As you know I pay close attention to trends in the culture and often wonder how far they will go. There have been many new gun laws put into place that allow people more freedom to carry guns and to use them. Here are two stories from the New York Times about guns. Both are from October of this year. I want to know what you think about the topic. After reading the two articles you can respond to either or both of the stories, comment about guns in general, or answer any of the following questions:
Should people be allowed to carry guns in their cars?
Should people be allowed to carry concealed guns?
Should people be allowed into sporting events with guns?
Would you personally feel safer walking around with a gun?
Would you feel less safe if strangers were walking around carrying guns in public?
Would you use a gun in self-defense?
In the states that permit open carrying of guns, do you think it will trend upward into more and more people wearing guns, or do you think this will only be limited to a few people who just really love having their guns at their sides?
Should people be allowed to openly wear their guns in public places like Bryan Hull does when he goes to Beverly's Pancake House?
Should the self-defense shooter in the second article have responded differently, or did he do the right thing?
Oklahomans Prepare for New Law That Will Make Guns a Common Sight
By Manny Fernandez
OKLAHOMA CITY — Bryan Hull will soon strap his Smith & Wesson .357 Magnum revolver to his hip and meet his armed friends at Beverly’s Pancake House here. They have no interest in the cash register. They just want a late-night breakfast.
A new law takes effect on Thursday in Oklahoma — anyone licensed to carry a concealed firearm can choose to carry a weapon out in the open, in a belt or shoulder holster, loaded or unloaded. Five minutes after midnight Thursday, Mr. Hull and his friends — supporters of the Oklahoma Open Carry Association, a gun rights group — will mark the occasion by wearing their unconcealed handguns while dining at Beverly’s, a 24-hour restaurant.
“It’s just a peaceful assembly,” said Mr. Hull, 44, the association’s co-director. “We’re all licensed by the state to carry. We’ve all been trained. Why wouldn’t somebody want to have that kind of a group do business with them in their establishment?”
In a state with 142,000 men and women licensed to carry concealed weapons, the scene at Beverly’s will most likely become commonplace as Oklahomans take advantage of the law by displaying their handguns while they shop for groceries, eat at restaurants and walk into banks.
Advocates for gun rights said the ability to “open carry” would deter crime and eliminate the risks of a wardrobe mishap, such as when someone carrying a concealed weapon breaks the law by accidentally exposing the firearm. But the new law is a symbolic as well as practical victory. Supporters said there was no better advertisement for the Second Amendment than to have thousands of responsible adults openly carrying their weapons in a highly visible fashion.
“This enhances Oklahomans’ ability to exercise their Second Amendment rights,” said the Republican state senator who wrote Senate Bill 1733, Anthony Sykes. “I think the evidence is clear that gun owners are some of the most responsible people, and they’ve shown that in not just Oklahoma, where we’ve had conceal carry for quite some time and there’s never been an incident, but in these other states as well.”
When the law takes effect, Oklahoma will become the 15th state to allow people to openly carry firearms with a license. Those 15 states include Utah, Iowa, New Jersey and Connecticut. Several other states, including Arizona, New Mexico and Nevada, have even more permissive laws that allow the carrying of unconcealed firearms without a license. All but six states and the District of Columbia allow some form of open carry, said John Pierce, founder of Open Carry.org.
Though common around the country, these laws in several states have posed legal and logistical problems for municipalities and law enforcement agencies seeking to balance gun owners’ constitutional rights with maintaining order.
Even in Western and Midwestern states where support for gun rights is strong, the laws have often passed after lobbying efforts lasting years, and have led to confusion and debate about where it is appropriate, let alone legal, for people to openly display their handguns.
In Mason City, Iowa, officials debated seeking an ordinance making it illegal to open-carry in city parks after two people displaying their firearms showed up at a children’s playground. To avoid potential litigation, officials decided to not pursue an ordinance. They instead started a marketing campaign last month asking residents to keep their weapons concealed in public parks.
