Time to go over the four universal safely rules again, specifically rule number four: “Know your target and what’s beyond it.”
A Mission Bend, TX woman, had been drinking with her husband late into a Friday night. They got into a bad enough argument that she left her home and went to the home of her daughter at about 3:30 AM.
She knocked on the front door, but no one answered. So she went around to the back door and eventually started banging loud enough for the daughter to assume someone was trying to break in. Her husband got his gun and called 911. Not long after that, he fired multiple shots through the door, hitting his mother-in-law three times.
She is expected to make a full recovery, and police said charges are not likely. I would suspect that family consequences will be harsh however.
While a lot could be said about the mother-in-law’s decisions that night that led to her banging on the back door at 3:30 in the morning, none of that is an excuse for shooting through a closed door. Banging on a door is not a deadly force threat. As long as whoever it is that’s doing the banging is outside the home, they may be extremely annoying and even scary but they can’t hurt anyone as long as they are outside. A threat may be close, but it’s not yet imminent if there is a barrier between you and the threat.
The reason not to ever shoot through a closed door should be obvious; you simply can’t see who’s on the other side and if, in fact, they are a real threat. You don’t have a clear target, so you don’t know where each round is going. Depending on the neighborhood, of course, how easy would it be for rounds fired through a door to end up penetrating homes across the street? You are responsible for every round fired.
This is the sort of situation where you cannot allow fear of what might happen to control you. We don’t know this man’s thoughts at the time he fired but can you imagine that perhaps his desire to keep an assumed threat from getting into the house caused him to act prematurely?
I’m pretty sure his mother-in-law knows the answer to that.
