Let’s say you’re a NBA player. While you weren’t drafted out of college and you’re way down on the league salary scale, you’ve finally made the big show and you’re pulling in nice bank by any reasonable standard. And now that you’ve made the big time, you have to keep up appearances by fathering at least one child with someone to whom you’re not married…let alone living. Now it’s your daughter’s first birthday and you decide to fly into Dallas for the event. But her mother pisses you off somehow and you decide to straighten her out, making an un-announced visit to her new apartment. Unfortunately (for you) you’ve never been there before . . .
New Orleans Pelicans guard Bryce Dejean-Jones went to the wrong apartment unit, forced his way in and approached the bedroom yelling for his girlfriend . . .
Since it was well after midnight, someone was home in the apartment Dejean-Jones mistakenly broke into.
A Dallas resident told police he heard someone enter his apartment by kicking open the front door, police spokesman DeMarquis Black said in a statement. The resident said “he called out to the individual, but was not answered,” and when the resident’s bedroom door was kicked open . . .
Also unfortunate for Mr. Dejean-Jones was the fact that his baby momma lived Texas, a state where millions of people own guns for personal defense. So here’s a question: if you’re laying in your bed in the middle of the night and a screaming stranger first kicks in your front door, then your bedroom door, what would you do?
(The resident) stated he called out to the individual, but was not answered. As the individual kicked the bedroom door, the resident fired his gun. The individual left the apartment and collapsed in the breezeway.
Dejean-Jones died after being transported to a local hospital.
There’s not much ambiguity here really. Dejean-Jones seemed bent on assaulting the mother of his daughter to the point of kicking in her front door. Fortunately for her, he picked the wrong door. The innocent apartment dweller, sleeping in his bed, defended himself against a violent stranger using a firearm in a manner no one could find fault with.
Well, almost no one. In a section of its report titled Changes Coming?, CNN implies that supposedly lax Texas gun laws are to blame for the consequences of the NBA player’s violence and stupidity.
Police have not said whether any charges will be filed against the shooter.
But Texas is one of many of states that justifies the use of deadly force in certain cases when someone feels threatened in their home.
In recent years, some states — including Texas — have expanded that protection to any place a person “has the right to be.”
Texas and 21 other states have also removed a stipulation that a person has the “duty to retreat” before resorting to force against an attacker, according to the National Conference of State Legislatures.
CNN scribes Ralph Ellis and Vivian Kuo clearly think “castle laws” are dangerous. There’s an unmistakable, sotto voce disapproval of laws designed to allow individuals to protect themselves from violent attackers in their own homes. Strangely, they don’t specify exactly where they would have the unidentified resident — lying in his own bed — retreat in this particular situation. Only that Dejean-Jones’ death is, in the words of NBA commissioner Adam Silver, a “tragic loss”.
Here’s hoping the resident isn’t seriously traumatized by the ordeal and recovers quickly.