On the East Coast, open-carry laws generate little controversy because several states make it hard for average citizens to acquire the permits necessary to display unconcealed firearms.
Oklahoma is considered a “shall-issue” state, meaning that once a resident meets the legal requirements, officials must issue a license. Others states, including New Jersey and Connecticut, are known as “may-issue” states, meaning that even if a resident satisfies the requirements, officials may or may not issue the license because they have the discretion to consider other factors.
In Oklahoma, some police officials, merchants and residents have expressed varying levels of concern and unease with the law. In 2010, a similar bill was vetoed by the governor at the time, Brad Henry, a Democrat, in part based on law enforcement concerns that such a law would make it difficult for officers to sort out the good guys from the bad guys at a crime scene. This year, the bill was signed into law in May by Gov. Mary Fallin, a Republican and a gun owner.
The governor and the bill’s supporters say those who will be openly carrying are law-abiding citizens, all of whom received their concealed-carry license after taking a firearms training course and passing a criminal background check by the Oklahoma State Bureau of Investigation. The average age of a license holder is 51.
The new law has illustrated the ways in which the state’s image as a bastion of rugged outdoorsmen and gun-toting cowboys is as much fact as it is fiction.
Beverly’s Pancake House is not exactly located in the Oklahoma prairie, where firearms turn few heads. The diner is in a strip mall off a busy expressway, behind a Starbucks and across the street from a Marriott hotel. Michael Rodriguez, the general manager, said he supported Mr. Hull and his other armed guests, but he planned on asking them Thursday to show their handgun licenses. Downtown, managers at the Bricktown Brewery plan on posting a “no weapons allowed” sign.
“I see our city with an opportunity to continue to be a modern, upscale city,” said Charles Stout, the brewery’s managing partner. “I think we have to be careful of the message we’re sending.”
In recent weeks throughout Oklahoma, there has been a flurry of activity and debate as the date has approached. Businesses and property owners have been figuring out their policies, and law enforcement agencies have been conducting trainings on the law for officers and dispatchers. Police officials in Tulsa, Oklahoma City and other cities said they anticipated receiving an increased number of “man with a gun” calls, but they did not expect widespread problems.
In Stillwater, about 65 miles north of Oklahoma City, the owner of the Stillwater Armory gun shop said the new law has brought about a subtle change in buying habits. Customers with small handguns that are easy to conceal have been buying larger weapons, with longer barrels that hold additional rounds, as they prepare to wear their guns unconcealed.
“The old saying within the community is, ‘It’s better to have it and not need it than need it and not have it,’” said the owner, Tom Smith, 42, who openly carries a Springfield XD-S pistol while in his shop.
The law prohibits concealed or unconcealed firearms in a handful of places, including government buildings, schools and bars. Most businesses, however, must decide on their own how to handle those openly carrying.
People entering one of Bank of Oklahoma’s 85 branches in the state need not leave their weapon in the car. They can bring it inside. Similarly, customers of American Eagle Towing in Oklahoma City will find that they and their holstered handguns are welcome. Mr. Hull is the general manager, and he openly wears a Ruger LC9 pistol while at the office. Last year, he said, a group of would-be robbers whose car had been impounded saw his pistol and quickly left.
“I never saw a weapon,” Mr. Hull said. “I never drew my weapon. There was no need to. My openly carried firearm deterred whatever it was they had in mind, and I’m sure it wasn’t to bring me a thank-you card.”
Unarmed and Gunned Down by Homeowner in His ‘Castle’
By JACK HEALY
KALISPELL, Mont. — The last mistake Dan Fredenberg made was getting killed in another man’s garage.
It was Sept. 22, and Mr. Fredenberg, 40, was upset. He strode up the driveway of a quiet subdivision here to confront Brice Harper, a 24-year-old romantically involved with Mr. Fredenberg’s young wife. But as he walked through Mr. Harper’s open garage door, Mr. Fredenberg was doing more than stepping uninvited onto someone else’s property. He was unwittingly walking onto a legal landscape reshaped by laws that have given homeowners new leeway to use force inside their own homes.
