Good Guy with a Gun #250: Anderson, IN
The prosecutor denounced "gun violence" right after praising an instance of it. | Original incident: July 8, 2024
These posts are based on our Good Guy with a Gun calendar. Today’s post is significantly updated from the calendar version.
I found a few tidbits for people who, like me, don’t know anything about Anderson, Indiana.
It’s about halfway between Indianapolis and Muncie.
Basketball leagues sprung up and changed in the wake of WWII, and Anderson had its own team.1 In 1949, the Anderson Duffey Packers became the NBA’s Anderson Packers. They lasted a year, then joined the ill-fated National Professional Basketball League for its one-year existence, and died out.
The city’s economic fate was worse than their basketball team’s. The job market in Anderson shriveled from about 22,000 GM jobs in the 1970s to under 2,600 by 2006. GM was the primary employer in the area, so the demise of GM meant the impoverishment of the city.2
Anderson’s poverty rate is about 20%, compared to Indiana’s 12%, which itself is close to the US average. Its violent crime rate is about 2% higher than the US rate, but its property crime rate is 15% higher than the US.3
The setting for this incident doesn’t look bad, though. It’s only a few hundred feet from the Madison County courthouse.
It was in this area that 51-year-old businessman Mark Squillante was playing “a Pokémon-style scavenger hunt game” on his phone just before 10 PM.
A stranger ambushed him, punching him in the face and stealing his phone.
Squillante was no longer playing games. He drew his gun and shot the man.
That man was 43-year-old Michael Piercy. He was homeless at the time. His ten-plus convictions since 2001 in nearby Henry County included battery resulting in bodily injury, burglary, carrying a handgun without a license, domestic battery, failure to register as a sex offender, possession of meth, sexual misconduct with a minor and theft. He had most recently been released from the Department of Corrections in April.
That night, Piercy had also allegedly threatened to harm several other people around downtown. He wasn’t armed at the time of his confrontation with Squillante.
Piercy died from his wounds.
Madison County Prosecutor Rodney Cummings filed no charges. “Everything that’s been presented to me it looks like a very strong self-defense case,” he said. “You can use deadly force to defend yourself or your property if you have reason to believe you could be injured or killed.”
He even referred to the gun itself, though he tried to have it both ways: “I mean this is one where someone defended himself and it could have been worse had he not had a gun, but gun violence is really over the top in the community and this town.”
But Cummings contradicts himself here. He had just deemed a specific act of “gun violence” to be reasonable, and not “over the top” at all. It was judicious “gun violence” in defense of self and property.
Law enforcement needs to control violence in general; otherwise, citizens will need to continue to judiciously apply gun violence to protect themselves.
Sources
There was good coverage from multiple sources here, though in different ways.
I very much appreciated the Star Press’s coverage of this incident, since they’re the only ones I see who detailed Piercy’s criminal history.
The Herald Bulletin named the defender, but it’s paywalled; fortunately, you can read at Yahoo!’s syndicated version.
WTWO 2 and Fox 59 / CBS 4 — it’s the same content at two URLs — provided good coverage about the prosecutor’s decision not to prosecute, with solid quotes.
Early investigations came from WISHTV 8, WTHR 13, and Fox 59 / CBS 4,
2A / Specialist sources
Goodguywithagun.online reader Claude Werner, a.k.a. The Tactical Professor, covered this as “Good” in a “The Good, The Bad, and The Ugly” roundup.
_The Tactical Professor_ is a really good info source!