I travel quite a bit for TTAG, and as a result I have spent a good number of nights in hotels. Thanks to budget restrictions, those hotels haven’t always been the nicest, and as a result I have come up with a personalized rating system for how nice and safe a hotel feels: do I keep the safety on or off for my nightstand gun. A story out of my home base of San Antonio shows that even when you’re staying in a “safety on” hotel, it pays to always be ready . . .
Let me set the scene for you: it’s the middle of the day, and one of the other guests is acting unruly in the hallway. You get momentarily pulled into the kerfuffle, but decide that rather than escalating the situation the better idea is to head back to your room and let the authorities handle the unruly guest. No dice: the man follows you back to your hotel room and starts banging on your door. You open the door to tell him to go away, and he charges at you.
What do you do? Well, in this case . . .
They said a confrontation between the two led to the shooting. Witnesses said the man who was shot, believed to be in his 20s, was acting unruly in the hallway.
“The individual who was shot was apparently breaking some lights in the ceiling. When the other guest walked by him, there was some type of at least verbal altercation. This is all preliminary,” said McManus.
Police said that’s when the shooter, reportedly in his 40s, left for his room.
Investigators said the victim was banging on the man’s door and when he opened it, the victim charged at him.
The shooter told police he fired once, hitting the victim in the chest and killing him.
In this case, the concealed carry holder did way more than Texas law demands. The Lone Star State is a “stand your ground” kind of place, and yet the concealed carry holder in this situation retreated from the scene and back to his own hotel room. The soon-to-be-deceased then re-escalated the situation by following the man and banging on his door. There will be some questions about why the man chose to open the door instead of calling the police, but legally speaking he seems to be in the clear.
We still don’t have all the details, but it looks like this will probably be a clean-cut case of self defense. And another reason why I never leave home without my Wilson Combat.