AVENTURA, Fla. (AP) — Authorities say a South Florida Uber driver acted in self-defense when he fatally shot a would-be robber.
Aventura police spokesman Chris Goranitis says the driver was taking a passenger to Fort Lauderdale-Hollywood International Airport early Sunday when a van driven by 24-year-old Kevin DeVincent Johnson cut him off. Johnson got out of the van with a gun in each hand and confronted Namique Anderson.
The Miami Herald (http://hrld.us/2hPXxcw ) reports Anderson fired four times at Johnson, killing him. Johnson never got off a shot.
Police say they believe Johnson committed an armed robbery about an hour before the shooting.
Uber officials say the company has a policy against drivers carrying weapons and tell the Herald they’re looking into the incident. Anderson wasn’t charged with a crime.
The passenger wasn’t injured.
Aventura is a coastal suburb between Miami and Fort Lauderdale.
Copyright 2016 The Associated Press. All rights reserved. This material may not be published, broadcast, rewritten or redistributed.
Glad this driver was carrying and was able to defend himself! I hope Uber will reconsider their no-weapons policy.
Wrong conclusion. This is like hearing about an auto accident in which the driver was saved because he wasn’t wearing a seatbelt, and was “thrown clear” of the crash, and concluding that this proves that you shouldn’t wear seatbelts.
Armed Uber drivers will simply lead to a fair number of needless gun deaths.
How many needless gun deaths did this armed Uber driver cause during his previous rides, before he defended himself?
Your seatbelt analogy begs the question at hand.
I get that guns are a mixed bag. It’s a fantasy to think we’d all be unequivocally safer if everyone were armed. It would be smarter to expect a mix of happy endings, like the one in this story, and bad endings, which we read plenty about on TPM. We pay a steep price when incompetent shooters or hotheads carry guns.
But we also pay a steep price for the fact that alcohol is legal, and for the fact that we’re allowed to drive cars faster than 30mph. I’m glad I have the right to do both of those things, even though irresponsible people doing those things cause a large number of deaths each year (surely giving gun deaths a run for their money). Likewise, I’m glad this driver had the right to be armed and to defend himself, even though there’s a cost to that arrangement.
This is like the “home defense” argument in favor of gun ownership. The statistics prove that it’s a fantasy, and not by a small margin.
Tell that to this Uber driver.