From the Herald & Review:
Police: Decatur woman shot father of her child in self-defense
Police say a Decatur woman shot the 33-year-old father of her child to defend herself after he attacked her while she was in a vehicle Sunday evening.
Sgt. Chris Copeland said officers were sent at 6:50 p.m. to HSHS St. Mary’s Hospital in response to the man having been shot in his right side.
He told police the woman had shot him in front of his home in the 3800 block of East Grand Avenue, Copeland said. Police began their investigation and contacted the 29-year-old woman, who voluntarily came to the Decatur Police Department for questioning.
Copeland said the woman had several injuries to her face from the man battering her while she was inside of her vehicle. She had a shunt in her head from a previous injury, and a blow to the head could be fatal, Copeland said.
She defended her life from her piece-of-shit baby daddy. She had obvious injuries from the attack and a history of life-threatening injuries from previous attacks.
Seems pretty cut-and-dry. So how can Illinois fuck this up?
The woman told police she shot the man in self-defense, Copeland said. He said the woman is not facing charges for the shooting, but is facing a preliminary charge of aggravated unlawful use of a weapon for lack of a concealed carry license. She is being held in lieu of $75,000.
She didn’t have the proper paperwork to defend her life outside of her home.
Can Illinois fuck this up any more?
You betcha!!!
The man was arrested and is facing preliminary charges of domestic battery and unlawful vehicular invasion. He posted $10,000 bond.
Nearly beat a woman to death? That’s $10,000.
Defend yourself from being murdered without paying your Dane-Gelt to the bureaucracy? That’s $75,000.
Welcome to Illinois where the law would rather you get beaten to death than defend yourself from a habitual abuser without the necessary paperwork and fees.
Keep in mind that it takes 90 days to get an Illinois CCW from the time the permit is sent in. Training takes 16 hours, but the wait times for training can be weeks or months long. It seems that this woman knew she needed her gun NOW and didn’t have time to wait for the bureaucracy to approve her permit request.
This is why I love Alabama, South Dakota, and Indiana. The background check is run while you wait at the police station, and they give you your permit right there as soon as it is approved. It takes about 15 minutes.
If a battered woman is threatened in Huntsville at 8:00 am, she can have her permit by 8:30.
I know we in the gun rights community like to say “when seconds count, the police are minutes away.”
Well, I think the new tagline should be “when seconds count, your permit to carry is 90 days away from being mailed to you.”
I may be mistaken, but my WI Concealed Carry License may allow me, through some obscure loophole, to carry my pistol concealed in my car in Illinois.
http://www.illinoisgunpros.com/illinois-concealed-carry-for-non-residents/
Meaning that I have more legal protection as a WI resident traveling through Illinois than an Illinois resident with no permit.
A “permit” to buy a gun? WTF? In Texas, my license to carry means I can walk into any gun store, fill out the 4473 and walk out. No “background check”, so if the NICS is down or busy, so what. Not quite constitutional carry, but I don’t need to go find some bureaucrat to give me “permission”.
FiftyCal, yes, in unconstitutional states like MA, you need a permit merely to buy a gun — never mind carry one.
15 minute permits are a good thing, but Constitutional Carry is the better answer.
Meanwhile, this story is confirmation that T.D.Melrose was right. Neil Smith quotes him at the top of his blog:
“Gun control is the idea that it’s better to see a woman dead in an alley, strangled with her own pantyhose, than to see her with a gun in her hand.”
So glad I’m in Missouri. Constitutional carry baby! I do have a permit so I can carry when I travel. Illinois is the only nearby state that doesn’t honor it so I never travel there.
I hope this case ends up in the SC.
It occurs to me we can use this sort of story as a way to quantify how civilized a state is. Let’s call it the “Melrose factor”. It is the ratio of the penalty applied to the victim vs. the penalty applied to the criminal.
In the case of Illinois, we see the Melrose factor is 7.5. It says that Illinois values criminals 7.5 times more highly than they value honest people.
A civilized state would have a Melrose factor of 0.