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Wednesday, May 11, 2022

A Righteous Shooting

     At eight-forty on Sunday morning November 30, 2014, a minister (not identified in the media) living with his wife and three young children on a rural road near Valley Center, Kansas, was forced to make a life and death decision.

     Alerted to an intrusion by his activated  home burglary alarm, the pastor ran into his kitchen to find a window shattered and a man about to enter the house. The minister, to protect  himself and his family, grabbed his handgun and opened fire.

     The intruder immediately retreated and ran off. Deputies with the Sedgwick County Sheriff's Office in responding to the home burglary call came upon a man lying on the side of the road not far from the break-in. Officers rushed the bleeding man to the nearest emergency room.

     Police identified the burglar who was shot while breaking into the pastor's house as Cory Landon. Lucky for him, he had been struck by a single bullet that grazed his forehead. After he was treated at the hospital and released deputies booked Landon into the Sedgwick County Jail on the charge of aggravated burglary. (In Kansas and most states intruding into a dwelling is a more serious offense than breaking into a commercial building.)

     Landon told the arresting officers that he and a few of his friends had been camping out in the area of the break-in.

     Neighbors praised the pastor for his bold anti-intrusion action. Faced with the same situation they all said they would have used deadly force. The neighbors did not believe the pastor's decision, given his position in the community, was immoral. He had reacted as a father and a husband, not as a man of the cloth. "That's an armed citizen taking care of business," one of the neighbors told a local report.

      As for the burglar, breaking into an intrusion-alarmed dwelling in rural Kansas in broad daylight was dangerously stupid.

     In 2015 Cory Landon pleaded guilty and was sentenced to a short prison term followed by probation.

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