Right here.

I think there's a fair amount to be learned from this whole thing, and not necessarily the obvious stuff; it's come up in a fair number of classes since it happens, and it likely will again, this weekend.

If I only had a gun...

Oh yeah, Diann Sawyer says that wouldn't work. Evidently, neither does Valleyfair Security.

Slap on the hand justice for another of the Evans' crew. This sentence will teach them nothing One can only hope that sooner or later something is going to stick real hard to the them.

It easily couldn't have -- that's the issue I go over in class. I'm not in the business of telling folks what to do, but it could have easily gone remarkably ugly, given who the perps turned out to be.

I have a good idea how I might have reacted had that been my 15yr old daughter.

I would like to think that I would have seen the problem coming in time to get into a better defensive position with my family. I guess that is where the training and keeping a good eye on what is going on around you would come in handy.

Sure. And I'm not suggesting it would have been wrong to do what I think any vaguely decent father would want to do. (And which this poor guy apparently tried to do.)

I am suggesting that, given the perps, it's more than a little likely that somebody taking out a gun and hoping that it would have worked as a situational management tool was more than vaguely likely to have seen it turning into a whole lotta bullets flying around, complete with -- assuming, optimistically, that the helpful permit holder survived, and that only the perps got shot -- all sorts of subsequent jailarity and prosecution and indictment in the MSM. (Of course, if any of the shots -- by anybody -- had hit an uninvolved person, it would have been much worse.)

I've got a fifteen-year-old daughter, too; I'm kinda fond of her. Not sure how fond I am of the father of somebody else's fifteen-year-old daughter, though.

I'm very sorry to hear this. That incident really struck a chord with me and I was quite upset about it last summer. It just goes to show that not only will 'security' not protect you, but 'the system' might not even hand down justice after the fact of you being a 'good witness'. I was outraged when I found out that Valley Fair security stood there and watched, and I am saddened that the courts have done little better.

At the time we don't want justice, we just want to stop the attack. Survival doesn't care about justice, but only survival. Justice is a consideration that comes into play long after the fact when it is hoped that the bad guy is punished and the good guy is affirmed. This is certainly asking too much from a human court but I would like to hope for it anyway.

There are plenty of predators out on the street who have become emboldened because of the system, not in spite of the system. The lessons that a young, violent offender learns from a sympathetic legal system is that no one cares, which is the very opposite of what he needs to think.

Oh well. How about some new marketing slogans for Valley Fair? I'll try to think of a few this week.

Those guys got some pretty sweet deals and depending on their criminal histories, the difference between probation and 7 years or more of prison time.

I must be an optimist, I read the title as: Valley Fair Update: Two Perps Blead Out

I would have liked to see them doing some hard time.

I may have missed it as I haven't followed the story. What do you know about this story that leads you to believe they were armed with firearms?

These guys were all gangbangers. If they weren't packing, their girl was holding it for them.

Then there is the retribution from the 'family' if you did anything. You'd probably have to move far away for your own safety.

3rd degree assault for stomping the **** out of a guy on the ground. Fine job, prosecutors.

While the individuals who plead out were indeed gangbangers, we should be careful as to how we speculate on the status of the father. Yes he was protecting his daughter, however the reports exaggerated (fancy that, I can barely believe it) what he was protecting her from. The fact is that it was not a groping, but rather a tap on the head with an inflatable baseball bat; yes it was done in a lewd manner, but other than the toy touching the girl there was no contact. The father then initiated the fracas by grabbing the offending id10t in a headlock and starts to punch, said id10t. I think at this point had you seen the event you would admit that the father was not a "Reluctant Participant". I'm not saying this to justifying the stomping, but we must establish the facts of a given case before we go overboard in our speculation on what happened and what we would do in that mythical situation!

These two got railroaded.

This whole matter is over the standard Evan's family employee interview process. They were simply recruiting staff.

Not quite certain, but close to it. The chance of all eight Evanses being unarmed? In their trade, that would be described as "slippin'", and is considered unwise.