Good Guy with a Gun #48: Houston, AK

Original Incident: December 20, 2023. Homeowners found a man in their garage trying to steal their stuff. They confronted him; he attacked them; one of them shot him twice. He lived to be charged.

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Picture the area around your garage. Now put some snow around it, and add the tracks of a person leading into it. And nobody you know put those tracks there.

(C’mon... If you don’t have a garage, or you live where there’s no snow, just play along.)

As you go into the garage to see what’s going on, you’re startled by a man who’s in there. You startled him, too, and he picks up a lamp and swings it at you like a club.

You draw, but you’re a little hesitant to pull the trigger — and he makes a grab for the gun. That’s enough for you, and you pull the trigger twice.

We don’t know the names of the people who experienced this, but they live in Houston, Alaska, fourteen minutes west of Wasilla. They weren’t harmed.

The lamp-swinging, garage-invading criminal is Kahleb Johnson, 30 years old at that time. First responders provided medical attention and then took him to the hospital with non-life-threatening injuries. At the time the news articles were written, troopers were forwarding charges of assault and battery to the DA’s office.

Here’s Houston, Alaska in Google Maps.

Sources

There are three articles about this story that we can find.

• The Anchorage Daily News is the source with the suspect framing discussed above.

• Alaska Native News also covered this incident with an article.

• Interestingly, the AP covered it as well, but I don’t see other news outlets picking up the AP article.

There’s also a Facebook group called Mat-Su Valley News that posted about it.

Your editors take special note of how the Anchorage Daily News frames the story: “This is the second time¹ within a week that a burglary escalated into a shooting in Mat-Su.”

The reporter says that these burglaries “escalated” when the homeowners shot their attackers, but it’s hard to see how the supposed “escalation” did anything of the sort. Escalation of a conflict is generally bad; these people, who were being attacked with blunt force or knives, were in fact better off and had a better result because they were armed.

When the victims who were being assaulted shot in self-defense, the shooting didn’t escalate the crime — it stopped it.

That thing that never happens, happens every day.

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1. We published the first incident as Good Guy with a Gun #40.