WhatFinger


Probation officer then kills the shooter, who appears to have picked the wrong judge to attack

Judge packing heat fires back after being shot entering courthouse



Before you ask, I don't know the partisan makeup of the players involved here, and at least for the moment I'm not sure it's important. Judge Joseph Bruzzese Jr. mainly handles family-type cases. We don't know if he was ambushed by someone who was upset by one of his rulings, but we do know that this turned out to be a good-guy-with-a-gun scenario. Judge Bruzzese was prepared:
A judge walking from his car into the county courthouse was shot by a gunman Monday morning but managed to fire back before a probation officer stepped in and ultimately killed the suspect, authorities said. Jefferson County Judge Joseph Bruzzese Jr. was shot at around 8 a.m. near the courthouse in Steubenville, just across the Ohio River from West Virginia's northern panhandle, roughly 30 miles (48 kilometers) west of Pittsburgh. Courthouse video shows both the judge and the gunman firing about five times each, said Jefferson County Sheriff Fred Abdalla. "Whoever thought this could happen here?" Abdalla said, adding that investigators are familiar with the suspect and are checking to see if he had any connection with the judge. Steubenville City Manager James Mavromatis tells WTOV-TV that Bruzzese was talking after being wounded. He was flown to a Pittsburgh-area hospital. Investigators didn't immediately release further information about the judge's condition or on the suspect. Republican Gov. John Kasich said he was told the judge would survive.

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I'd like to ask everyone to pray for Judge Bruzzese in his recovery. Obviously the report given to Gov. Kasich is very good news. And with all due respect to Sheriff Abdalla, I couldn't help but laugh at his comment. Why would you think that an event like this couldn't happen in any particular place? No matter where you go in the world, there are malcontents who are angry about something, and are willing to take it out violently on whomever it is that they hold responsible - or on whatever random person happens to get in their way. If not for the fact that both Judge Bruzzese and the probation officer were armed and ready, this situation could have gotten much worse. It's the same thing we saw with the gunmen who opened fire at the Republican congressional baseball practice. The fact that capitol police were present and took down the shooter may have been the only thing that prevented it from becoming a mass murder with dozens of victims. I've shared my thoughts before on how we could turn the good-guys-with-guns concept into something that routinely stops these incidents from getting out of control. You may not like the idea, but what you can't deny is that guns neutralize each other. When the bad guy is the only guy who has a gun, then he is in complete control of the situation and can basically do whatever he wants. That's how you end up with Virginia Tech, Sandy Hook and Columbine. It's a good thing the Stubenville courthouse area wasn't a "gun-free zone." Or if it was, it's a good thing the judge and probation officer were packing regardless. As it was, no one ended up dead but the shooter. We need more of these incidents to end like that.

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Dan Calabrese’s column is distributed by HermanCain.com, which can be found at HermanCain

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