Utah County, Utah saw a couple of deadly interactions over the weekend between miscreants and concealed carriers. We featured one of them, an attempted carjacking gone wrong…for the carjacker. Sunday morning, a homeowner ended a home invasion in progress with extreme prejudice. Two clear self-defense situations, two dead suspects. All of which, if you believe ksl.com, has sparked “discussion” about the use of deadly force by armed citizens. Just who’s doing the discussing — besides KSL’s reporters — isn’t really clear. Well, reader RA is having none of it . . .

Here are his thoughts as communicated to TTAG central command:

I’m sorry, I hate to sound callous here, but the only discussion we should be having is about how these two gun owners are coping with the situations. I understand that at one time both cold bodies in the morgue were warm, loving and cuddly. However both men made poor choices. No one forced Mr. Matafeo to steal that car and no one forced Mr. Chichia to get drunk and break into the wrong home. Mr. Matafeo’s mother said,

“Remember that owning a gun comes huge responsibility, the individual who shot my son will now have to carry that burden with him forever,” she wrote to Orem police. “He shot someone’s son, father, brother, uncle, someone who was loved tremendously.” 

Yes, owning and carrying a gun is a huge responsibility, but so is being a good citizen. I don’t know the shooters and I can only imagine what they may be thinking. However, I do know that had I been in the same situation I would have done the same thing. I would much rather live with the “burden” of shooting a bad guy, than the “burden” knowing they harmed my family and I could have stopped it.

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59 COMMENTS

  1. Here, let me edit the quote from Mr. Matafeo’s mother: “Remember that with raising a child comes huge responsibility. The crappy job I did raising a child who became a criminal has forced an honest citizen to defend himself with a firearm, and that honest citizen will now have to live with that knowledge. Fortunately, the lowlife he shot will be no big loss to the community.” There, fixed it.

    • This times a bazillion. Holy crap lady, you raised a criminal, accept that failure. Your lucky the gun owners don’t find a way to sue you.

        • THIS!

          Parents can only do their best to instill a sense of right/wrong in their children. If they choose not to use it, well, their responsibility. That does not make him less loved. My older brother was raised in the same house, with the same parents as my younger brother and myself, but he is a meat bag, stealing oxygen from those better equipped to live in today’s world than him, but he’s still my brother, and our mother’s son. She did nothing wrong, he chose his own path. Personal responsibility is what we, the POG, believe, is it not?

        • Robert Asprin, in Little Myth Marker, had a great little commentary on being a parent. It went something like-

          You’ll never know if your kids were a success or failure because of you or despite you. Parenting is in a large part taking the credit or blame for things that you may have had no real control over. You won’t know if they’re done despite or because of the things you did. You can only do the best you can.

          Ultimately– it was the individual’s choice to make his choices. As my Dad told me– choices have consequences, I’ve made some bad decisions that my Dad surely wouldn’t have approved of … doesn’t make him a bad father.

        • I would normally agree with you, but the moment she opened her mouth to question the victim’s decision to defend himself from her son’s poor decision, it tells me she is not in the right mindset either.

        • You would be right if she hadn’t said what she said. She didn’t put the responsibility on her son screwing up and being a criminal. She put it on the other guy.

        • Non-analogous. Blaming a parent for how a child turned out is akin to blaming freedom group for making terrible firearms. Parents hold the enormous responsibility of instilling morals and responsibility in their children, failure to do so foists defective adults on society at large. These defective adults then suck up welfare, occupy prison cells, and generally harm those of us who are actually responsible.

          tl;dr

          Yes. Blame the parents. Occasionally parents do everything right and the kid is still a screw up. More often the parents didn’t bother to be parents and the kids (unsurprisingly) turn into recidivistic delinquents.

      • Any set of fools can make a baby. The trick is to make that baby into an adult worth keeping.

    • Plus one trillion. Where the H E double hockey sticks do you get off lady? Your kid violently tried to assault someone and take their rightfully owned property by force and you have the nerve to insinuate that the victim of your poorly parented chid should feel guilty? Shame on you. You gave this world a violent criminal that was bent on destroying lives for his own selfish gain. The victim was at the wrong place at the wrong time and would have fallen victim like god knows how many before him or her if it wasn’t for their handgun. Shame on you and your victim blaming.

    • It’s not necessarily bad parenting. There are far to many cases of good kids and rotten kids coming out of the same household to assume it’s nurture over nature.

      • Maybe not, but she is putting responsibility on the other guy. At the end of the thing, its on her son.

  2. MEMO TO KSL –

    I’m shooting first.

    Have fun with your encounter group therapy session.

