Carmen Tarleton (courtesy nytimes.com)

“At 1:30 a.m. on Valentine’s Day this year, Carmen Tarleton left her rural home here and drove through the frigid dark to Brigham and Women’s Hospital in Boston,” nytimes,com reports. “Her doctor had called hours earlier with the news she had been waiting for: a suitable donor had been found. She would get a new face. Almost six years had passed since her estranged husband broke into her house one spring night, beat her with a baseball bat and soaked her with industrial lye that he squirted from a dish-soap bottle . . .

The attack nearly blinded Ms. Tarleton, a nurse and mother of two, and burned her beyond recognition. She lost her eyelids, upper lip and left ear. What remained of her face and much of her body was a knobby patchwork of scar tissue and skin grafts, painful to look at and far more painful to live with.

While we congratulate Ms. Tarleton and her medical team for their courage and perseverance, and celebrate her return to something approaching normalcy, perhaps she should have been armed, carrying at home and shot her husband during the attack. God knows what he might have done to the children—other than trying to kill and disfigure their mother. Just thinking out loud during National Domestic Violence Awareness month.

Here’s some more news from that campaign via hill.com:

Vice President Biden will visit the headquarters of the National Domestic Violence Hotline in Austin, Texas, next month to commemorate National Domestic Violence Awareness Month, the White House said Friday.

The hotline, which provides 24-hour support to the victims of domestic violence, was established in 1994 as part of the Violence Against Women Act — Biden’s signature legislative accomplishment.

In a speech earlier this year, Biden said his work on domestic violence was “the single most important cause of my life.”

Maybe “Double Barrel” Joe Biden would like to share his thoughts on shotgun-based home defense. Again, just sayin’ . . .

23 COMMENTS

    • yes. Colorado State Senator Hudak wants to present him with an award because he didn’t use a gun on his victim. Now Shannon Watts(TM) can do her Snoopy dance.

      • Maybe this time around Shannon Twatts will make my dreams come true and snoopy dance in front of a moving train.

  1. Jesus. This is one of those stories that just really makes you question the usefulness of humanity as a whole..

  2. If there was ever a guy who deserves dyin’, it’s Herbert Rodgers, the POS who disfigured this poor woman. Instead, he copped a plea in exchange for a 30-70 year ticket. If there’s any justice in the world, which I doubt, Rodgers will die in prison and it won’t be pretty.

    • I swear officer he slipped and fell when that happened he knocked over a gas can. When he got up he decided he needed a cigarette then poof he was on fire.

    • Where I’m from, the preferred saying is “…he needed killin…” As in, when asked why one shot the other: “we’ll, some men, they just needed killin.” Old time more commonly known alternates include, “…he had it comin” and “…he got what he deserved.”

  3. I once prosecuted a domestic violence case where the perp hit the woman so hard with a Dan Wesson .357 that the grips came off! She’d shot him on two prior occasions with a .22, but he got out the hospital within a week both times. (both shootings ruled justifiable). His own lawyer said he was a psycho who would kill someone eventually. I wanted to tell her so badly, “Lady, you need a bigger gun!” But I couldn’t b/c of my official position at the time.
    Ms. Carmen’s tragic story is a lesson for us all. Teach your daughters to shoot, b/c restraining order is just a piece of paper.

  4. Would rather have “DB” Biden than “shoot someone in the face with a shotgun while hunting and guess who had to pay that settlement…the taxpayers” Cheney.

  5. Cheney shot a lawyer hunting buddy in the face with a 28 gauge shotgun. Quail hunting as I recall. not sure about the distance either as that would mitigate the damage.

  6. No,No,No; Not a gun! A gun would have just made it worse!

    The more I hear the emoting of the anti-gun crowd; the more I see the fallen nature of human beings. The really wierd part is that these antigun people really see themselves on the side of what is right, just and good; well, the street level minions; those in position of power just see them as “useful idiots”, the ones in power are just plain evil.

  7. Not sure what “industrial duty lye” is, and the Red Devil and Drano are pure, unadulterated sodium hydroxide.

    Anyway, we really do need to teach our kids and significant others to shoot; this POS’ attempts at caustic bluing a human being are not the worst that happens — although they’re certainly in the running.

    Restraining orders, peh! Monsters are real, and when seconds count, a contempt of court charge is only days away.

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