Will Malven

11/16/2007

Friday afternoon, the 14th of November, 2007, 61 year old grandfather Joe Horn was working in his home when he heard glass breaking at his next door neighbor’s house. He investigated the sound and saw two men in the act of breaking into and then entering his neighbor's house. What happened next was a textbook example of how every American citizen should behave.

When Mr. Horn saw the two men breaking into his neighbor's house, he called 911 to alert the police. Over the next six or seven minutes, he conversed with the 911 operator as he waited for police to arrive.   Mr. Horn was outraged at this act of brazen criminal behavior and rightfully so, would that every law-abiding citizen felt such outrage when a crime is being committed.  Mr. Horn was absolutely determined that he was not going to allow these two criminals to escape and he told the 911 operator of his intention.

Having waited for the police to arrive, Mr. Horn then did what I would hope every citizen would do, he acted to defend his neighbor's property and very possibly his own. When he witnessed the perpetrators leaving the crime scene and it became apparent that the police would not arrive in time, Joe Horn grabbed up a pump shotgun and went outside to stop them and hold them for the police. He warned them not to move. They moved and he shot them.

Here is the Houston Chronicle’s article about the shooting:

Nov. 15, 2007, 9:58PM
Shooting of theft suspects may test self-defense law

By RUTH RENDON and PEGGY O'HARE
Copyright 2007 Houston Chronicle

In a case legal experts say may "stretch the limits" of the state's self-defense laws, a Pasadena man shot and killed two suspected burglars during a confrontation as they attempted to flee his neighbor's property Wednesday afternoon.

 

In the minutes before the fatal shootings, Pasadena police said the man called 911 and reported that he had heard glass breaking next door and saw two men entering the home through a window. Still on the phone with police, the man, believed to be in his 70s, saw the suspects leaving from the back of the home.

 

"I'm getting my gun and going to stop them," the neighbor told the dispatcher during the 2 p.m. call, according to Vance Mitchell, a spokesman for Pasadena police. "The dispatcher said, 'No, stay inside the house; officers are on the way.'

 

"Then you hear him rack the shotgun. The next sound the dispatcher heard was a boom. Then there was silence for a couple of seconds and then another boom."

Our forefathers believed that every citizen capable of handling and using a firearm could and should possess one.  They also believed that it was the duty of every citizen to protect themselves and their communities.  They expected men to intervene to prevent these crimes rather than cowering helplessly waiting for the police to arrive and watching helplessly as the criminals make good their escape because the police are can’t get there.

Any society so cowed by their government that they are afraid to defend themselves property, and their neighborhood is no longer a free society. In this case these criminals were stopped by a man who refused to allow himself and his neighbor to become a victims.  They encountered a man who refused to live in a completely lawless society.  We should all be angry that criminals feel perfectly safe in committing a crime like this. As Americans, we should not be forced to live in fear because some people don't respect the property of others.

Our population is increasing at an alarming rate, due in large part to a massive influx of people (illegal aliens) who feel no compunction at violating our nation’s laws to enter our country. If one uses the logic of Rudy Giuliani’s “broken window theory,” by looking the other way as we have been doing for decades as these law breakers violate the integrity of our borders, we are encouraging criminal behavior of a more serious nature.

 The fact is that police forces across the nation are increasingly undermanned, over worked, and underpaid.  It is apparent for all who will see that American citizens must begin to depend more upon their neighbors for security than on the police. The average response time in Houston to a “Priority One” (life threatening ) emergency call is now in excess of five minutes.  This, as reported by Channel Two News:

Local 2 Investigates analyzed three years worth of police response times, breaking down Houston neighborhood by neighborhood, we discovered more and more parts of the city are waiting longer than five minutes for police to respond to these life-threatening, "priority one" calls.

 

"What I hear from officers is we are short and could we get some help out here," outgoing Houston Police Officers’ Union president Hans Marticiuc said.

 

In 2004, police were taking longer than 5 minutes to respond to a third of Houston's neighborhoods. Two years later it was 43%. Through the first quarter of this year it was half the city.

 

"Any given shift you probably don't have more than 200 to 250 officers out on the street," Marticiuc said.

 

"For the entire city?" Arnold asked.

 

"Uh, huh," Marticiuc said.

Ironically that news story was published just nine days prior to this event.  Since “a burglary in progress” is not considered a life threatening call under ordinary circumstances, it is a safe bet that, short of Mr. Horn making his intentions to intervene clear to the dispatcher, the police would have arrived 5-10 minutes or more after the criminals had left the crime scene and were well out of the neighborhood.

