Law & Order
Well, I watched/listened to last night's Law & Order episode. It was the "ripped from the headlines" story that meshed with the hunting massacre here in Wisconsin. I've posted on this before here and here, when it was breaking news.In typical liberal fashion, the screenwriters took a tragic story and bastardized it, making the victims into the bad guys again. In last night's episode, the hunting incident was only discovered after a car chase in downtown Manhattan led to the death of a man in a SUV. He plowed into a restaurant, hurting the customers. A boy was injured in the crash while the driver was killed. It seems that the SUV was being chased by another non-descript sedan. The detectives detected a weapon in the SUV and came to the conclusion that the SUV had traveled to Manhattan from upstate New York. The vehicle belonged to a man who was supposed to be hunting with his son in the woods.
The detectives come upon several dead bodies in the woods. They then discover that the mad gunman had murdered the hunters in a dispute over a treestand, then stolen the SUV of one of his victims. In taking the vehicle, he realizes he has stolen an occupied vehicle. The hunter's son was asleep in the SUV and woke when the vehicle began to move. Bad guy threatens kid.
Meanwhile, another hunter preparing to join the crowd hears gunshots and screams, then sees the bad guy fleeing the scene in the SUV. He decides to follow the fleeing car and calls 9-1-1 from his cell phone. Unfortunately, his reception is poor and the operator can't make out what he is saying before his cell phone goes dead.
(Aside: I don't know about y'all, but in the woods in lots of places cell phone reception is bad. Presumably he could have thought ahead and charged his battery, but if I can't get my husband to do it, it really is too much to ask of a fictional character.)
The cops don't respond, because they don't know there is a problem.
(Further aside: I've lived in the country. It can be 45 minutes before the fire department shows up, let alone the cops. I've even lived in urban areas, upscale snooty urban areas, where it took the police department of the village an hour to show up to a burglary. So, I'm not the type that waits around for the police.)
The guy following the bad guy, whom McCoy later calls a 'vigilante', flees the accident scene when the car crashes into the restaurant. Although, technically, I'm not certain that he caused the accident. When the bad guy stops for gas, the good guy doesn't alert anyone because he doesn't want the guy to see him. He doesn't stop along the road or alert the folks at the toll booths.
So, naturally, since the bad guy died in the car crash and since the good guy lied to the cops and didn't do enough to stop the guy...McCoy prosecutes him. The judge throws out the first case, saying essentially, that hindsight is 20-20, and that unless you were in your shoes you can't blame the 'vigilante' for not doing more. But, then the abducted kid dies of complications, so McCoy files new charges.
My point is, once again the Left, through entertainment, has chosen to back the bad guy, the mad gunmen, instead of the guy who was at least trying to do good. It really makes me mad! Could the guy do more? Maybe. But in an emergency, few people think perfectly clearly and rationally.
Here's another thing: if you are going to abdicate responsibility for your own personal safety and well-being, that's your thing. But not all people are willing to do that. Faced with the same circumstances, we all would have done something different. Some would have done nothing. They would have walked away. But hunters, being do-it-yourself kinds of guys, normally aren't of that breed. They are the go-to guys. The guys that get it done.
For heaven's sake, you can't say that your only line of defense is the police force. That's like telling the bad guy, "Go ahead and rape and/or kill me. The cops won't show up for at least 30 minutes once they are informed of a disturbance. You are going to let me call 9-1-1, so if you also don't let me scream, we're on your timeline. Do your damnedest!" I'm simply not comfortable with that. You try to rape me, you get the cold hard steel of my Walther PPK in your nether regions.
In England, as I understand it, you aren't entitled to protect your life and property with deadly force. For heaven's sake, there have been cases where the Subjects of Britain have defended their property with force and only injured the perpetrator. What do they get? Hauled into court, of course, and sued for damages. Britain: Where crime really does pay.
Look, the story offended me because it was ripped from the headlines. And, seeing as how the story was only "inspired" by actual events, the non-news-junkie, non-Wisconsinite may not see the alterations in the story. They may take this story to mean that all hunters/gun-owners are wackadoo serial killer wannabes. They may think that this story is straight from the headlines, when in fact, I believe the real victims only fired after being fired upon.
Gun owners, I have found, are overly polite sorts. They work very hard not to offend. Just go to a gun show sometime and you'll see what I mean. Most gunowners are not psychopaths. Most Catholic priests are not child molestors. Same thing. For the Law & Order franchise to depict the story in this manner, wrongly portrays the victims as the aggressors and misleads the public on the realities of actual events.
It was crap. That's all I have to say about that.
