Be Excellent To Each Other

When only lethal force will do.

Fair play to him though, apparently the rules governing lethal force in Texas are:

The reasonable use of lethal force will be allowed if an intruder is:

* Committing certain violent crimes, such as murder or sexual assault, or is attempting to commit such crimes
* Unlawfully trying to enter a protected place
* Unlawfully trying to remove a person from a protected place.

The law also provides civil immunity for a person who lawfully slays an intruder or attacker in such situations.

Whereas in the UK:

IF:
-the suspects have broken in or attempted to break in at least once already
-you have informed the police and either:
a) they've done fuck all
b) given you a 'crime reference number'
-you are being stabbed, beaten, shot or otherwise menaced by the suspects

you will still be locked up and the key thrown away, and your house given to an illegal immigrant from Algeria with four wives and 27 children, all bearded and named Abdul (even the girls)

This seems to be all the police think people expect of them when something is stolen, so they can claim it back on their insurance. Based on personal experience and anecdotal evidence, they don't even go through the motions of even appearing to give a fuck.

To investigate it would be a waste of resources. Unless the culprit gets caught red handed (very unlikely) or later with the stolen goods, their laughing.

You can use any reasonable force in self-defence and the defence of your home and/or the people and stuff in it. That includes using weapons, as long as they're not deadly weapons kept specifically for the purpose (a cricket bat in the cupbard = fine. A katana you use for nothing else = not), but not gratuitously, and not setting up traps or chasing people down the street. Obviously "reasonable force" is open to interpretation, but what legal term isn't? If they had an extensive list of injuries, weapons and forms of defence, you'd get people sent down because their reflexive punch happened to break a bone that put the injury into level 6a or whatever.

The whole "you'll be arrested/sued" thing is totally overplayed - it's not anywhere near as common as the papers would have us think. Quite apart from anything else, the police and courts alike would mostly like to see burglars having their face pushed in once in a while.

Anyone have that issue of VIZ with the Charles Clarke Reasonable Force-o-Meter?

The story it sets it all up with is brilliant - an 86 year old widow has her house broken into by an 18 stone madman. 'Die you fucking bitch' he grunts as he advances on her with a giant knife. She cowers... and a policeman suddenly arrives. She thinks the day is saved, until the copper carts HER off to jail. It seems that she accidentally scratched the maniac's lip while cowering, and he is awarded vast amounts of damages for his 'injury' while she is sent to rot in prison forever.

This is true but I still prefer the Texan definition of when you can use force i.e. If you unlawfully enter someone's property, you may get your brain's blown out.

Incidentally, it wasn't his property, it was his neighbour's.

In Texas, you can still use lethal force in some circumstances to protect a neighbour's property.

This is his call to the emergency services, he shoots the intruders during the call.

Even if a mentally ill person wanders into your property unaware of it not being their own? Are they fair game? What about a child?

There's a lot of difference between trespass and burglary. Still, I suppose this land that one claims to be one's property is only thus due to someone killing one or many other someones until people left him alone on his patch many many years ago, so why fuck with tradition?

Sounds like cold blooded murder to me.

"No, you're dead". I couldn't tell who the person was or what they said just before he said that. But either way it doesn't sound like there was much counter-fire. Ie he just shot at two black guys on his lawn because they had loot. What a cunt. Whilst I think the laws in this country is stupid, it prevents this like this. The guy also sounds like he's a few sandwhichs short of a picnic as well.

As mentioned in the article, I wonder what the situation would have been if the deadies were white and the shooter a Columbian illegal immigrant...

Well "illegal" would change this, remove the illegal and it's a better question.

This topic has come up on a couple of mainly US forums I've been on, and a few of the US posters seemed to be genuinely looking forward to the time when they are burgled so the can confront the intruder and use their .45 HydraShoks for real. Brrrrr.

He's Texan.

I thought this topic was going to be about someone completely different.



"What we are dealing with here is a complete lack of respect for the law."

He wanted to shoot those men from the minute he picked up the phone.

"you want me to go and shoot at them?"
"no"
"I've got a shotgun, it's a legal weapon, can I use it?"
'No, do not shoot anyone, stay in the house"
"I'm going to go and shoot them"
"No, don't shoot them"
"I wanna go and shoot at them"
"no, don't"

Over and over.

Actually, I think what he did was indefensible, but how long did it take the police to turn up? I have had to call the police in a couple of emergency situations and they have always been there in 2-3 minutes.

Anyway, the guy wanted to shoot those people, he was trying to justify it in any way possible. As the officer on the phone said, property is not worth wasting a life for, and I agree. The caller's life was now in any danger, nobody's was.

I don't know how I feel about this. One the one hand, we obviously can't have everyone shooting at each other. On the other hand, the village I grew up in had a twenty-minute ERT. 20 minutes is a fucking long time to be waiting.

