patrick.net

He should have put a bayonet on his rife, so that the rife jamming issue would not have been as much of a problem. The only thing he is guilty of was not disposing of the bodies someplace where they could not be found.

CaptainShuddup says

Gotta live in Florida, if you want to legally kill scumbags

Naw, we kill them in Texas too.

From the article

Smith is a retired security engineer for the U.S. Department of State.

That's code for someone whose house you should not break into.

Looks like some fine young psychopaths chose the wrong mean old man to terrorize.

Wasn't this just a MillXY mercy killing by a loathsome Boomer?

Didn't he bait the basement with Ecstasy, weed, porn, food stamps and Playstations with black lights and hi def TV?

They thought "Hey, this is WAY better than Mom's basement".

Pow, no more MillXY pain.

New Renter says

From the article

Smith is a retired security engineer for the U.S. Department of State.

That's code for someone whose house you should not break into.

I know. It's like these people who break into an old guys house don't realize that the old guy probably served in some sort of war, knows how to use a rifle, and maybe even killed a bunch of people once.

Shooting burglars is a reasonable self-defense. That's not why this guy is under arrest. According to the article,

"He was angry," Wartner said, then describing that Smith pulled out his revolver and shot her twice in the head, once in the left eye and once behind the left ear.

Smith dragged Kifer's body into the workshop and laid it on top of Brady's, Wartner said. Smith told investigators he thought he heard Kifer gasping, so he placed his revolver under her chin and fired what he told police was a "good clean finishing shot to the head," the assistant prosecutor said.

If these facts are true, then the state has a good case that the shooting which caused the deaths were not in self-defense. Smith was already safe. And the shootings were committed out of rage, not reasonable fear for one's safety.

Now, I don't know if these facts are true, but I know that it is disingenuous to call this a case of arbitrarily prosecuting a man for defending himself.

I don't know. if I am in my house and two people break-in, I have a few seconds to find out what or who they are. Even if they were shot, the burglars could be carrying concealed weapons. It is not my responsibility to verify that-in my own home.

Out in the street or a mall is one thing-but once you break in to my own home-one can't exactly run a credit/criminal background check and then decide how to respond. The guy may have been over the top in his response-but it could just be adrenalin and fear. if burglars chose not to break in to his home, nothing would have happened.

I think expecting the homeowner to behave rationally against two burglars is way too much .

lostand confused says

I don't know. if I am in my house and two people break-in, I have a few seconds to find out what or who they are. Even if they were shot, the burglars could be carrying concealed weapons. It is not my responsibility to verify that-in my own home.

Agreed. But that is materially different from

Smith dragged Kifer's body into the workshop and laid it on top of Brady's, Wartner said. Smith told investigators he thought he heard Kifer gasping, so he placed his revolver under her chin and fired what he told police was a "good clean finishing shot to the head," the assistant prosecutor said.

When you finish the job for good measure, it gets very grey very quick.

By the same token, you aren't allowed to rape the dead bodies afterwards either.

Dan8267 says

good clean finishing shot to the head

Only Osama gets this treatment, not even Saddam!

I dunno, once you opt to break and enter someones property, all bets are off. How was the old guy supposed to know what would happen next? He did the right thing, hell, he seems to also have been excessively honest about it.

Don't waste the taxpayer resources on prosecuting this guy

errc says

Don't waste the taxpayer resources on prosecuting this guy

eh, I would volunteer my tax dollars to scare anyone else from shooting people point blank just because they walked in your house.

APOCALYPSEFUCKisShostikovitch says

Think of the deterrent value of posting Facebook videos of the burglars being shot to death, raped and eaten, though not necessarily in that order.

Just like Reavers.

http://www.youtube.com/embed/xoXjUl5usKI

bgamall4 says

He executed them and went beyond the law. Don't know how that applies to every state but he was evil, and his comments were hateful, not even normal.

If you're a burglar and a thief, then it should be "Hey! My house my rules." and if you break in and I catch your sorry ass, then we get midevil on your ass. Them's the rules, don't like it, then stay the fuck our, or just better yet. Knock on the door.

