Man shot by border patrol agents

And usually, you'd think this means I was clip-blogging about something that probably happened near Laredo. No, wrong border.

Read the article in the Great Falls Tribune. It happened near Sweetgrass, MT, and there are a couple of items in this story that interest me.

According to a brief statement released by the Havre sector office of U.S. Customs and Border Protection, the U.S. officers encountered the man, who was driving a stolen vehicle with Illinois license plates, during their patrol duties.

As the officers attempted to question the man, he reached for his back pocket for what was later found to be a stun gun, according to the statement, read over the phone by David Bernard, assistant chief patrol agent out of the CBP's Havre office.

"In an act of self-defense, the agents discharged their service-issued weapons," Bernard said.

So, in this instance, even though the agents outnumbered the other guy two to one, it was still justifiable self-defense for them both to shoot him when he tried to pull a stun gun. Of course, they apparently didn't know what he was reaching for at the time.

The incident concerned Pellerin-Fowlie because Canadian customs agents are not armed, despite pushing for the policy change for years with the Canadian government.

"Our members are not armed and this man was heading to the Canadian border," he said. "We have been calling for the arming of our officers for some time."

It's a good thing our guys stopped him. Otherwise those poor Canadian border agents would have been completely at the mercy of a car thief with a stun gun.