Every action Mr. Horn took was textbook citizenship. Citizenship is not a state of being; it is a state of action. Citizens vote in elections, serve on juries, and help their neighbors when asked.  Real citizens care enough about their communities enough to be willing to risk their lives to make sure their neighborhoods are safe for their children, their neighbor's children, the elderly, and all of those who are incapable of protecting themselves. Real citizens do not sit and let bad things happen out of fear of injury or legal action.

Our society is slowly devolving  to a point where our justice system is more concerned with the rights of criminals than it is with the rights of law abiding citizens.  Our judges appear to care more about how our criminal population is being treated than the fact that they are in prison for a committing criminal acts against the people those judges are elected to protect.  Those to whom we have entrusted our domestic order and tranquility have become advocates of chaos rather than enforcers of order.  Why should the American people be forced to endure living in a lawless society because the lawyers of the ACLU and a bunch of Leftist Judges believe that criminals’ rights supersede the rights of law-abiding citizens to be secure in their neighborhoods and homes?

What happened on Wednesday was both heroic and tragic. Mr. Horn’s actions were heroic. It was the courageous thing to do and it was the right thing to do. That these two men had to die is tragic, but their deaths were of their own choosing. 

The criminals Dejesus and Ortiz were solely responsible for their own deaths.  Mr. Horn was not looking for someone to shoot that day; he was minding his own business.  The two perpetrators were looking for trouble and unfortunately for their families, they found more trouble than they bargained for.  We must never allow ourselves to forget, DeJesus and Ortiz were criminals and were caught in the act of committing a crime. Had they surrendered to Mr. Horn rather than ignore him, they would be alive today.  Had they not been intent on breaking the law, they would be alive today.

Our Founding Fathers believed passionately in every man’s right to own and protect his property as well as his person by any appropriate means.  They also believed in the right of people to protect their communities.  That is precisely what Mr. Joe Horn did when he confronted Ortiz and DeJesus.  The survival of our Republic depends on the citizens’ right to do so.

Our society has blessed us with lives of abundance and liberty due, in main part, to the laws we have passed which define how we are supposed to interact with each other.   Those blessings also derive from the rights and liberties we claim as our inheritance from our Creator and from the traditions and laws handed down to us by our forefathers.  

Our freedoms and liberties have been bought and paid for many times over by the blood of our forefathers and our fellow citizens and to the extent that we allow our government to usurp those freedoms and liberties, we dishonor those who have gone before us.

Criminals should be afraid to commit crimes.  They should live in terror that every time they go out to commit a crime, they will encounter a man like Joe Horn.  When criminals are more afraid of committing a crime than they are in gaining from their brazenness, then crimes decrease.  It has been proven time and again that the more likely it is that criminals believe that they will encounter a homeowner armed with a firearm; the less likely they are to attempt to enter that house. That is why those cities and states in which they have passed the most draconian gun laws have the highest violent crime rates and those which have enacted concealed carry laws and the castle doctrine, have the lowest violent crime rates.

The reaction from those on the Left was easily predictable.  They are immediately more concerned with the deaths of two felons than they are with the fact that they were caught committing a crime. Once more we are shown an object lesson that Liberals are incapable of comprehending human nature.  It is these same people who advocate tighter restrictions on gun ownership and who advocate an international policy of appeasement over confrontation.  Once more we are shown why allowing Liberals to govern our society is dangerous for our citizenry.

When a society becomes so afraid that it surrenders its citizens’ rights to do exactly what Joe Horn did; when a society allows itself to be disarmed by its government and police are the only people in that society who are allowed to possess firearms, it is precisely at that moment that a free society becomes a “police state.”

Mr. Horn is not happy that he was forced to kill those two men.  Their deaths will haunt him for a long time, but he should never doubt that what he did was right and justified.  And as for those in our society who condemn him, they are wrong and unjustified in their criticism.  Until they find themselves in the same situation and are forced to make the same decisions, perhaps they should withhold their judgment.

I don’t know if Messrs. Ortiz and DeJesus deserved to die for their crime, but once they made the decision to cross the line from citizen to criminal, once they chose to ignore Mr. Horn’s order to stop, they became responsible for their own fates.

I for one will pray for Mr. Horn, that he can find some solace in the fact that what he did was the right thing to do.  It was and is what every good citizen should be prepared to do.  He is a hero in the greatest traditions of our Founding Fathers.

Long Live Our American Republic!!!