Proponents say the laws strengthen people’s right to defend their homes. To others, they are a license to kill.
That night, in a doorway at the back of his garage, Mr. Harper aimed a gun at the unarmed Mr. Fredenberg, fired and struck him three times. Mr. Fredenberg crumpled to the garage floor, a few feet from Mr. Harper. He was dead before morning.
Had Mr. Fredenberg been shot on the street or sidewalk, the legal outcome might have been different. But on Oct. 9, the Flathead County attorney decided not to prosecute, saying that Montana’s “castle doctrine” law, which maintains that a man’s home is his castle, protected Mr. Harper’s rights to vigorously defend himself there. The county attorney determined that Mr. Harper had the right to fetch his gun from his bedroom, confront Mr. Fredenberg in the garage and, fearing for his safety, shoot him.
“Given his reasonable belief that he was about to be assaulted, Brice’s use of deadly force against Dan was justified” under current Montana law, Ed Corrigan, the county attorney, wrote in a four-page letter explaining his decision to the Kalispell police.
The shooting raises similar questions about armed citizens and their right to self-defense to those raised after the February shooting of Trayvon Martin, 17, in Florida, with the critical difference that Mr. Martin was shot outside.
In Montana, it has focused new scrutiny on whether the castle doctrine measure, implemented in 2009, has given homeowners the authority to defend themselves against real threats or has provided a way to kill without consequences.
“The community has not been well-served by either the law or the legal process in this case,” the local newspaper, The Daily Inter-Lake, wrote in a recent editorial.
In 2009, Montana joined more than 20 other states in passing broad self-defense measures backed by the National Rifle Association and other gun-rights groups. Under the law, a person can brandish a gun to ward off a threat. An individual does not have to flee or call the police before engaging in self-defense.
For criminal trials in which a defendant claims self-defense, the legislation flips the burden of proof, putting the onus on prosecutors to discredit those claims.
“It changed things here in Montana,” said Leo Gallagher, president of the Montana County Attorneys Association, which joined associations of sheriffs and police chiefs to oppose the law. “For any sort of personal affront, you’re permitted to threaten the person with a gun.”
To Mr. Fredenberg’s family, the county attorney’s decision not to press charges hit like a fourth bullet. They acknowledged that Mr. Fredenberg, a hot-rod lover who painted, fixed and restored cars, had made his share of bad decisions in life. He often drank too much — his blood alcohol level was 0.08 percent on the night he died. He had a turbulent love life. He struggled financially.
But they said Mr. Fredenberg was also big-hearted, a doting father to his four children and a practical jokester — “40 years old going on 25,” his father put it. They said he was not violent and had done nothing that night to deserve being killed.
“It’s tearing me up,” said his father, Ron Fredenberg, a retired police officer and detective in Kalispell. “Dan was totally unarmed.”
Mr. Fredenberg’s long path to that slate-blue duplex at Empire Loop began about two years earlier, when he started dating a young barista named Heather King. After finding out she was pregnant with twins, the two eloped to Las Vegas, where they started what was by all accounts a rocky marriage.
Heather Fredenberg, 22, said she and Dan were passionate about each other, but also bickered about child care, bills, fixing the car and other stresses amplified by having two infants and not enough time or money. The county attorney’s report said they were “mutually abusive with each other, both verbally and physically.” More than once they considered divorcing.
About three months before the shooting, Ms. Fredenberg started seeing Mr. Harper. She has called it a flirtation and an “emotional affair” that was intimate but never sexual. She told her husband about the relationship, and the two men once clashed at Fatt Boys Bar & Grille in Kalispell.
Although Ms. Fredenberg said she and her husband were committed to each other despite everything, Mr. Fredenberg’s father said his son believed the marriage was breaking apart. The day before he died, he told his father, “I’m giving up on it. I just can’t put up with it anymore,” his father said.
