"The shooters story was that the robber was decending the stairs with his wife in a choke hold and a gun to her head. But I don't about Massachusetts (this was in Boston, yes?), maybe your supposed to let the bad guy take your wife and you should call 911 and wait for the police to take a report."... that was his *first* story -- that he simply disarmed the intruder. And in that version, he *didn't* claim to have shot anyone, in defence of anyone at all, or any other way.
He didn't do that until police received a call about an individual with a gunshot wound at an apparently nearby address:
Roisten *then* claimed he disarmed the suspect with his left hand and shot the suspect with his right as the suspect fled out of the front door, police said.
This guy apparently couldn't even make up a good self-defence/defence of wife story when he'd had all that time to do it. (Guess he never took one of those "self-defence" courses where one learns how to handle the police to one's advantage after injuring/killing someone else.) He claimed to have shot
a person who was running away.I know it all isn't particularly easy to follow from the news report, but that's how it went down. The fellows who reportedly burst into his home when his wife answered a knock at the door actually (according to somebody else, anyhow) had keys to the door. And they knew the male householder by name. And the one who got shot had a glass tube in his pocket. And I'm seeing a bit of an internecine squabble here. And I'm wondering how opportune it is to have
drug dealers law-abiding citizens wandering about with licences for firearms, and firearms, and whether that old
right to own a firearm for self-defence stuff really works all that well when applied to individuals who are engaged in anti-social activities of the kind that make them rather unusually vulnerable to people doing things to them they might need to defend themselves against. (But then again, a right's a right, and I still haven't figured out why anybody should be rendered unable to exercise his/her right of self-defence just because s/he's a drug dealer.)
If he did indeed shoot at someone who was fleeing out a door, it might be just dumb luck that he hit his target and not the five-year-old walking by on the sidewalk. And it seems to me that if he chose to engage in risky behaviour, the risk was for him to assume, not for him to shift onto anyone who had the bad luck to be in the vicinity. And ditto for pretty much anybody else.
(Edited to fix my faulty memory; the gunshot victim wasn't at a hospital.)