But this is not a good idea.

Lol, you don't think they'll do that eventually? This is how it all starts. Boiling frog apologue and all that.

They arrested her. It's stated multiple times throughout the article, and anything about protective custody isn't mentioned by anyone involved.

If protective custody was the case, wouldn't it stand to reason that the officers involved would have stated as much and provided evidence beyond a messy home to corroborate it? There's nothing there to suggest that she was a danger to herself or others. Indeed, the fact that Chief Mone abruptly announced her retirement while this is going on should also raise eyebrows.

"Officers returned to Loud’s home to further question her. They noticed the unclean condition of the home. Loud later told officers she had not cleaned in 10 years, according to the police report.

Asked if she had been drinking, Loud said she stopped off after work and drank a few beers before coming home to watch baseball. She said she might have had some hard lemonade at home."

There's no indication, at least in this article, that she drove at all. She simply said she came home. Those sorts of technicalities are huge in courts. To your point, you're absolutely right in that alcohol and its resulting effects take time, so any testing done (especially when they came back to her house a second time) should have absolutely no standing.

Still boggles my mind that they arrested her and searched her home for...drinking at home.

Precisely.

Everyone wants equality until forced conscription becomes a possibility.

It's amazing what happens when states actually focus on their communities and try to address the socioeconomic factors that are the real contributors to violence.

That said, MA has similar issues with juvenile crime like CT does, so there's still a lot of work to be done.There were a lot of assaults around South Station in Boston over the past year all carried out by kids.

https://www.boston.com/news/crime/2022/06/28/four-juveniles-charged-assault-south-station-adam-neufell-young-other/

I think they were referring to the fact that those states specifically have what's called Constitutional carry.

https://en.m.wikipedia.org/wiki/Constitutional_carry

Edit: with that in mind, it stands to reason that there are more factors at play that contribute to violence than the presence, or lack thereof, of gun laws. On the reverse side of things, California has a laundry list of gun laws that include places like gun free zones, yet they were the site of several high profile shootings recently. And before someone mentions crossing over state lines to get guns, that is already a federal crime if you don't get an FFL involved.

Things like feature bans, mag capacity limits, the NFA etc? Yeah, those are unconstitutional. Things like taking gun rights away from a convicted murderer, or the laws in place that prohibit a person convicted of domestic violence from legally buying a gun? Not so much.

And yet they're exempt from the vast majority of gun control laws, including here in CT.

Like all legal things in self defense related cases, it's tricky. It's one thing if your assailant was using something like a knife or their fists to hurt someone and then opts to flee. At that point, they no longer have the capacity to harm others as long as everyone keeps their distance, so unless they're perceived as being on the move to hurt someone else (which you would need to prove), you're right in that that would be a bad shoot. However, that sort of proximity phenomenon is off the table with a gun. You can very easily fire a weapon while retreating, and someone with a gun on the move can still pose a threat almost instantly. The assailant firing blindly without even turning is a possibility, and all they have to do is get lucky. All this to say, it's not super clear cut when a gun is perceived to be involved, though his perception on the presence of a firearm is a different discussion and one that will certainly come up alongside this.