On Sept. 22, Mr. Harper called Ms. Fredenberg and asked a favor: He was moving out of town the next day, and could she come over and help him clean the house? She took her 18-month-old twin boys and spent the afternoon at his home, a five-minute drive from hers. She swapped tense text messages with Mr. Fredenberg and talked on the phone around 8:30 p.m. He asked whether she was with Mr. Harper. She said she did not answer. He cursed and hung up.
As she was strapping her sons into their car seats and getting ready to leave, she said, she asked Mr. Harper to circle the block with her to diagnose a clunking sound in her car. As they drove, she saw headlights in her rearview mirror. Her husband had come looking for her, and he was behind them.
Ms. Fredenberg said she dropped Mr. Harper off at his house and told him to go inside and lock the doors. She said he told her that he had a gun and was not afraid of her husband. Mr. Fredenberg, close behind, parked his car and followed Mr. Harper into his garage, its light spilling onto the driveway.
Under Montana’s old law, homeowners could protect themselves with deadly force only if someone breached their house in a “violent, riotous or tumultuous manner.” The changes erased those provisions, giving people license to use lethal force if they “reasonably believe” they are about to be assaulted.
“You don’t have to claim that you were afraid for your life,” Mr. Corrigan, the county attorney, said. “You just have to claim that he was in the house illegally. If you think someone’s going to punch you in the nose or engage you in a fistfight, that’s sufficient grounds to engage in lethal force.”
It was immaterial that Mr. Fredenberg was unarmed. What mattered was what Mr. Harper — who declined to comment through his lawyer — later told investigators: that Mr. Fredenberg was charging toward him, angry, “like he was on a mission,” and that Mr. Harper was scared for his life.
In an interview, Ms. Fredenberg said that she sat in her car and watched the shooting, and that her husband was standing still when he was shot. She ran to him, screaming. His last words, she said, were a simple plea: “Call 911.”
Neither the police nor the county attorney conducted a rigorous investigation, she said, leaving her husband without an official advocate.
“There is no justice,” she said.
Should people be allowed to carry guns in their cars?
Should people be allowed to carry concealed guns?
Should people be allowed into sporting events with guns?
Would you personally feel safer walking around with a gun?
Would you feel less safe if strangers were walking around carrying guns in public?
Would you use a gun in self-defense?
In the states that permit open carrying of guns, do you think it will trend upward into more and more people wearing guns, or do you think this will only be limited to a few people who just really love having their guns at their sides?
Should people be allowed to openly wear their guns in public places like Bryan Hull does when he goes to Beverly's Pancake House?
Should the self-defense shooter in the second article have responded differently, or did he do the right thing?
Oklahomans Prepare for New Law That Will Make Guns a Common Sight
By Manny Fernandez
OKLAHOMA CITY — Bryan Hull will soon strap his Smith & Wesson .357 Magnum revolver to his hip and meet his armed friends at Beverly’s Pancake House here. They have no interest in the cash register. They just want a late-night breakfast.
A new law takes effect on Thursday in Oklahoma — anyone licensed to carry a concealed firearm can choose to carry a weapon out in the open, in a belt or shoulder holster, loaded or unloaded. Five minutes after midnight Thursday, Mr. Hull and his friends — supporters of the Oklahoma Open Carry Association, a gun rights group — will mark the occasion by wearing their unconcealed handguns while dining at Beverly’s, a 24-hour restaurant.
“It’s just a peaceful assembly,” said Mr. Hull, 44, the association’s co-director. “We’re all licensed by the state to carry. We’ve all been trained. Why wouldn’t somebody want to have that kind of a group do business with them in their establishment?”
In a state with 142,000 men and women licensed to carry concealed weapons, the scene at Beverly’s will most likely become commonplace as Oklahomans take advantage of the law by displaying their handguns while they shop for groceries, eat at restaurants and walk into banks.
