Lisa Falkenberg in this morning's Chron, in a follow-up to her own armchair-quarterbacking of Joe Horn:
I don't really think it's the facts alone that suggest Joe Horn was "itching to pull the trigger" so much as the way people like Lisa Falkenberg spin the facts of the case to fit their own preconceived notions of how we should or should not be watching out for our neighbor. The rest of the column proceeds to cloud the issue even further by tossing out statistics about how crime has gone down in Houston and using these facts to say that people's fears about crime in Houston aren't really justified. Which is ironic considering how Falkenberg talks about "missing the trees for the forest." Why is that? Well, ask anyone who's been a crime victim what the decrease in crime means to them personally. I'd be pretty sure it's not gonna mean a damn thing to them since it happened to them. Or, put another way, there may not be so many home invasions here in the Golden Triangle, but the next time it happens it'd be interesting to see what the victim of said home invasion would say to the suggestion that it doesn't happen often. Just because crime has gone down doesn't mean Joe Horn should have just sat back and let those thugs break into that house."It's not the things they steal that upsets people," said Joe Brignac of Katy. "It's that they're violating the sanctity of people's privacy in their houses."
Many of these folks have trouble seeing the trees for the forest. To them, Horn's actions send a message that we're mad as hell and we're not going to take it anymore. Never mind the facts in the case that suggest Horn was itching to pull the trigger and needlessly took two lives.
And if what I've heard is right, said thugs came at Horn with a crowbar. Call me callous, but anyone stupid enough to come at a man with a shotgun with anything other than hands in the air deserves whatever they get coming to them, no matter what color they are. I'd just think of it as chlorination of the gene pool. But maybe that's just me.
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