  3. The mom is right! I can’t imagine what one would go through after being forced to dispatch a predator, but I assume it’s heart-wrenching, second-guessing, and difficult to justify your actions even to yourself. As a result, I maintain that each of those victims should be able to sue the perpetrators of their crimes. The mom herself points out the trauma that the victim went through! Victims forced to shoot and/or kill their attackers should have the right to sue their aggressor’s “estate.” Considering some defensive shooters are open to being sued by the criminals’ families, it should go both ways: if the criminal had only criminal intent, they should be held liable for forcing somebody to shoot them. And I don’t care if they’re dead, go after whatever they have.

    • Thankfully Utah has upgraded our castle doctrine laws. Now if it is determined to be a good shot the perp(s) & relatives can’t try to sue the shooter. Also the car jacker had multiple felony warrants out for him. Sorry but the mom must be either delusional or in denial about how bad her son was.

      According to a quick search of the Internet it looks like Taulagi V. Matafeo may have had 11 cases against him prior to his death.

      http://bigstory.ap.org/article/f0ed2d753c5c45d5ad2fd952621807b8/utah-man-killed-carjacking-attempt-had-prior-convictions did a better cover on the stores in my opinion as they mention some of his previous crimes.

    • Victims forced to shoot and/or kill their attackers should have the right to sue their aggressor’s “estate.”

      They do.

      • But in reality, you can’t get money from someone who has nothing. They’re not gonna have the assets or insurance to cover the costs of damages, therapy to deal with the shock/trauma etc.

        About the only recourse you’re likely to have is your state’s victims assistance fund (if they have one)

        …. you might get enough to cover the costs of cleaning the carpets, walls, and patching the holes if there are any.

      • But how successful are they? Will the courts dismiss the case as groundless? And does the average street criminal leave enough of an estate behind to make the legal costs worthwhile?

        Ooh! I know! People want to force gun owners to pay for insurance in case we shoot somebody. Maybe we should force criminals to have insurance covering them for the physical, emotional, and property damage they cause.

  4. Strange how we currently live in an age when having a criminal lifestyle or committing criminal acts some how has lost its risk. For some reason there is this belief that being a scum bag should be 100% safe, and that people who are forced to deal with one’s scumbag behavior are expected to follow certain guidelines related to the type of reaction they may have to said scumbag behavior. I may sound callous, but quite frankly even IF someone “overreacts” to something criminal, I have no sympathy for the criminal. Life is all about choices, and bad ones do not come with a promise not to exceed a certain level of consequences. There is no stone tablet that reads “Everytime you snatch a purse, the old lady is just going to give it away and cry for help.” Sometime the old lady pulls out a .38 and you’re done.

    • You don’t understand!! Carrying a gun and being able to shoot a criminal creates a HOSTILE WORK ENVIRONMENT for criminals, and entitles them to file a Federal civil rights discrimination lawsuit! And the “Justice” Department will be right there, helping them!

  5. This kind of thing is worse than questioning the RTKABA. This is questioning the natural right of self-defense, which nearly every culture, religion and nation support, even if they hypocritically don’t allow private gun ownership.

    Also, only a small percentage of people CC in this country. If a CC’er justifiably puts down a BG, they may well have saved a non-CC’er who would have been the BG’s next victim.

    Finally, I have to ask, how would this discussion play out if the shooter were a cop? How would it play out if the perp were a different race, gender or religion? Same situation, same outcome, different media coverage. It’s all BS and it is too bad the general public can’t see that.

    • I’ve noticed that the worst parents either honestly do not care in the slightest, or are in serious denial about, how their little angel actually turned out.

  7. KSL isn’t exactly a good source of news. Back when the Governor vetoed the constitutional carry bill they mentioned how “they could try to override the veto but it didn’t have the 2/3 majority necessary the first time” and gave the number of votes for and against. They didn’t bother to notice that it passed with a greater than 2/3 majority. It was closer to 3/4. When they can’t be trusted to do basic math I don’t think they can be trusted to get much of anything right.

    • if they say something and show the numbers do you really think the majority of the people would actually do the math? all they are waiting for is celebrity news

  8. This is right along the lines of the oft-mentioned “concern” of gun-grabbers, “An armed person might shoot me for being rude to them.” Setting aside the ridiculousness of that comment, the resounding words that should be spewing forth is, “Then don’t be rude to people and you won’t have to worry about them shooting you!” There is a reason for the saying, “An armed society is a polite society”.

    I swear, gun-grabbers and criminals want us disarmed so they can be rude and/or assault us without having to worry about any personal consequences. Newsflash: I am not giving up my right to self-defense so that gun grabbers can assault me without concern for personal consequences.

    • Well, accept being rude to muslims. If you’re rude to muslims and they shoot you apparently you asked for it …

  9. Maybe I’m just cold hearted, but I would sleep just fine knowing I was able to protect my loved ones. The car jacking, well, I wouldn’t have unholstered and I certainly wouldn’t have gotten directly involved. Too many unknowns.

    • You decide for yourself what to do in such a situation. I’m glad the thug, rather than the lady who was being carjacked is dead. This concealed carrier is not just a responsible citizen, but a hero.

