77 year old congressman struggles with armed home invader

An Iowa paper called WCF Courier reports:

Congressman Boswell fights off armed intruder at Iowa farm house

DES MOINES, Iowa (AP) — A home invasion at Rep. Leonard Boswell’s Iowa farm ended when his 22-year-old grandson fetched a shotgun and aimed it at the intruder, according to a statement from the congressman’s office. No one was seriously injured.

The incident started about 10:45 p.m. Saturday when an armed man came in through the front door, attacked Boswell’s daughter, Cindy Brown, and demanded money, the statement said. Boswell, 77, heard his daughter’s screams, came into the entryway and attempted to disarm the intruder.

As they struggled, Boswell’s grandson, Mitchell Brown, got a shotgun from another room. When he pointed the shotgun at the intruder, the man fled into the fields around the house outside Lamoni.

Boswell’s wife, Dody Boswell, 75, also was home during the attack. His spokesman Grant Woodard said the whole family is safe and unhurt, aside from some scrapes and bruises. [cont.]

There is no description of the intruder, other than that he is an “armed man.” Given that this armed and dangerous individual is at large, why does the Courier not describe him? Have you ever heard of a local newspaper reporting about an armed and dangerous man—a criminal who has attacked people and is likely to attack again, a criminal whose description is readily available from the people whom he has already attacked—that does not provide a physical description of him? I’m not jumping to any conclusions about the characteristics of the criminal in this case. What I’m saying is that the contemporary news media’s policy of withholding physical descriptions of criminals, which is done in order to cover up the true degree of black criminality in our society, results in a failure to give necessary physical descriptions even when the criminal is not black.

The larger problem is this: Under our liberal—i.e., racial socialist—regime, every once-normal practice and standard of society that results in blacks being shown as doing worse than whites must be eliminated, in order to make the races seem equal in all respects. Thus physical descriptions of at-large criminals were once routine and automatic; now they are rare. Why? To make black (and nonwhite Hispanic) criminality seem less than it is.

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E. writes from Florida:

Lamoni, Iowa is close to the Missouri border, about 60 miles south of Des Moines. There is nothing nearer than Des Moines that could be called a city or even a large town. It is all farming. I can tell you, from years of living in and visiting Iowa, most recently last month for five days, that, when traveling around farm country, you never see Negroes, even in cars, but nowadays you see plenty of Hispanics. So, my guess is that this guy was a Hispanic, familiar with the area because he worked on that farm or nearby farms. I expect the truth will out in the near future.

The Congressman is an eight term Democrat (white guy) whose district includes Des Moines, where most of the votes would be—either Des Moines proper or the suburbs. Some day liberal whites will wake up. This guy’s too old to bother with, but perhaps his daughter and grandson learned something.

David B. writes:

Your post about the home invasion and assault on the family of an Iowa Congressman rang a bell. Here is a 2005 Vdare piece by Steve Sailer on “Mapping The Unmentionable: Race and Crime.” Toward the end Sailer lists Iowa as the state with the highest percentage of its black population behind bars at 4.8 percent. “Bet you didn’t guess that,” Sailer wrote.

I did a google search and none of the news items I found on the incident gave a description of the attacker. Maybe he was black, maybe he was white, but it would help to know what such a dangerous criminal suspect looks like.

E. continues:

The other note of interest is that they owned a shotgun and that the grandson, age 22, knew where it was. Most rural Iowans have a gun on the premises. Shotguns are usually used for hunting birds. It would be interesting to review the congressman’s record on gun control legislation. I don’t know how to do that, but perhaps some of your other readers might.

Jonathan W. writes:

He’s on the right side of the gun issue. Many rural Democrats are. They simply have to be if they want to be elected.

Alexis Zarkov writes:

The intruder faced considerable risk with an armed home invasion. The occupants have no obligation to retreat and having a gun amply demonstrates that the occupants were in mortal danger. Had Mitchell Brown fired the shotgun, and killed the intruder, he should have been well within the boundaries of legitimate self defense. Now the intruder is free to threaten other people. He might even return to the Boswell farmhouse to extract revenge or make another attempt. In Britain the victims of a home invasion face severe penalties if they employ lethal force, indeed almost any force to protect themselves. The state insists on an absolute monopoly on the use of force, and jealously guards this prerogative. As a result British people face a far higher rate of home invasions than Americans. American home invaders, except in places like New York City and Washington DC, know they might get killed, and this provides a substantial deterrent. The Europeans deride us as “cowboys” for protecting ourselves with guns. We might be cowboys, but we are live cowboys. On the other hand, the British are dead, if not in body then in spirit.

July 18

James Perry writes:

In this story at the Des Moines Register the county sheriff and Boswell’s chief of staff won’t even identify the sex of the intruder. They won’t even eliminate half the population from the list of potential suspects!

Woodard didn’t specify the intruder’s gender, and Muir declined to say.

At this point the story is so fishy that I wonder if it happened at all, or if it is something he contrived to assist his reelection campaign.

Posted by Lawrence Auster at July 17, 2011 01:07 PM | Send