By now you've probably heard about the Michigan woman who pulled out a gun in the parking lot of the Home Depot in Auburn Hills and fired shots at someone running from the store with a security guard chasing them (details HERE.) The store is part of a retail district with hundreds of stores in the area.
Here's an overhead shot from Google maps showing the Home Depot where it all went down:
Well, it turns out (not surprisingly) that she was not being personally threatened when she fired at the alleged shoplifter:
Police confirmed on Wednesday that a concealed pistol license (CPL) holder was not being threatened by a fleeing shoplifter when she decided to fire multiple shots at him in a Home Depot parking lot.
And experts interviewed Wednesday doubted the shooting could have been justified.
And that, my friends, might just put her in jail.
Here are a couple of choice bits from the reporting by the Detroit Free Press on this story:
To use a concealed weapon in Michigan, a CPL holder needs to think that there is an imminent danger of death, great bodily harm or sexual assault, or think there is a similar danger to someone else, said Rick Ector, a firearms trainer who runs Legally Armed Detroit. He added that a gun is “truly a tool of last resort.”
“In that situation personally, there’s no way I would be shooting my gun,” said another instructor, Dawn Martin, with the Kalamazoo-based Viper Security Enforcement Inc.
And:
“It’s my worst nightmare as a CPL instructor,” said Doreen Hankins, owner of Detroit Arms, which holds CPL classes. “You have to know the entire situation before you pull that handgun out. And I don’t see that a shoplifter at Home Depot fills any of those criteria.” [...]
Hankins, the owner of Detroit Arms, said of the shooting, “None of it makes sense. Even if it were law enforcement, they wouldn’t do that.”
She added, speaking of CPL holders: “You are not a police officer. You are not a person out there protecting the public at large.”
This woman needs to go to jail.