That tale about my East Texas cousin raised enough eyebrows that i figure it needs a followup. Here’s my version from memory of an article in a Houston newspaper a couple of years ago.
This poor single mother with a little kid at home has worked hard for two weeks in her dishwashing job at a restaurant and is given her paycheck when she gets off work. She cashes it at an ATM, but as she turns away from the machine, she is knocked to the ground by a mugger, who grabs the money out of her hand.
She’s an East Texas girl, remember, so she just rolls to the side, pulls her gun out of her purse, and puts six slugs into the robber, who expires on the spot as she is retrieving her money from his hand. The police come, and since it was clearly self defense, she is released on her own recognizance and instructed to go to the DA’s office in the morning.
The DA explains that under the circumstances he’s not going to bring charges against her, but one aspect did present a bit of a problem for him, and he asks her: “How come you had to go and shoot him six times?”
“Because the last time I pulled the trigger it just went, ‘Click’.”
Meanwhile, talk about digging yourself into a hole:
And OK, it’s not as bad as it looks because at the top of the excavation just out of the frame to the left stands the crane that will lift the earthmovers out when their job is done. The men will remain until the end of their shift.