Good Guy with a Gun #59: Mascotte, FL

Original incident: December 28, 2023. When a 16-year-old boy breaks into a home at 6 AM, we know very little — except that the homeowner can't be blamed for shooting him.

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In a quiet neighborhood in Mascotte, Florida, just after 6 AM, a 16-year-old boy tried to break into a home. It was probably his second attempted burglary: Police had been called earlier that morning about another house in the area.

Someone called the police, because they were responding to an in-progress home invasion, but by the time they got there, it was over.

The homeowner shot the teen, wounding him seriously. First responders gave aid and sent him to the hospital, where he was in critical condition.

Nobody else was injured.

I’m sensitive to the idea that a young person was shot, but there are a couple of things to consider with respect to this incident.

1. When you hear about guns being a leading cause of death to “the young” — which is a misleading statement anyway — remember that youth is no barrier to being a danger. A 16-year-old boy is plenty strong enough to cause harm, and plenty of 16-year-old boys have assaulted and even murdered adult victims.

2. When someone is standing in his own house looking at someone breaking into it, he won’t know how old this person is, whether he’s armed or not, or whether he’s in a Big Brother program and might someday walk away from the criminal life.

   1. He (or she!) sees a threat, and justifiably so, so it’s the homeowner who deserves all of our sympathy, not the youth.

   2. For that matter, this child might have had a great upbringing and every advantage. We shouldn’t presume that he was among bad people just because he did bad things.

3. Unlike yesterday’s post, where I could look up the criminal records related to the home invader, there’s no resource for us to find juvenile records. You’ll find almost no additional information on this incident except the initial report.

Sources

There’s very little variation on this story from any source.

The best single source is the WFTV 9 report — not the write-up, but the video report on the same page. They gave a solid two minutes of airtime, and they humanized it with commentary from a neighbor. Nice work by this local team.

You can also get police report summaries from WESH 2 (with one minute of airtime), ClickOrlando.com, the Clermont Sun, and Gulf Coast News.

Finally, in the 2A / conservative press, you can find summaries from AWR Hawkins at Breitbart and Brandon Curtis at Concealed Nation.

That thing that never happens, happens every day.

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