The incident that happened in Texas yesterday, where three people shot themselves dead in an auto dealership shows a worrying quirk of American law.
The shooting happened at the Nissan of Greenville dealership off of I-30 around 7:20 p.m. when two bounty hunters walked into the dealership and falsely identified themselves as federal agents.
The so called federal agents had waited at the dealership until a customer’s acquaintance arrived at the dealership. An exchange happened that ended in gunfire and all three of them fatally shot.
Eye witnesses said that bounty hunters approached their target with handcuffs, trying to arrest him and that’s when the shooting started. The target fired on the bounty hunters and the bounty hunters fired back, with both parties hitting their target and killing one another.
According to KRIS in Corpus Christi, family members identified the two bounty hunters as Fidel Garcia Jr. and Gabriel Bernal. Garcia owns an investigation agency in Corpus Christi and was hired by US Fugitive Recovery & Extradition to bring in a man wanted out of Minnesota.
US Fugitive Recovery identified the fugitive as Ramon Michael Hutchison. He failed to show up in court and was wanted for assaulting a police officer, disarming a police officer and first-degree felony narcotics possession. He had an extensive criminal history that included assault and weapons charges.
The question here is why the United States law still allows for untrained, and basically private citizens with guns to run around looking to apprehend law breakers?
Why do we have, and pay, the police, FBI, and the tens of other law enforcement agencies if we still have to run the risk of untrained civilians running around with guns and endangering the lives of everybody else under the guise of apprehending fugitives?
There were employees and customers at this dealership when the gun fight broke out, and innocent people could have been killed or injured due to the reckless actions of those two bounty hunters.
Trained law enforcement officers would definitely have handled the arrest a different way without endangering everyone in the vicinity because they were trained for such jobs, which is something these civilian bounty hunters lack.
I don’t think there’s any reason why bounty hunters should be operating in a civilized society. If our law enforcement are not able to apprehend any fugitives, then it’s their failure, and it’ll be preferable for the fugitives to stay free until they’re apprehended than for untrained civilians to risk the lives and properties of innocent people while trying to do a job they’re not trained to do.
The right thing for citizens to do when they find a fugitive from law is to alert law enforcement, especially when the fugitive is of the armed and dangerous type. It makes no sense encouraging people to take laws into their own hands, no matter what fancy name they call themselves.
That shouldn’t happen in a civilized society.