I'm being serious here, if the risk was greater than a hapless victim being home when you break in. Like say a bored hapless victim, with a gun and torture tools, and a lot of spare time on his hands to get creative.

If there were a lot more stories like this where the homeowner was giving an award by the Mayor, rather than a murder rap. We would see big decline in burglaries and break ins. It's getting bad, really bad, so NO!!! I don't feel one damn bit sorry for them.

"Stand your ground" Should be expanded to "Welcome to my house."

You should be able to keep them in the cellar chained to the wall, and make them make you glass bead necklaces to sell on Ebay.
I mean in between daily beatings of course!
Fuck them!

bgamall4 says

CaptainShuddup says

You should be able to keep them in the cellar chained to the wall, and make them make you glass bead necklaces to sell on Ebay.


I mean in between daily beatings of course!


Fuck them!

You need a better neighborhood Captain. You definitely have a lot of rage.

Cap'n, you live in Florida, right? If so, that is pretty much par for the course. If I still lived there I would probably 1) agree and do the same and 2) NEVER, EVER walk into somebody's house uninvited.

Assuming the facts in the article are correct ... (which is why there must be a trial) ...
It's pretty hard to feel sympathy for the 'victims' here. It's easy (and correct, I imagine) to say that the *right* thing for him to do was to shoot them only enough to ensure they were no longer a possible threat. In his shoes, though, I can understand wanting to finish the job. If he doesn't kill the people who've repeatedly broken into his house, he has to fear that they'll be back - maybe in 10 years after some jail time has hardened them up and he's that much older and weaker.

He *deserves* a feeling of peace and security in his home - everyone does. I would not say that someone who is breaking into another person's house to steal *deserves* the benefit of the doubt - though I hope that I will be more merciful if I am ever in such a situation.

Ultimately, they took a gamble with their lives and lost. No sympathy from me.

Oh wait, I'm a librul, according to the idiots on this forum who bandy around terms they don't even understand. I've changed my mind. This guy should go to jail for simply owning a gun! ( no death sentence, of course - there's way too much tax money that needs to be wasted for us to cut any corners like that )

bgamall4 says

You need a better neighborhood Captain. You definitely have a lot of rage.

Oh like scumbags are running around looting and breaking into the bad neighborhoods where the sorry fucks don't have a pot to piss in.

Man they'll meet at your house, in your front yard on Christmas eve, as you pull into your driveway, while your family looks on out the window. As some punk puts a bullet in your gut for your iPhone, and packages in your car. The news never stops with these stories.

Especially in the good neighborhoods. The bad neighborhoods, they'll jack you in front of the Sop-N-Go.

The Liberal left has coddled these creeps for too fucking long. They don't know no boundaries are you Insane? Or are you just living in Starbucks snow globe and a fantasy world, where Netflix has blockbuster movies in frequent rotation, and Obama Changed the World for a better place. What fantasy world do YOU Live in? HUH?

MattBayArea says

It's pretty hard to feel sympathy for the 'victims' here.

I disagree.

They were pill-stealers, and burglars.

Contrary to fantasy, some kids get into pills, but DO manage to clean up their lives. These ones never got that chance.

Did this guy call 911 when he heard glass breaking? Nope.

Nothing in this story indicates they were home invaders out looking to kill this guy. He parked his truck blocks away, making the house look unoccupied. The old man sitting in his basement shot the first one when only his legs were visible at the top of the stairs. When he fell down the stairs he shot him in the head, then dragged his body out of sight.

Then he returned to sit down and quietly wait for the other one. Hunter waiting for his prey. When the girl came to the basement stairs and only her legs were visible she said "Nick?" he shot her and she fell down the stairs too. His gun jammed, and she laughed briefly though wounded because you know, nervous laugh about escaping death maybe? This pissed him off so he pulled a pistol and shot her in the chest repeatedly.

Dragged her to the office, but she still wasn't dead, so he put the pistol under her chin and "finished her". Oh yeah he uttered a few pithy lines. Did he return to his chair and see if he could bag a few more? Call 911?

