This is an odd coincidence.
Quite a while back, shortly after I started this blog, I posted “Is the Government Responsible for Your Protection,” a two-part essay on one reason there is a right to arms. In Part I I used the transcript of the 1981 D.C. Court of Apeals en banc decision of Warren v. District of Columbia in which Carolyn Warren, Miriam Douglas, and Joan Taliaferro sued the District of Columbia for failing to protect them from a pair of rapists, even after they had called the police and the police had come to the home. If you’ve not read it before, I strongly recommend you do.
These women lived in the District in 1975, a short while before D.C. passed its draconian firearms restrictions, but in any case none of them were armed, and they depended on the State for their protection.
Skip forward twenty-nine years, nearly to the day, and shift your coordinates to Canton, Ohio. Clayton Cramer’s Civilian Gun Self-Defense Page posts from the Akron Beacon-Journal the following story that I will copy shamelessly:
Man shot to death in Canton
The first time Carolyn Warren called police, she wanted to be rescued from a man she said was trying to break in her door.
Three minutes later, she called back to say the man was in her apartment, but she didn’t need to be rescued anymore.
The man was shot dead.
Kenneth G. Riggs, 38, died about 12:30 a.m. Thursday (March 11, 2004) of a gunshot wound to the head. He was shot inside Warren’s apartment on Mahoning Road Northeast, less than a block from his home.
Canton Police Lt. Tom Thomas said the two women in the apartment knew Riggs, but he declined to describe their relationship. Police say the shooter is a 31-year-old woman, who Thomas said was identified in the 911 call as Warren’s daughter.
The mother apparently made the calls and the daughter allegedly fired a .22 rifle at Riggs twice after he forced his way into the apartment.
Police did not arrest the woman. Thomas said information from the shooting investigation will be turned over to the Stark County prosecutor.
A telephone number listed for Warren was out of order Thursday.
Riggs, who lived in the 2600 block of Mahoning Road Northeast, had a history of arrests in Stark County that stretched back to the late 1980s. Court records include a one-year prison sentence for illegal possession of a firearm and using a weapon while intoxicated. The records also list multiple arrests on charges of assault, aggravated burglary, menacing, drug abuse and violating a protection order.
Is it the same Carolyn Warren? Her daughter would have been born in 1973, two years before the attack in D.C, so I think it’s highly doubtful. But notice the stark difference between the two cases – one in which there was a .22 rifle and someone who knew how to use it, and one in which the victims were unarmed.
The name coincidence was just too weird not to comment on.