Advocates for gun rights said the ability to “open carry” would deter crime and eliminate the risks of a wardrobe mishap, such as when someone carrying a concealed weapon breaks the law by accidentally exposing the firearm. But the new law is a symbolic as well as practical victory. Supporters said there was no better advertisement for the Second Amendment than to have thousands of responsible adults openly carrying their weapons in a highly visible fashion.
“This enhances Oklahomans’ ability to exercise their Second Amendment rights,” said the Republican state senator who wrote Senate Bill 1733, Anthony Sykes. “I think the evidence is clear that gun owners are some of the most responsible people, and they’ve shown that in not just Oklahoma, where we’ve had conceal carry for quite some time and there’s never been an incident, but in these other states as well.”
When the law takes effect, Oklahoma will become the 15th state to allow people to openly carry firearms with a license. Those 15 states include Utah, Iowa, New Jersey and Connecticut. Several other states, including Arizona, New Mexico and Nevada, have even more permissive laws that allow the carrying of unconcealed firearms without a license. All but six states and the District of Columbia allow some form of open carry, said John Pierce, founder of Open Carry.org.
Though common around the country, these laws in several states have posed legal and logistical problems for municipalities and law enforcement agencies seeking to balance gun owners’ constitutional rights with maintaining order.
Even in Western and Midwestern states where support for gun rights is strong, the laws have often passed after lobbying efforts lasting years, and have led to confusion and debate about where it is appropriate, let alone legal, for people to openly display their handguns.
In Mason City, Iowa, officials debated seeking an ordinance making it illegal to open-carry in city parks after two people displaying their firearms showed up at a children’s playground. To avoid potential litigation, officials decided to not pursue an ordinance. They instead started a marketing campaign last month asking residents to keep their weapons concealed in public parks.
On the East Coast, open-carry laws generate little controversy because several states make it hard for average citizens to acquire the permits necessary to display unconcealed firearms.
Oklahoma is considered a “shall-issue” state, meaning that once a resident meets the legal requirements, officials must issue a license. Others states, including New Jersey and Connecticut, are known as “may-issue” states, meaning that even if a resident satisfies the requirements, officials may or may not issue the license because they have the discretion to consider other factors.
In Oklahoma, some police officials, merchants and residents have expressed varying levels of concern and unease with the law. In 2010, a similar bill was vetoed by the governor at the time, Brad Henry, a Democrat, in part based on law enforcement concerns that such a law would make it difficult for officers to sort out the good guys from the bad guys at a crime scene. This year, the bill was signed into law in May by Gov. Mary Fallin, a Republican and a gun owner.
The governor and the bill’s supporters say those who will be openly carrying are law-abiding citizens, all of whom received their concealed-carry license after taking a firearms training course and passing a criminal background check by the Oklahoma State Bureau of Investigation. The average age of a license holder is 51.
The new law has illustrated the ways in which the state’s image as a bastion of rugged outdoorsmen and gun-toting cowboys is as much fact as it is fiction.
Beverly’s Pancake House is not exactly located in the Oklahoma prairie, where firearms turn few heads. The diner is in a strip mall off a busy expressway, behind a Starbucks and across the street from a Marriott hotel. Michael Rodriguez, the general manager, said he supported Mr. Hull and his other armed guests, but he planned on asking them Thursday to show their handgun licenses. Downtown, managers at the Bricktown Brewery plan on posting a “no weapons allowed” sign.
“I see our city with an opportunity to continue to be a modern, upscale city,” said Charles Stout, the brewery’s managing partner. “I think we have to be careful of the message we’re sending.”
In recent weeks throughout Oklahoma, there has been a flurry of activity and debate as the date has approached. Businesses and property owners have been figuring out their policies, and law enforcement agencies have been conducting trainings on the law for officers and dispatchers. Police officials in Tulsa, Oklahoma City and other cities said they anticipated receiving an increased number of “man with a gun” calls, but they did not expect widespread problems.