[citation needed]


An argument for village bobbies and decent local GPs, perhaps.

This is just another example of Tony Blair's rip-off Britain.

Actually, the solution was for some enterprising chap to build a clay pigeon shooting ground nearby, complete with the largest collection of shotguns in the country. Now there's a police station just four miles away

Me too!

Yeah, there's a depressing and worrying number of americans who are not merely happy to consider having a gun "just in case" to scare off or stop a burglar, but instead seem to genuinely spend their lives dreaming of their first chance to gun someone down the instant they cross their threshold. Pointing a gun at someone or firing to warn or injure a burglar or intruder I could handle. But fuck, I wouldn't kill my worst enemies over a stereo or tv, let alone some two-bit thief trying their luck. I'd have no qualms about killing to protect people, but christ, it's just stuff, man. And I sure as fuck wouldn't want my neighbours to kill someone over it.

What surprises me is that despite this, the stupid thieving cunts still can't resist entering people's property and stealing from them.

How much must the average haul be worth from your average burglary once it's been sold on? Probably a couple of hundred quid if they're lucky. Yet they are still prepared to endanger their life and the lives of others, regardless.

In a perfect world, we wouldn't have to worry about being burgled. Until then, I'm perfectly happy not caring about the welfare of those who don't have any consideration for the welfare of others.

And what does that tell us?

That they are prepared to endanger the lives of others for their own selfish gain.

Er... how are they endangering other people, exactly? It's the resident with the gun (or whoever they live with) who's got the power to shoot the wrong person.

If people are willing to risk their lives for a few hundred quid, there's more to it than mere selfishness. I'm selfish, and I wouldn't risk my life for a telly, and today's the first time since february that I've had enough money to buy something that wasn't strictly necessary to live and work.

I seriously considered turning to crime several times. It'd certainly be easier, and I suspect I'd be pretty good at conning people, for one thing. But I was lucky enough to have friends to help out, so I've fallen short of being desperate enough to steal. It was pretty close, though.

By committing an act of burglary, they are potentially (only potentially, admittedly) creating a situation that could cause harm to them or harm to the people they are robbing, if they are caught in the act.



Well you would also have, presumably, considered the consequences of turning to crime and if the crime in question was burglary, and you were in Texas, a possible consequence of your actions would be that you were killed.

That tells you how good heroin is, though.

Nonsense, show me someone who was indifferent to being burgled (at least the first time) and I'll show you an emotional cripple. It's a horrible feeling; my home is like my underpants, I don't want some random junkie rooting around in there. And all your cool shit gets taken away, so there's nothing to do.

I'm not so concerned with their motivation (there are plenty of people who make a living out of that), rather the possible outcome of what they do.

I was referring to physical harm but your right. It's not just about physical injuries.

They are only creating a situation where someone else may get harmed if they are willing to harm someone else. This isn't necessarily the case, and in fact most burglars will scarper at the first sign of disturbance to avoid detection and to avoid a confrontation (either from fear of being overpowered, pragmatic avoidance of a more serious crime, reluctance to injure someone or, commonly, a combination of all three. The reluctance to injure isn't as far-fetched as it may sound, or they may as well don a mask and crack a shop assistant over the head or knife someone in the street).





Well, yes. But so what? That's the very point - I'd need a damn good reason to risk my life for a few hundred measly quid. If I hadn't had a huge sack of pasta to eat, I would have had a much stronger reason.

It happens enough for it to be a concern. Whilst a major reason for this is the fact that a botched burglary where no one is harmed is much less likely to be reported by the media than one that ends in injuries/death. The fact still remains that the situation is totally avoidable but for the selfish actions of the person committing the crime.




I don't believe that, especially in this or any other developed country, there is a good reason to commit burglary.

Surely if anything, burlgary in a developed country is more justifiable, since there's more useless crap whose absence won't cause significant harm? I'd steal a telly from a neighbour before I stole a hoe from some Somalian dirt farmer.

In most developed countries there tends to be a basic social safety net that will, for example, prevent people starving to death, whereas this isn't always the case in less developed countries.

I wouldn't say it was ever justifiable to commit burglary, certainly not on the basis of whether someone is deemed to be able to do without whatever may been taken.

Again, it not so much the loss of material possessions rather the potential for injury/loss of life that a burglary can lead to as a result of unlawfully entering someone's premises.

But if the only life being risked is your own, so what? Yes, it's a cirme and it's immoral, but saying that there's no reason to risk your life for selfish gain because that would mean risking your life is ridiculous, and the only reason the victim could be harmed is if you deliberately attacked them, which isn't part of robbing someone, but a totally different act, or if they somehow injured themselves while you were there, which is their own stupid fault for waving an axe around or whatever.

You originally said "they are prepared to endanger the lives of others for their own selfish gain." This simply isn't true. Committing burglary does not risk anyone else's life, ever. If you choose to attack or fight someone during a burglary, that's another crime and another action altogether (and it's pretty counter-productive anyway - a good thief will avoid confrontations as far as possible).

