These posts are based on our Good Guy with a Gun calendar. Today’s post is somewhat updated from the calendar version.
I’m sure the 46-year-old man’s questions weren’t pleasant, but I’m also sure that he didn’t deserve to be hit with a car.
The man saw two cars with teens in them — a Kia and a Hyundai — at Norton Village apartments that Wednesday afternoon. I suppose he thought they looked a little suspicious, because he walked up to ask them “about their presence,” as the Rochester PD put it.
The teens drove off. That was good.
Then they circled back and drove directly at him. Significantly less good.
He pulled a .45 (registered, which in the People’s Republic of New York is less a process than a punishment) and fired several rounds. The cars took off. He was uninjured.
Minutes later, a couple of miles away, a call came in for a seventeen-year-old shot on South Union Street with at least one wound to the upper body. Police figured out that he had been in one of the two cars back at Norton Village. His injuries were serious but not life-threatening.
Sorry, but I have to make a few extra comments.
WHAM 13 ran a minute-long segment about this incident, and one of their B-roll shots is priceless:
Yes, please feel free to defund the Rochester Police Department while “the children” are stealing cars at a rate three times higher than the year before (see below), so middle-aged men are forced to defend themselves using pistols New York State doesn’t want them to have. That sounds like a great idea.
Broken record time: Think of stories like this when people tell you about “gun violence” and “the children.” The judicious use of gun violence, which these (legally speaking) children brought upon themselves helped stop the vehicular violence they were inflicting on someone else. (Where is that Vehicular Violence Memorial, anyway?)
As it turns out, both cars were stolen.
Yet Another Digression: Nobody who knows anything about Kias and Hyundais should be surprised.
The year before, Rochester posted a 355% jump in stolen-vehicle reports — worst of the thirty-one cities somebody thought to measure — with most of the accused car thieves between thirteen and eighteen.
At the time the Democrat and Chronicle wrote about the problem in 2023 (see Sources), Rochester and other New York cities were even preparing to sue both manufacturers (because there’s nothing New York loves more than the government stepping in to save us all from ourselves).
Officers found the Kia, the Hyundai, and a 15-year-old boy near where the wounded teen turned up. The 15-year-old was charged with grand larceny, criminal possession of stolen property, and unauthorized use of a motor vehicle, then taken to the county’s juvenile detention center.
That’s only one arrest out of two carloads — probably two, assuming the teen in the hospital was also arrested. Let’s hope there were more that we just don’t know about.
The man wasn’t charged at the time of the last story I found, and the lack of follow-up suggests he never was.
Sources
WHAM covered it twice, the second piece the fullest account anywhere of what actually happened in the parking lot.
Teenager hospitalized after shooting in Rochester (Night-of report, and the only source with the dispatch and 911 times)
Rochester police: 17-year-old boy was shot as teens drove toward man at Norton Village (Next-day follow-up)
Other coverage:
Teenager seriously injured after shooting in Rochester involving stolen cars (WROC)
WHEC mistakenly says 3:30 AM instead of PM. RPD: Boy, 17, shot while riding in stolen car in parking lot (WHEC)
The car-theft numbers come from the Rochester Democrat and Chronicle, from the year before this happened. Rochester has highest car theft increase in the U.S. Most suspects are 13 to 18 years old (Democrat and Chronicle, July 31, 2023; the link is the syndicated version on Yahoo!)
Ah, the children. I have 16- and 17-year-olds in my class and they are not _boys_; they are young men.