  10. If I had to shoot someone in a defensive situation, I know my concern would be more about retaliation from friends and family than with the death of the perp.

  11. “However both men made poor choices.”

    No, a “poor choice” is having red wine with fish, or wearing plaid and stripes at the same time.

  12. You know what else we dont need? These ****ing autoplaying video ads. I was fine with letting ads stay on the website for ad revenue purposes, but these autoplaying ones are too much. Adblock goes back on.

  13. More mamby pamby second guessing hand wringing by progressive utopian moralists lamenting *someone else’s* morals from the safety of a warm chair with no ‘skin in the game’.

    These holier than thou meddlers, especially those in the media, should just shut their “pie holes” as they have absolutely nothing productive to say about an event they did not attend.

  14. Since when does the MSM want to discuss anything except Bruce Jenner’s sex change or Beyonce’s transparent evening gown?

    • Whenever some anti-gun rat like Steve Gunn pops his head out of the hole with some ludicrous statement like “gun owners generally don’t have adequate training to handle those tense situations”, the pro-disarmament MSM will gladly move off their gossip of the day to promote the ‘expert’ comments from the antis’ spokesman.

      What the stupid media anti-gun whores don’t seem to get is that the people who REALLY need better training are the bad actor perps such as the two dead clowns here who missed the parts about being a productive law abiding citizen during their upbringing.

      Looks to me like these gun owners were quite satisfactorily trained for the attacks they encountered.

      I guess that will be the latest anti-gun mantra; gun owners don’t know HOW to safely defend themselves.

      Such garbage.

  16. I’ll be darned, the carjacker was just starting to turn his life around I gather. Who woulda thought? Gotta say, at least the pro-gun side got its share of the ink in the KSL article. They even got one of the local gun-grabbers to admit that in these two cases, the shooters were not to be faulted.

  17. Reading the mother’s statement leads me to believe that her dead son made bad decisions because he was never taught to make good ones while growing up.

  18. It’s come to really loath terms like ‘discussion’ and ‘progress’ because they’re being hideous distorted into just leftist sh*t-heals bitching about how your wrong and you should feel bad for not being just like them.

    • i agree. every time i hear the word ‘discussion’ now it gives me the sudden fleeting urge to jam my finger in my own eye, whether anyone is talking about guns or not.

        • “No bastard ever won a war by dying for his country. He won it by making the other poor dumb bastard die for his country.”

          George S. Patton

  19. Yeah let’s have a talk. My own son wandered into a house in a psychoactive haze. He got a felony and spent a year in jail. And if he’d been shot thems the breaks. I never visited him once yet we have a fairly good relationship. Something about bringing shame on the family name…oh yeah I left when he was a baby(that was MY fault). Mom WAS part of the problem.

  20. “Remember that _living in a free society_ comes _with_ huge responsibility, the individual who _assaulted and attempted to carjack an innocent woman_ will now have to _live (or not) with the consequences of that decision_ forever _as will his family_,”

    FIFY

  21. I mean.. We can just discuss how awesome it is when a DGU goes the right way and how nice it would be if more went that way and grow awareness about that fact that people should be protected after such an event.

  24. I live in this area and had the same thought when I read that article. “Other than the reporter WHO is discusing this?”
    NO ONE is fretting over the car jacker whether or not he had a weapon.
    And the other case was fairly straightforward too. If you drunk enough to do that and keep at it when warned off, you drunk enough to attack the people you find in “your” house. These were clean cases. It’s stupid to pick a fight (discussion ) over these. Wait for a case that is murky and confusing to start your “discussion”

  25. If I woke up and my name was Chi Chia, I would be a drunk as well. When I sobered up, I would get it changed.

  26. Exactly. You know what else is an important and difficult burden? Being a responsible adult. Not getting so plastered you can’t figure out you’re in the wrong house, because you have kids who need you. Gosh.

  27. Does anyone know how to get rid of those powder rings on stainless revolvers? I spray them down with solvent and scrub them with a bronze toothbrush and they’re still there. One advantage to a blued revolver.

  28. ksl has been a lib shill for some time. It seamed to have gotten worse right around the time that the LDS church started slipping on their core values. Ksl used to have a gun classified section also and that was cool BUT… Right after a shooting they decided that selling firearms second hand was not something they liked. I wrote a nasty letter with obviously no reply. They let Utah know exactly where they stand on many issues and the Bill of Rights isn’t something they really understand. Well anyway you know the phrase “comes the minute, comes the man”. Now from the ashes of the KSL gun section we have Utahguns.com and Utahgunexchange.com, both of which are a lot better than KSL ever was.

    The use of deadly force is not the discussion we should be having unless it’s an expansion of castle doctrine on the books saying deadly force is justified in your home if someone breaks in…PERIOD.

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