There are no good guys here. Defense doctrine is you stop when they are clearly incapacitated. After shooting the girl but before "finishing her" if he had walked out of the house, gotten his truck and called 911 he might have gotten away with it. Maybe.

Nope, he left their bodies there and called nobody until the next day.

If he had put a mine under his porch and killed these 2 kids or a newspaperboy, he'd be up on murder charges either way.

I agree that there are no good guys here.
Bad move tho, by the prosecuting attorney. Murder one won't fly. I'd go manslaughter one, and that would be an easy slam dunk. What's the difference anyway? He'd spend the rest of his life in prison.

CaptainShuddup says

then we get midevil on your ass

midevil? What does that involve? Only one calorie, not enough evil?

Why not rape and torture them for years until they mutilate themselves out of desperation, then off them?

Once they entered his house they became his property.

I'm surprised there has been no discussion of this from the property-rights perspective.

APOCALYPSEFUCKisShostikovitch says

Shoot the second and make her eat the first at gun point while shrieking damnations at her and commending her to satan as his bride.

My concern is that the guy in this article might someday shoot Rob Ford during one of Ford's drunken crack binges, and that would be a great shame.

APOCALYPSEFUCKisShostikovitch says

The guy brought water but forgot the goddamn video camera.

Well evidently his home security recorded video and audio. The audio was played in court, along with some of the video I seem to recall reading. Perhaps he should have livestreamed it?

It's all quite baffling from a "security contractor". You'd think he could have reviewed the recordings overnight and said "naaah, better wipe that, won't look good in court".

NOOOOPE!

Iosef V HydroCabron says

Once they entered his house they became his property.

http://youtu.be/WCSZfmbFJyQ

That what you're going for?

APOCALYPSEFUCKisShostikovitch says

Iosef V HydroCabron says

Once they entered his house they became his property.

That is the only reasonable interpretation of this case I've read yet.

Come to think of it, the IRS should give him a hell of a depreciation/loss write-off on this. Dead sex slaves aren't worth much compared to live ones. Figure $175000 for the pair, and this guy's got a hell of a strong case on Schedule A.

Defense in your own home from burglars is not a crime. maybe he went overboard, but how is he supposed to know the burglars are not psycho killers. If anyone of you have small kids, are you going to support the burglars rights to burglarize without any risk of being shot at?

On the surface, the initial shots for each perp seem justified.
The excessive head shots seem criminal.
However, what also has to be accounted for are:
1- The state of mind of the shooter. His house is in the process of being intruded upon by multiple perps. After shooting one of them, he is in a mental state unknown to himself, rage coupled with fear, all brought on by intruding perps
2- Not knowing if more perps are upstairs, and fearing the ones he shot will recover, get up and do him harm, in a frenzied state of mind brought on by the intrusion he finishes them off.

Initial shot for each perp: Not Guilty
Finishing shots for each perp: ????
lostand confused says

Defense in your own home from burglars is not a crime. maybe he went overboard, but how is he supposed to know the burglars are not psycho killers. If anyone of you have small kids, are you going to support the burglars rights to burglarize without any risk of being shot at?

SoftShell says

If anyone of you have small kids

This particular homeowner had no family to protect. Did his recordings evidence any fear? You'd think so, but nope. Sad lonely basement dweller got to deliver some pithy lines though like "you're dying.... bitch!"

You'd think a security contractor could manage to video intruders, call police, hold them, and send them to jail. That wasn't his goal, it was nice clean "finishing shots" all along. Maybe he didn't get to deliver enough of those since he retired from overseas work, and missed it.

Protecting pills doesn't seem important to me. AF may disagree.

lostand confused says

If anyone of you have small kids, are you going to support the burglars rights to burglarize without any risk of being shot at?

This is dangerous thinking, because it can lead to the rights assigned based on category of citizen - you know, the government picking winners and losers. Why should I have to have kids just to apply a Colt Python to a dirtbag's chin and light her up? Once you go down that road, you're letting the lawyers into the henhouse, with all their subparagraphs amd heretofores.

"Think of the children" is a phrase that draws liberals to your rights like coyotes to a wounded squirrel.