In Stillwater, about 65 miles north of Oklahoma City, the owner of the Stillwater Armory gun shop said the new law has brought about a subtle change in buying habits. Customers with small handguns that are easy to conceal have been buying larger weapons, with longer barrels that hold additional rounds, as they prepare to wear their guns unconcealed.
“The old saying within the community is, ‘It’s better to have it and not need it than need it and not have it,’” said the owner, Tom Smith, 42, who openly carries a Springfield XD-S pistol while in his shop.
The law prohibits concealed or unconcealed firearms in a handful of places, including government buildings, schools and bars. Most businesses, however, must decide on their own how to handle those openly carrying.
People entering one of Bank of Oklahoma’s 85 branches in the state need not leave their weapon in the car. They can bring it inside. Similarly, customers of American Eagle Towing in Oklahoma City will find that they and their holstered handguns are welcome. Mr. Hull is the general manager, and he openly wears a Ruger LC9 pistol while at the office. Last year, he said, a group of would-be robbers whose car had been impounded saw his pistol and quickly left.
“I never saw a weapon,” Mr. Hull said. “I never drew my weapon. There was no need to. My openly carried firearm deterred whatever it was they had in mind, and I’m sure it wasn’t to bring me a thank-you card.”
Unarmed and Gunned Down by Homeowner in His ‘Castle’
By JACK HEALY
KALISPELL, Mont. — The last mistake Dan Fredenberg made was getting killed in another man’s garage.
It was Sept. 22, and Mr. Fredenberg, 40, was upset. He strode up the driveway of a quiet subdivision here to confront Brice Harper, a 24-year-old romantically involved with Mr. Fredenberg’s young wife. But as he walked through Mr. Harper’s open garage door, Mr. Fredenberg was doing more than stepping uninvited onto someone else’s property. He was unwittingly walking onto a legal landscape reshaped by laws that have given homeowners new leeway to use force inside their own homes.
Proponents say the laws strengthen people’s right to defend their homes. To others, they are a license to kill.
That night, in a doorway at the back of his garage, Mr. Harper aimed a gun at the unarmed Mr. Fredenberg, fired and struck him three times. Mr. Fredenberg crumpled to the garage floor, a few feet from Mr. Harper. He was dead before morning.
Had Mr. Fredenberg been shot on the street or sidewalk, the legal outcome might have been different. But on Oct. 9, the Flathead County attorney decided not to prosecute, saying that Montana’s “castle doctrine” law, which maintains that a man’s home is his castle, protected Mr. Harper’s rights to vigorously defend himself there. The county attorney determined that Mr. Harper had the right to fetch his gun from his bedroom, confront Mr. Fredenberg in the garage and, fearing for his safety, shoot him.
“Given his reasonable belief that he was about to be assaulted, Brice’s use of deadly force against Dan was justified” under current Montana law, Ed Corrigan, the county attorney, wrote in a four-page letter explaining his decision to the Kalispell police.
The shooting raises similar questions about armed citizens and their right to self-defense to those raised after the February shooting of Trayvon Martin, 17, in Florida, with the critical difference that Mr. Martin was shot outside.
In Montana, it has focused new scrutiny on whether the castle doctrine measure, implemented in 2009, has given homeowners the authority to defend themselves against real threats or has provided a way to kill without consequences.
“The community has not been well-served by either the law or the legal process in this case,” the local newspaper, The Daily Inter-Lake, wrote in a recent editorial.
In 2009, Montana joined more than 20 other states in passing broad self-defense measures backed by the National Rifle Association and other gun-rights groups. Under the law, a person can brandish a gun to ward off a threat. An individual does not have to flee or call the police before engaging in self-defense.
For criminal trials in which a defendant claims self-defense, the legislation flips the burden of proof, putting the onus on prosecutors to discredit those claims.
