skippy the bush kangaroo

Sunday, April 22, 2007

giving headlines

and the award for today's most deceitful headline goes to...what a surprise! fox news!

82-year-old ex-beauty queen stops intruder by shooting out tires

when we read that, the obvious thought appeared first: well, there's an argument for allowing citizenry to bear and keep arms.

then we wondered: how...or why...would shooting out one's tires stop one from intruding? does one simply sit in one's car, resigned to not be able to drive illicitly into somebody else's home?

upon reading the story, the answer became clear: the woman stopped the intruder from trying to leave.

venus ramey, 82, confronted a man on her farm in south-central kentucky last week after she saw her dog run into a storage building where thieves had previously made off with old farm equipment.

ramey said the man told her he would leave. "i said, 'oh, no you won't,' and i shot their tires so they couldn't leave," ramey said.

she had to balance on her walker as she pulled out a snub-nosed .38-caliber handgun.

"i didn't even think twice. i just went and did it," she said. "if they'd even dared come close to me, they'd be 6 feet under by now."

ramey then flagged down a passing motorist, who called 911.
granted, the woman as 82 years old, so she gets points for chutzbah. but apparently the worst the guy was doing was trespassing; he was unarmed, and he was leaving.

personally, we wouldn't want our 82 grandma waving a gun around. but leave it to fox noise to make it appear as if the lady stopped an attack, when the exact reverse was true.

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posted by skippy at 5:58 PM |

6 Comments:

Grannies waving guns around might not be a good thing. One wonders if they manage to find their glasses before they start popping off rounds.
commented by Blogger beepbeepitsme, 7:56 PM PDT  
It doesn't even sound like the guy TOOK anything, or presented a threat at all.
commented by Anonymous KMTBERRY, 12:56 AM PDT  
Once more proof positive that the so called mainstream news is not worth a pile of broken buttons.
commented by Anonymous Lord Matt, 4:02 AM PDT  
skip have to differ with you on this one

First the story reports that she had been burglarized before which at least made it possible that the guy was coming back for more, which pretty much makes the case for turning him over to police, which is a lot easier if he is at gunpoint in a disabled vehicle than being at large with at best a known license plate number.

Second it is likely as not that there were stolen goods in the car. You have no obligation to simply let people stroll off your property with your possessions in their possession.

Third you know he was unarmed how? And commenter kmtberry knows he didn't take anything how? And beepbeepitsme thinks its amusing to throw out ageist crap how?

Obviously you are not responsible for the commenters, and certainly the Fox headline was moderately misleading, but my only reaction on reading this item in the Sunday paper was "Good for her".

Lets put this in a different context. If your sister or wife woke up and found a strange man standing in the bedroom and his explanation was "I was just leaving" would you just tell her she should have said okay, rolled over and gone back to sleep? If not where would you draw the line? The porch, the front door, the living room? She didn't use deadly force, she killed a tire, and perhaps prevented a whole series of burglaries of her properties and here neighbors.

This kind of post simply plays into the hands of the gun nuts. Don't validate their looniness. Until gun control proponents understand that policies that make perfect sense in Philadelphia are positively nutty when the nearest sheriff is 40 miles away we are never going to get sensible gun control laws.
commented by Anonymous Anonymous, 7:54 AM PDT  
"Hutzbah"?

Skippy, you ain't spending enough time in the show business with the Yiddishers. It's spelled chutzpah and remember the guttural "ch."
commented by Blogger gmoke, 9:26 PM PDT  
point taken, gmoke, and corrected.

anonymous, i will grant you that the points about what could have been in his car was not addressed in the story.

i'm actually trying to talk more about the misleading headline than the righteousness of an 83 year old woman with a gun protecting her property.

i've got to say, tho, that a man leaving a shed on a farm property is not anywheres close to the same as a guy leaving my wife's bedroom.

unless that guy is me.
commented by Blogger skippy, 9:56 AM PDT  

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