A young Oklahoma mother shot and killed an intruder to protect her 3-month-old baby on New Year's Eve, less than a week after the baby's father died of cancer.
Sarah McKinley says that a week earlier a man named Justin Martin dropped by on the day of her husband's funeral, claiming that he was a neighbor who wanted to say hello. The 18-year-old Oklahoma City area woman did not let him into her home that day.
On New Year's Eve Martin returned with another man, Dustin Stewart, and this time was armed with a 12-inch hunting knife. The two soon began trying to break into McKinley's home.
As one of the men was going from door to door outside her home trying to gain entry, McKinley called 911 and grabbed her 12-gauge shotgun.
McKinley told ABC News Oklahoma City affiliate KOCO that she quickly got her 12 gauge, went into her bedroom and got a pistol, put the bottle in the baby's mouth and called 911.
"I've got two guns in my hand -- is it okay to shoot him if he comes in this door?" the young mother asked the 911 dispatcher. "I'm here by myself with my infant baby, can I please get a dispatcher out here immediately?"
The 911 dispatcher confirmed with McKinley that the doors to her home were locked as she asked again if it was okay to shoot the intruder if he were to come through her door.
"I can't tell you that you can do that but you do what you have to do to protect your baby," the dispatcher told her. McKinley was on the phone with 911 for a total of 21 minutes.
When Martin kicked in the door and came after her with the knife, the teen mom shot and killed the 24-year-old. Police are calling the shooting justified.
"You're allowed to shoot an unauthorized person that is in your home. The law provides you the remedy, and sanctions the use of deadly force," Det. Dan Huff of the Blanchard police said.
Stewart soon turned himself in to police.
McKinley said that she was at home alone with her newborn that night because her husband just died of cancer on Christmas Day.
"I wouldn't have done it, but it was my son," McKinley told ABC News Oklahoma City affiliate KOCO. "It's not an easy decision to make, but it was either going to be him or my son. And it wasn't going to be my son. There's nothing more dangerous than a woman with a child."
Source
A great story. Good job to this woman! Glad her child is safe.
It elaborates on the difficult of making such an assertion and why.
http://www.gunpolicy.org/firearms/regio
Research supported by two international foreign affairs departments and its sources aren't generally more than ten years old. Takes into account the difficulty of making the assertion you mean. Isn't US centric and all about advocating the second amendment.
Found in ten minutes.
See this from the same site as well: http://www.gunpolicy.org/firearms/regio
But as per the former link for why these kinds of assertions from the numbers can be misleading again.
Also see this for a fairly high rate of gun homicides despite an extremely low number of private gun ownership: http://www.gunpolicy.org/firearms/regio
And compare it with Serbia who has the second largest rate of private citizen gun ownership with comparatively low numbers of gun related homicides: http://www.gunpolicy.org/firearms/regio
Annual homicides by any means total;140
Annual firearm homicides total; 89
That's more than half. (edit; whoops, assumed the any means was aggregate. Assume the total aggregate is 229, that's still more than a third) You could infer that with more restrictive laws those stats wouldn't be so high (I don't consider that a low murder rate at all). I'm not a statistician but I wouldn't want to draw a conclusion from such a small pool of results, and one country at that.
Swizerland;
general homicide; 53
by gun; 40
I could infer that with a perfect law and complete absence of guns, we'd be looking at almost half of all deaths eliminated (assuming the gun stats are not aggregated in the general homicide; if they were we'd have 13 deaths total, isn't that nice!)
What about the US? 2007...
Annual homicides by any means total; 16,929
Annual firearm homicides total; 10,129
Jeeesus Christ, I am glad I don't live there. Imagine stricter gun laws, gangs without guns, and how many lives/much money & state resources/policing time that would save.
Tunisia only lists number of homicide generally and doesn't have a gun statistic to compare it to.
I can cherry pick statistics too; Australia, restrictive, homicide generally; 260, homicide by gun; 19.
We could bandy numbers about all day; it doesn't take into account different cultures, different states of security and so forth. You can interpret numbers in very different ways, as I've shown your stats can fit my point of view. You cannot be definitive about this issue by relying on statistics.
Edited at 2012-01-07 12:17 am (UTC)