Thanks, Charles. Desperate people do desperate things, and they don't deserve to die for it. No one deserves to die.

Now, sit back and enjoy all the enlightened comments this post is sure to attract.

It is indeed tragic. Those poor kids will be scarred for life.

And he could have warned them off without firing (as, BTW, I have done not once — but twice — back in the day while living in Highpoint. And it is highly likely they would've skedaddled).

But what if those two men, in the commission of crime, had made it into the bedroom of this man's children? And a direct confrontation with an armed home owner occurred. In the presence of witnesses and the terror and mayhem of screaming children. Could not the same desperation that drove them to become burglars also then drive them to become multiple murderers? It does happen in this country with troubling frequency.

While I don't believe in elevating these sorts of tragedies into some sort of "American Hero With A Gun" status it's certainly not a simple moral calculus if you find yourself in this situation. You could say the gun changed the calculus. Probably. But who knows how things could've gone with a few seconds either way.

The home owner is neither a villain as you seem to ant to pain here. Nor is he a hero.

Rather he found himself flung into an impossible situation due to the poor choices of a foolish, desperate man. And that dead man is still a criminal regardless of his desperation. He did this to his family every bit as much as the homeowner. This foolish man death is nothing to celebrate but only something to mourn. But the responsibility for the burglars choices rest squarely with himself.

He was out burglarizing houses to feed his baby? Riiiiight.

Drug addict making the last of a lifetime of poor choices is more like it. You can't engineer society to protect this loser from his own mistakes. And it sounds like you want other people to pay for his poor choices so he doesn't have to.

@2 is what I call a mic-drop comment.... nothing here from me.

Charles, how can you still be anti-gun when we have Nazis, white supremacist and the Ku Klux Klan walking around our streets armed and in uniform?

When someone writes "Rather he found himself flung into an impossible situation due to the poor choices of a foolish, desperate man. And that dead man is still a criminal regardless of his desperation," all I can think of is Anatole France: "The law, in its majestic equality, forbids the rich as well as the poor to sleep under bridges, to beg in the streets, and to steal bread."

@2: your contention is that burglaries in America turn into multiple murders with "troubling frequency"? I wasn't under the impression that is at all frequent.

Meanwhile, hundreds, if not thousands, of people whose partners had heart surgery deal with adversity without resorting to crime.

This is an inherent risk when one breaks into a home filled with the sleeping children of the home's owner.

He chose poorly. There is such a thing as being responsible for your willful actions, regardless of how much we try to pretend such a thing should and could not occur.

@3: How do you know he was a drug addict? Are you just assuming that?

I also used to know some piece of shit who would burglarize and steal things because his mother needed xyz

Nobody cares. There is no excuse to be a degenerate in this country. This isn't the world of Aladdin.

Thank you for pointing this out, Charles.

So was the dude robbing the house or what?

He lived the life of a fool and died as a fool.

If you're going to attempt to rob people, trying to sneak into (kids!) bedroom windows at night of random homes is not the way to do it. That's effectively asking to be shot and killed.

Frankly, if I were to resort to a life of crime, I'd drive around neighborhoods and look for homes that just came up for sale. Since homes sell so quickly around here, I'd come back the next weekend and eyeball the house for a U-Haul van. A few minutes after they left, I'd back up another rented van up to the garage, drill through the realtor's key holder, cut the power to the house by removing the utility meter and then take my time stealing everything that isn't bolted down.

That's what happened to me a few years back in Pierce County. It sucked getting robbed, but I have to give the criminal props for having a slick, non-violent and non-destructive operation. They stole the refrigerator, washer/dryer and all the appliances - all without leaving a scratch. And it didn't involve endangering children or a family.

@14 these days, you'll get shot n kilt by the neighbor....you're impressed that the robbers didn't leave scratch, oh my gawd,,,

Surely if the situation were reversed, if the SeaTac homeowner had crawled through the bedroom window of Elgin's infant son in the middle of the night, he would have just gotten a stern talking-to.

@10. It's absolutely an assumption. A 100% correct assumption.

@17. Pretty much. Let's engineer society to minimize the accountability of those who make horrible personal choices for their lives with no regard to the affect it may have on others. Then everyone will be happy because justice and equity will finally have been realized.

@7 Do multiple murders happen all the time? No. More than they should? Yes. As in more frequently than it happens in say, France or just about any other civilized wealthy nation.

America is a horrifically violent place.

Again, if we're going to speculate that desperation drove this man to crime then that man, who was desperate enough to break into the bed room of children in the middle of night, could also desperate enough to murder everyone in the house when cornered.

You can't have it both ways.

Oh for fuck's sake. All y'alls saying "Whelp, he shouldn't have decided to be a burglar due to his crippling medical bills" can go fuck straight off.

If this country had a decent fucking medical program, one where a man wouldn't be forced to steal to pay for necessary surgery, this whole thing wouldn't have happened.

A man was faced with a truly horrifying choice here: Let his wife die because, despite being one of the wealthiest countries on the goddamn planet, we can't take care of our people; or take a chance at stealing from someone better off so that maybe, if all goes well, his wife might live.

If the wealthy one percent, and the even astronomically-wealthier 0.1 percent have to be taxed a tiny bit more so that everyone in our country gets fair healthcare I am okay with that. And I doubt that the one percenters and the 0.1 percenters will even fucking notice that they have one million less, or one billion less. Fuck them.

@20: you're speculating more. mass murder is theoretically possible, but less likely than desperation.

Charles, I gotta hand it to you. You're a great writer and you have a kind of moral courage
And I do appreciate you forcing me to examine the other side to this story.
But no.
Dude needed to get a job and resign himself to being a drone for a period of time.

there's always a choice. there's always personal responsibility. the family left behind changes nothing. is it any less tragic when a burglar without a family gets shot?

win stupid games, win stupid prizes.

First, the break-in happened in in the morning. In fact, MOST break-ins happen during the day while people are expected to be out. The burglar and his partner likely expected that no one would be home. Only the most aggressive thieves want to break into an occupied home.

Second, the homeowner was in SeaTac and not one of its wealthiest neighborhoods. It's not like the thief was trying to get some good stuff at a rich person's house. He was victimizing someone who might be only marginally better off than he was.

Third, there's no way the homeowner could have known the thief's backstory. There's no reason he should have stopped and asked. For all the abuses of gun rights in our society, this is the one use that is almost universally accepted... protecting your home and family from criminals.

Fourth, no matter how "just" we try to make our society, so long as we have the freedom to make bad decisions, there will be people on the fringe. We should do more to give people opportunities to succeed, but in the end, you can't save people from themselves by denying them every bad choice they could make without becoming a totalitarian regime even dystopian fiction has yet to envision.

And what do you do about the people who keep making bad choices? If we can't protect other members of society from becoming victims of someone else's bad choices, can we conscientiously deny them the tools to protect themselves?