“It changed things here in Montana,” said Leo Gallagher, president of the Montana County Attorneys Association, which joined associations of sheriffs and police chiefs to oppose the law. “For any sort of personal affront, you’re permitted to threaten the person with a gun.”
To Mr. Fredenberg’s family, the county attorney’s decision not to press charges hit like a fourth bullet. They acknowledged that Mr. Fredenberg, a hot-rod lover who painted, fixed and restored cars, had made his share of bad decisions in life. He often drank too much — his blood alcohol level was 0.08 percent on the night he died. He had a turbulent love life. He struggled financially.
But they said Mr. Fredenberg was also big-hearted, a doting father to his four children and a practical jokester — “40 years old going on 25,” his father put it. They said he was not violent and had done nothing that night to deserve being killed.
“It’s tearing me up,” said his father, Ron Fredenberg, a retired police officer and detective in Kalispell. “Dan was totally unarmed.”
Mr. Fredenberg’s long path to that slate-blue duplex at Empire Loop began about two years earlier, when he started dating a young barista named Heather King. After finding out she was pregnant with twins, the two eloped to Las Vegas, where they started what was by all accounts a rocky marriage.
Heather Fredenberg, 22, said she and Dan were passionate about each other, but also bickered about child care, bills, fixing the car and other stresses amplified by having two infants and not enough time or money. The county attorney’s report said they were “mutually abusive with each other, both verbally and physically.” More than once they considered divorcing.
About three months before the shooting, Ms. Fredenberg started seeing Mr. Harper. She has called it a flirtation and an “emotional affair” that was intimate but never sexual. She told her husband about the relationship, and the two men once clashed at Fatt Boys Bar & Grille in Kalispell.
Although Ms. Fredenberg said she and her husband were committed to each other despite everything, Mr. Fredenberg’s father said his son believed the marriage was breaking apart. The day before he died, he told his father, “I’m giving up on it. I just can’t put up with it anymore,” his father said.
On Sept. 22, Mr. Harper called Ms. Fredenberg and asked a favor: He was moving out of town the next day, and could she come over and help him clean the house? She took her 18-month-old twin boys and spent the afternoon at his home, a five-minute drive from hers. She swapped tense text messages with Mr. Fredenberg and talked on the phone around 8:30 p.m. He asked whether she was with Mr. Harper. She said she did not answer. He cursed and hung up.
As she was strapping her sons into their car seats and getting ready to leave, she said, she asked Mr. Harper to circle the block with her to diagnose a clunking sound in her car. As they drove, she saw headlights in her rearview mirror. Her husband had come looking for her, and he was behind them.
Ms. Fredenberg said she dropped Mr. Harper off at his house and told him to go inside and lock the doors. She said he told her that he had a gun and was not afraid of her husband. Mr. Fredenberg, close behind, parked his car and followed Mr. Harper into his garage, its light spilling onto the driveway.
Under Montana’s old law, homeowners could protect themselves with deadly force only if someone breached their house in a “violent, riotous or tumultuous manner.” The changes erased those provisions, giving people license to use lethal force if they “reasonably believe” they are about to be assaulted.
“You don’t have to claim that you were afraid for your life,” Mr. Corrigan, the county attorney, said. “You just have to claim that he was in the house illegally. If you think someone’s going to punch you in the nose or engage you in a fistfight, that’s sufficient grounds to engage in lethal force.”
It was immaterial that Mr. Fredenberg was unarmed. What mattered was what Mr. Harper — who declined to comment through his lawyer — later told investigators: that Mr. Fredenberg was charging toward him, angry, “like he was on a mission,” and that Mr. Harper was scared for his life.
In an interview, Ms. Fredenberg said that she sat in her car and watched the shooting, and that her husband was standing still when he was shot. She ran to him, screaming. His last words, she said, were a simple plea: “Call 911.”
Neither the police nor the county attorney conducted a rigorous investigation, she said, leaving her husband without an official advocate.
“There is no justice,” she said.