The Constitution does not explicitly enumerate any government power to restrict the disposition of one's personal property in one's domicile. What he does in his basement is no different than shooting up an old washing machine on the back 40.

He privatized capital punishment through the Ownership Society, saving the taxpayers millions.

my point is if you are living in your home, alone or with family and have burglars break in-how on earth are supposed to know who they are, how many there are. Maybe he went overboard, but he shot one, then the other comes walking down the basement-for all he knows they could have a loaded semi-automatic. How do you know if one that fell, might not have concealed, get up and come after you while another new burglar is coming from the front??

bgamall4 says

He executed them and went beyond the law. Don't know how that applies to every state but he was evil, and his comments were hateful, not even normal.

He saved the taxpayers a bunch of money by executing them, and also saved many potential future victims. That and making sure that they are dead often prevents civil lawsuits.

Vicente says

Protecting pills doesn't seem important to me. AF may disagree.

First of all these weren't just foolhardy burglars looking for pills. They stole a shotgun from the homeowner which was recovered 7 days after the shooting by the sheriff. So the homeowner had every reason to believe they might be armed. And it doesn't really matter what they were at someone's house to steal, the fact that they are in your house is clear and present danger to you, and it should be legal to shoot any intruder until they are incapacitated.

Like I said in a previous post, this guy should serve jail time because he executed the teens after they were incapacitated and recorded it, moved their bodies around and waited a day to call the cops.

zzyzzx says

He saved the taxpayers a bunch of money by executing them

You can save the taxpayers a bunch of money by killing newborns before they rake up public education dollars. This does not justify doing so.

Dan8267 says

zzyzzx says

He saved the taxpayers a bunch of money by executing them

You can save the taxpayers a bunch of money by killing newborns before they rake up public education dollars. This does not justify doing so.

This is probably straying a little bit but I have always wondered why conservatives are so against abortion and liberals are so for it. Sure there is the freedom versus morality issue, but abortion favors conservatives and hurts liberals as it eliminates millions of mostly future poor people who would in all likelihood, suck up entitlements and be inclined to vote Democrat, because minorities and inner city white women are much more likely to have an abortion than rural and suburban white women. I mean isn't that why Margaret Sanger started Planned Parenthood? To control the negro population and those that could possibly be a burden to society.

lakermania says

This is probably straying a little bit but I have always wondered why conservatives are so against abortion and liberals are so for it. Sure there is the freedom versus morality issue, but abortion favors conservatives and hurts liberals as it eliminates millions of mostly future poor people who would in all likelihood, suck up entitlements and be inclined to vote Democrat, because minorities and inner city white women are much more likely to have an abortion than rural and suburban white women. I mean isn't that why Margaret Sanger started Planned Parenthood? To control the negro population and those that could possibly be a burden to society.

Your rant is full of assumptions with little backing. How do you know what party potential aborted kids might have voted for in future? My head hurts from the Fox News relatives I have, who think BOTH that "those people" are having too many kids due to all the welfare they are living high on, and that they are having abortions right and left. The incongruity of these 2 simultaneous projections doesn't bother them. "We the people" of course never drive our daughters to another city to get one of those, nosiree, well nobody saw us anyhow.

lakermania says

liberals as it eliminates millions of mostly future poor

I'm a liberal and I'd be damn glad if we eliminated poverty once and for all. By the way, liberalism and socialism are two unrelated philosophies. Liberalism is a social philosophy, not an economic one. I, and the vast majority of liberals I know, are fiscally conservative. We spend damn little and invest a lot.

Socialism, despite it's name, is an economic philosophy, not a social one. More accurately, in my opinion, socialism is more of an economic tactic than a philosophy.

Don't let our stupid media fool you into thinking that liberals are on the left. We're orthogonal to the stupid left-right line. And we're farther from either the left or the right than they are from each other.

A leftist will ban hate speech on college campus. A liberal will fight for the rights of all including the KKK to hold a march on campus. And then that same liberal will hold a counter-demonstration holding up large photos of the KKK lynching people.

