A gun owner in Raleigh, North Carolina likely saved a life on Tuesday morning when he came to the aid of someone who was being threatened with an axe.
According to authorities, the incident began when two men living in an “encampment” near a quiet neighborhood on the city’s south side got into an argument. Though officials haven’t said where that encampment is located, Google Maps shows a strip of woods with a trail running through it located just to the east of the location where the shooting took place. That appears to be the same general area where a man was arrested last month after three people were stabbed at an encampment.
At some point the argument turned physical, and moved from the woods to the nearby neighborhood.
Investigators say that’s when a neighbor heard the fight, went outside, and shot the man wielding the ax.
The man who was shot collapsed nearby and was taken to a nearby hospital for treatment. The man who police say was beaten with the ax suffered multiple injuries to the face and was also taken to a nearby hospital.
Raleigh police say the two men know each other.
Police say the person who fired the shot has been cooperative and had a valid license to own a gun.
To be clear, you don’t need a license to own a firearm in North Carolina. Maybe the guy had a license to carry, though honestly it would be pretty stupid for a prosecutor to charge him with illegally carrying when he was coming to aid of someone who was being attacked with an axe.
Stupid, but not completely unheard of either, especially in Democrat-heavy jurisdictions.
Still, in this case it looks like the armed citizen was well within their rights to come to the aid of another. Under North Carolina law someone must have a “genuine, reasonable belief” that the third party is in imminent danger of death or great bodily harm, and can only use force that’s proportional to the threat. An axe is certainly capable of causing serious injuries or death, so in this case lethal force would be justified in defending the victim of the attack.
If I lived near this armed citizen’s home I’d walk over and shake his hand… and then I’d make plans to attend the next Raleigh City Council meeting to ask what on earth the city plans on doing with this encampment.
This isn’t the first time that an armed citizen has had to defend themselves or others from someone living in one of these encampments. Two years ago a man who was living in another homeless encampment pulled what appeared to be a gun on a man during an argument about a parking space. The second man drew his legally owned firearm and shot the man who was threatening him with what turned out to be a BB gun.
These encampments are havens for violently mentally ill individuals and drug addicts who don’t want to or believe they cannot follow the rules that would allow them to live in shelters or subsidized housing. Not everyone who pitches a tent in the woods falls into one of those categories, of course, but there have been enough issues in just the past month to demonstrate Raleigh has a real problem on its hands. In this case, an armed citizen prevented what could easily have been a homicide, but there won’t always be a good guy with a gun around, and it’s incumbent on city officials to address this crisis head on before someone else gets hurt.
Editor’s Note: The radical Left will stop at nothing to enact their radical gun control agenda and strip us of our Second Amendment rights.
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