 @ 7:56 pm

    Stacy’s reaction is perfectly acceptable in the context that he’d rather not attend his brother’s funeral. That is certainly something to feel good about. As in, a sense of relief and joy that a loved one survived a tragedy.

    This is an aspect of humanity that gets glossed over by many people (including politicians, I must note) — how are survivors of a lethal situation supposed to feel? How about their relations? “Survivor’s guilt” is a very real condition that will impact people as surely as a bullet. It sounds like his younger brother has survived nicely, and that helps the rest of the family as well.

    And while all life is indeed valuable, not all humans agree with that. History is replete with examples of men and women who do not accept that standard, or are so damaged as to not care. In those conditions, triumph over evil is certainly worth considering as an acceptable response.

    “He’s dead, I’m alive, and that’s the way I wanted it to be” is unpleasant, but you have to be alive to feel anything. So I’ll accept “feeling good” if I ever come into that situation, and make my own peace with The Almighty.

  20. Rob Crawford
    January 20th, 2013 @ 8:56 pm

    I think it died the moment someone thought it could be taught in college, rather than learned on the job.

  21. Rob Crawford
    January 20th, 2013 @ 8:57 pm

    Feel good? HELL YEAH!

    Those thugs weren’t men. They abandoned their humanity when they set out to prey on others.

  22. richard mcenroe
    January 20th, 2013 @ 8:59 pm

    I reinstalled Firefox and now I have to refresh my pop-up blocker, apparently. It’s started throwing up full page pjørn ads… with audio. Skosh embarrassing in the coffee shop.

  23. richard mcenroe
    January 20th, 2013 @ 9:01 pm

    Genesis is a worthy text, but I’ll take Christ’s advice when he advised Peter to “sell your robe and buy a sword.”

  24. Da Tech Guy's Blog » Blog Archive Newtown = "Opportunity" for Mika Brzezinski » Da Tech Guy's Blog
    January 21st, 2013 @ 7:19 am

    […] thought: Pray tell why the story of 12 year old Kendra St. Clair will not be found newsworthy) on Morning Joe today? Could it be her story offers no “OPPORTUNITY”? Share […]

  25. Rick20033
    January 21st, 2013 @ 6:48 pm

    Let his days be few;
    Let another take his office.
    Let his children be fatherless
    And his wife a widow.
    Let his children wander about and beg;
    And let them seek sustenance far from their ruined homes.
    Let the creditor seize all that he has,
    And let strangers plunder the product of his labor.
    Let there be none to extend lovingkindness to him,
    Nor any to be gracious to his fatherless children.
    Let his posterity be cut off;
    In a following generation let their name be blotted out.
    Let the iniquity of his fathers be remembered before the Lord,
    And do not let the sin of his mother be blotted out.
    Let them be before the Lord continually,
    That He may cut off their memory from the earth;
    Because he did not remember to show lovingkindness,
    But persecuted the afflicted and needy man,
    And the despondent in heart, to put them to death.

    (Psalm 109:8-16)