If, when a burglary goes wrong, the only person that could come to harm is the burglar, then I would have less of a problem with it.

History shows that the person being burgled is just as likely to come to harm. It is probably the case that the burglar in these cases did not intend to assault/murder when they set out to commit burglary, but did none the less.

Do a Google search for "killed disturbing burglars", you'll have no shortage of cases to peruse.

The definition of burglary is:

Burglary is defined by section 9 of the Theft Act 1968 which created two variants:
“ A person is guilty of burglary if he enters any building or part of a building as a trespasser with intent to steal, inflict grievous bodily harm [or raping any person therein][13], or do unlawful damage to the building or anything in it.(section 9(1)(a)) ”
“ A person is guilty of burglary if, having entered a building or part of a building as a trespasser, he steals or attempts to steal anything in the building, or inflicts or attempts to inflict grievous bodily harm on any person in the building.(section 9(1)(b))

So committing a violent act during a burglary can still be chargeable under the same offense.

Do a search for "attacked at a nightclub" and you'll find lots of results, too. That doesn't mean that choosing to go to a nightclub has anything to do with choosing to attack someone while there. There are many cases where a burglar has attacked someone, but try comparing that to the number of times a burglar hasn't attacked someone.



Only if the burglar chooses to stick around and put up a fight instead of scarpering at the earliest sign of trouble, which is not only a separate decision to the decision to enter in the first place, but really lousy practice.

Also, entering a house with people in at all is pretty fucking stupid anyway. Most burglaries, and certainly most successful burglaries, are planned in advance and done when nobody's in, or likely to come in.



I wasn't aware of that legal definition, but come off it. We're talking about going into someone's house to steal their stuff, not to beat them up and steal their stuff. The fact that there's a law that covers both doesn't change the fact that morally and practically, the decision to steal stuff from a house and the decision to hurt someone while doing it are totally different.

I've never said that a violent act accompanies every burglary.

Any violent act that occurs at a nightclub is often for a reason unrelated to the going to the nightclub, that is merely the location where the violent act occurred.

Any violent act that occurs during a burglary is a direct result of the burglary being committed in the first place.


What if the person catching them in the act stands between the burglar and their escape route?

It may well be pretty fucking stupid but it happens, no doubt this was not planned.


I don’t think morality comes in to it when stealing people’s stuff and committing a violent act, unless your talking about varying degrees of immorality.

If the point of the exercise was merely to steal someone’s stuff, it is perfectly possible to do so without entering someone’s premises.

In entering someone’s premises, it increases the chance of a violent encounter.

Wrong, wrong and wrong again.

There have been many cases of elderly people being burgled, and consequently having heart attacks. Or if you're going to include non fatalities, there have been numerous cases of people being burgled having various mental issues as a consequence.

Indeed, or the burglar whom my sister disturbed last year whilst feeding her friend's cat. She ran into the front room to grab the phone and he followed her ripped it from her hands, intimidated her and ordered her to stay put, whereupon she felt no other choice than to throw a chair through the window and dive out after it. No chance of injury there then. If as an apparently fairly bright person Sinister Agent you have seriously considered taking up crime because it would be easier then you are a cunt.

Yes, really must try that sometime.

Th e problem of causing a heart attack could be avoided by not entering an occupied house. The bloke who ripped the phone out of someone's hands and threatened them could have simply not done that, and legged it instead. Choosing to do either is not the same thing. Is it really that hard to make the distinction between choosing to take someone's stuff and choosing to attack or scream at someone if they try to stop you? And yes, of course you can talk morality about different ways of committing a crime. One man robs a bank and hurts nobody. Another man robs a bank and shoots three customers on his way out. Which is the more immoral act? It's hardly metaphysics.

Also, how can you steal something in someone's house without going into their house? A crane?



I find it difficult to believe that you've never, ever thought that "fuck it, maybe it'd be easier to just stop trying to do the right thing all the time, and if everyone else is going to be a selfish fuck with no regard for other people, why the hell not give it a go and see how it works out?"

If you've never, ever considered a life of crime, then your obedience of the law is utterly meaningless because you're not doing it out of choice.

Yes of course, I've considered every sort of "what if" imaginable, the crucial difference is that you claimed the only thing which stopped you from actually doing it were some good friends. You seemed to want us to think you were right on the verge of going out and robbing someone. I assumed it was just silly internet bluster but thought I'd call you on it anyway.

Well, it wasn't so much "good friends" as "people I live with buying some food for once, although only after two weeks of buying fucking sausage rolls and trying to claim they spent £120 a week on them", and after that, finding work that paid more than the rent about 20 minutes before I'd have otherwise cracked.

I'd have been far more likely to steal from a chain shop anyway, if it came to that.