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Armed Homeowner Who Stared Down 'Mob' Fires Back After Chris Cuomo Attack

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This homeowner was standing his ground.

The St. Louis man who’s made headlines after he and his wife confronted a mob of Black Lives Matter “protesters” who trespassed onto a private street on Sunday took his case to a confrontational Chris Cuomo on Tuesday night.

And he didn’t back down a bit.

During a lengthy interview with the typically combative CNN host, 63-year-old Mark McCloskey, with his attorney at his side, disputed the basis of Cuomo’s argument — that McCloskey had no reason to resort to displaying a semiautomatic rifle while his wife wielded a handgun.

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Neither weapon was fired, but McCloskey made it clear to Cuomo that he thought it was the presence of firearms that prevented anything from actually happening.

Cuomo kicked off the interview by breezily bypassing what he called “the legal rights and the facts” to home in on what he apparently considered the crucial issue — and a question clearly designed to paint McCloskey into the corner of opposing the Black Lives Movement instead of simply a man defending his property:

“How do you feel about becoming the face of political resistance to the Black Lives Matter movement,” he asked.

Would you have done with Mark McCloskey did when the mob came?

McCloskey, an attorney himself, wasn’t biting.

“First of all, that’s a completely ridiculous statement,” he said. “I’m not the face of anything opposing the Black Lives Matter movement. I was a person scared for my life, who was protecting my wife, my home, my hearth, my livelihood. I was a victim of a mob that came through the gate.

“I didn’t care what color they were. I didn’t care what their motivation was. I was frightened. I was assaulted. And I was in imminent fear that they would run me over, kill me, burn my house.”

It’s important to note here, as Cuomo did, that McCloskey was using “assaulted” in its civil law sense — meaning a threat of harm or reasonable fear of harm — rather than a criminal action. But that hardly changes the atmosphere that surrounded the incident.

McCloskey pointed out that St. Louis had already seen the effects of recent riots, including the death of retired police Capt. David Dorn, a black man shot to death outside a looted pawn shop.

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Four police officers were also shot and wounded in the “protests” against alleged police brutality that degenerated into criminal chaos.

“When bad things happen, they unpredictably turn really bad, really fast,” McCloskey told Cuomo. “These things get very bad, very quickly. And when those people came through the gate, when there was a mob, I didn’t take the time to see their birth certificates or anything else.

“I was defending my house, my life, my wife, and what I’ve spent 32 years building there.”

Almost all Americans who have accomplished something in their lives — which probably discounts 90 percent of the mobs making news the past month — can understand McCloskey’s point here: Use of force in self-defense is a right that applies to property as well as lives.

Cuomo, who has amassed a considerable amount of material wealth himself — owning property in the Hamptons doesn’t come cheap — pretended he didn’t understand it at all.

At about the 4:25 mark in the video below, he gets to the heart of the issue, particularly objecting to McCloskey’s use of the word “terrorism” to describe the mob he was facing.



“They’re yelling, they’re angry,” Cuomo said. “They did not go up your steps. They didn’t go to your house. They didn’t touch you. They didn’t try to enter your home. They didn’t try to do anything to your kids.”

“To call it terrorism, when the people are there protesting how the community is treated by the police, is a little bit of reverse psychology at a minimum, is it not?”

Whatever Cuomo was trying to get at with the “reverse psychology” crack — was McCloskey the terrorist for defending his property? — the homeowner didn’t buy it.

“No,” he said. “You’re absolutely wrong.

“The reason why they did not get up my steps was because my wife and I were there with weapons to keep them off our steps,” he added. “They were coming at us until I displayed the weapon and that stopped them.”

When Cuomo asked for proof that the mob had actually headed toward McCloskey’s property, McCloskey’s lawyer, Albert Watkins, largely took over.

With Watkins — who’s apparently a story in his own right — holding the floor, the conversation degenerated into Cuomo apparently attempting to hold McCloskey responsible for the fact that President Donald Trump had publicized the incident in a Twitter post.

But that’s getting far afield from McCloskey’s position.

The legal situation hasn’t been resolved. As KSDK-TV in St. Louis reported, Missouri has a “castle doctrine,” which generally means the use of deadly force is permitted if an intruder enters a home, but in Missouri that applies to trespassing on property, too.

Meanwhile, USA Today reported Tuesday that Circuit Attorney Kimberly Gardner is investigating the case, presumably to see if criminal charges can be brought against the couple.

The political questions are murky, too. According to the “fact-checking” site Snopes, McCloskey has made multiple donations to the Republican National Committee and the 2016 Trump presidential campaign.

But he’s also donated to Democrats, including a candidate for state Senate who announced Monday he would not be keeping the money, according to the St. Louis Post-Dispatch.

But what really matters here is the moment on Sunday when a mob of “protesters” — the same kind of lawless “protesters” who had torched St. Louis and other cities across the United States for the past month — marched onto a private street, in an unmistakably menacing manner, and an armed couple confronted them.

The McCloskeys stood their ground then.

On Tuesday night, Mark McCloskey stood his.

He’s not the face of “opposition to the Black Lives Matter movement,” as Cuomo and liberals would like to pretend.

He’s the face of Americans who think their homes, their lives and their families are worth protecting, and who treasure the Second Amendment because of it.

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Joe has spent more than 30 years as a reporter, copy editor and metro desk editor in newsrooms in Pennsylvania, West Virginia and Florida. He's been with Liftable Media since 2015.
Joe has spent more than 30 years as a reporter, copy editor and metro editor in newsrooms in Pennsylvania, West Virginia and Florida. He's been with Liftable Media since 2015. Largely a product of Catholic schools, who discovered Ayn Rand in college, Joe is a lifelong newspaperman who learned enough about the trade to be skeptical of every word ever written. He was also lucky enough to have a job that didn't need a printing press to do it.
Birthplace
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