The leftist tries to silence hateful speech. The liberal counters hateful speech with the truth. These are two diametrically opposing worldviews.

The left and the right in America are arbitrary sets of political beliefs lumped together. What constitutes left and right in the U.S. isn't what constitutes them in other countries. In contrast, the definition for liberalism is universal. We liberals believe

1. All persons have the same rights. No one has privileges.
2. Rights, by definition, cannot be taken away. A freedom that can be taken away is, by definition, a privilege.
3. All persons are equal under law.
4. The only laws that should exist are those protecting rights. Note that this includes public property rights, which is why pollution should be illegal. The environment is public property.
5. People should be allowed to do whatever they want as long as they aren't violating the rights of others. However, polluting, fraud, the open system of bribery we call lobbying, and systematically rigging the system to keep people impoverish is a violation of basic human and civil rights. In contrast, smoking weed and running around nude in public is not.

Liberal does NOT mean

1. Pro-choice.
The question of when an offspring becomes a person and is entitled to rights is outside the scope of liberalism. Liberals may be anywhere in the spectrum of pro-life to pro-choice.

2. Socialistic or Communistic
These are economic issues and as liberalism is a social philosophy, liberals can and do subscribe to many, many different economic philosophies.

3. Left or democrats
Although social conservatism has become code for bigotry and is therefore incompatible with liberalism, that does not mean the left or democrats are liberals or that liberals are democrats. I view the Democratic Party as simply being the far less evil of the two parties, but that doesn't mean I don't think their evil. They are just a minor evil compared to the Republicans.

Although you might make a case that the left wants multitudes of poor, I doubt that is true. It seems to me that the rich, who vote almost entirely Republican, want a multitude of poor because their opulent lifestyles can only exist if there are multitudes of poor doing shitty jobs for low pay. If all the poor suddenly died, the rich would have to pay a hell of a lot more for the middle class to do these jobs. And that would dramatically decrease their wealth. If the middle class also suddenly died, the rich would instantaneously cease being rich. They would have to do all the work they currently pay others to do including all the manual labor.

The rich need the poor. The poor do not need the rich. The rich prey on the poor like the lion preys on the gazelle. The gazelle gets nothing in return.

lakermania says

This is probably straying a little bit but I have always wondered why conservatives are so against abortion and liberals are so for it

If I were dictator, I would make abortion mandatory unless the people had enough money to pay for the damm thing up front.

if these were 12 year old kids.. like say the kids from the movie GOONIES... inquisitive types. And this guy did the same to them.. how would you guys feel?

Vicente says

Your rant is full of assumptions with little backing. How do you know what party potential aborted kids might have voted for in future? My head hurts from the Fox News relatives I have, who think BOTH that "those people" are having too many kids due to all the welfare they are living high on, and that they are having abortions right and left. The incongruity of these 2 simultaneous projections doesn't bother them. "We the people" of course never drive our daughters to another city to get one of those, nosiree, well nobody saw us anyhow.

Really?

88% Almost 90%! Of women who had an abortion comes from metropolitan areas according to prochoice.org.

64% of women who have abortion are minorities.

57% of women who have abortions are below the poverty level, not including minors which is at least 6%.

Only 13% of abortion patients describe themselves as born-again or Evangelical Christians. 22% are Catholic.

Assumptions? Does the majority of these demographics sound like conservative voting women to you?

But hey, but I'm just a guy who leans to the left on a lot of social issues like abortion, who happens to vote Republican and sits on the sidelines watching in bewilderment, as the two parties do things which are contradictory to their own benefit.

http://www.prochoice.org/about_abortion/facts/women_who.html
http://www.guttmacher.org/pubs/fb_induced_abortion.html

Dan8267 says

Don't let our stupid media fool you into thinking that liberals are on the left. We're orthogonal to the stupid left-right line. And we're farther from either the left or the right than they are from each other.

Rather than go point by point, and take this topic even more off track, it would be easier to concede that yes....people like myself do tend to use "liberal" in place of Democrat or leftist in many instances. It's easy to do, like you insinuated, there are no liberals voting for conservatives. Of course the reverse is never done....