Ranting and Raving (v9): Getting Away with Murder

I almost don't even know where to start with this one, it's so horrifying and so incredibly painful and so insanely stupid, it's hard to even talk about. 

Back in February, in Texas, of course, a nine-year-old girl was shot and killed by a guy who was robbed at an ATM. Here's the story from Houston's KWTX.

Police said the victim of a bank ATM robbery, Tony D. Earls, 41, is in custody charged with aggravated assault with a deadly weapon after Earls fired his gun at the wrong vehicle, striking and killing an innocent 9-year-old girl.

Earls, the robbery victim, was at the bank’s ATM drive-through making a transaction when an armed robber appeared on foot and robbed Earl at gunpoint.

According to investigators, Earls took out a weapon and fired several rounds in the direction of the suspect, but it’s unknown if the suspect, who is still at large, fired back.

The robbery victim then fired several rounds “at a pickup truck he thought the robbery suspect had gotten into,” police said.

The vehicle’s occupants, a family of five, were not involved in the robbery, police said, adding a stray bullet struck a 9-year-old girl in the backseat of the pickup. She was taken to Memorial Hermann-Texas Medical Center, where she later died.

 Earls did not know the stray bullet struck the girl when he called police to report the robbery.

It goes to show that anytime there are guns involved, the danger to innocent bystanders is extremely high,” said Houston Police Executive Chief Matt Slinkard.

And then, in July, this happened.

HOUSTON — The family of a 9-year-old Houston girl who died after she was shot by a man who had opened fire when he was robbed at an ATM said Wednesday they remain angered by a grand jury’s decision to not indict the man.

“That was not an accident. That was not self-defense,” April Aguirre, the aunt of Arlene Alvarez said during a news conference as a photograph of the girl as she lay in a hospital bed bloodied and bandaged shortly before her death was shown.

Tony Earls, 41, had been charged with aggravated assault, serious bodily injury, in Alvarez’s Feb. 14 death. A Harris County grand jury in Houston on Tuesday could have indicted him on this charge or several others, including manslaughter and murder, but declined to do so.

And this is not a surprise - at least, it's not a surprise in Texas, where everything is bigger, including the stupid stuff. 

Texas law “gives very, very broad self-defense rights for people carrying guns, even if the person makes a mistake,” said Sandra Guerra Thompson, a law professor at the University of Houston Law Center.

The murderer's attorney said the robber fired and the murderer "fired back in self-defense," and the murderer "continues to grieve for Alvarez but that the grand jury made the right decision and that the person responsible for her death is the robber." The murderer, they said, 

did what we believe anyone in that situation would have done. We are relieved that, despite the emotion and tough decisions that had to be made in dealing with this case, justice was served for (the murderer).

I'm sorry, but there is zero justice being served here, 

• Unless you think that an idiot who's so dumb he'd shoot at a random vehicle in the ATM line deserves justice. 
• Unless you think that an innocent nine-year-old little girl is acceptable collateral damage for a robbery. 
• Unless you think that a person who shoots at a stranger's vehicle in an ATM line is acting in self-defense, when he doesn't even know whether the person who robbed him is in that car, or any other car in the ATM line.
• Unless you think that someone's going to rob a guy at an ATM by driving up to it, getting in line behind other cars, parking his car, getting out, walking up to the car at the head of the line, robbing the drive, going back to his car, getting in, starting it up, and sitting in line until cars move and he can get out of line and drive away. Maybe ATM robbers are that dumb in Texas, but up here, they'd have come on foot, hidden in the bushes, approached your car, stolen your money, and run away. 

There's also especially zero justice being served here if you believe that the only person or entity responsible for a murder is the person who pulls the trigger, which of course is what you tell us all the time. It's never anyone other than the shooter himself, 

• unless it's bad parenting;
• unless it's video games and movies;
• unless it's not saying prayers in school;
• unless it's too much screen time;
• unless it's woke corporations;
• unless it's socialism and critical race theory;
• unless it's red flags that were missed;
• unless it's red flags that weren't missed.

Yeah, unless that last bullet. 

Rick Ramos, the attorney for the Alvarez family, said Wednesday that (the murderer's) actions were reckless and he questioned whether (the murderer) was capable of carrying a weapon as his lawyers had indicated in court records that he had suffered from mental illness before the shooting.

Chew on that for a second. The guy had known mental health issues? The things we're supposed to be worried about?

Aren't we always told that we need to make sure that there's plenty of money that "may" be used for mental programs, and that schools and teachers and coaches and friends and classmates and neighbors and scout leaders and pastors (oh wait, it's never the pastors' fault, what was I thinking?) and everyone else need to identify these issues and make sure they tell someone?

And don't we know, for certain, that mental health issues are why we have so many shootings here? 

Heck, even the NRA tells us that - here's some of what they were telling us back in 2013:

Since 1966, the National Rifle Association has urged the federal government to address the problem of mental illness and violence. As we noted then, “the time is at hand to seek means by which society can identify, treat and temporarily isolate such individuals,” because “elimination of the instrument by which these crimes are committed cannot arrest the ravages of a psychotic murderer.”

Of course, the NRA also said this, and yes, the emphasis is mine:

A person cannot be federally disqualified from owning a gun based simply on a psychiatrist’s diagnosis, a doctor’s referral, or the opinion of a law enforcement officer, let alone based on getting a drug prescription or seeking mental health treatment. Doing so would actually discourage troubled people from getting the help they need.

Chew on that for a second. Keeping a person from having a gun will keep them from getting the mental health care they need?

What the actual hell? Isn't the very decision to get a gun instead of getting treatment for a mental health problem enough of an indication that the person shouldn't have a gun? 

Nope - not in Texas. 

Because Texas doesn't have red flag laws. 

Because Republican legislators Texas, last year, made it possible for anyone, regardless of anything, to carry handguns without a background check and without any training. 

In a nutshell, a person in Texas needs to do exactly as much to get and carry a gun as a nine-year-old little girl needs to do to go with her parents to the ATM: absolutely nothing.

But have no fear: while justice was served here for the murderer, the 'real' killer is still out there... you know, like the real killer of Nicole Brown Simpson is still out there.

... investigators planned to focus on finding the unidentified robber and holding him responsible for Alvarez’s death, with authorities now offering a $30,000 reward for information leading to his arrest.

Clearly, the person responsible for the murder of a child is not the person who murdered her. It's not the shooter, like we've always been told. It's not the guy who has known mental health issues, who "took out a weapon and fired several rounds in the direction of the suspect" and then fired several more “at a pickup truck he thought the robbery suspect had gotten into.” 

It's the guy who robbed the guy who did all of that.