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Originally Posted by Grimace
Funny that you mentioned that case about the intruder, Webstral. Here in Montana they're working on putting through legislation that will grant all homeowners the full and absolute right to shoot and potentially kill anyone that breaks into your house.
Of course, I think many people in other states view Montanans as gun toting hicks, so I guess it'll be okay for us to have a clear conscious when we blow an intruder away.    |
Here in the UK we had a big fuss about this a few years ago. Essentially the common law position is that you are allowed to use "reasonable force" to defend you and yours from attack (I think that position is pretty common to all common law countries), you are also allowed to use reasonable force if you have a reasonable fear of attack. This requires the court, and the jury, to "get into your head" and decide whether or not your behavious was "reasonable" under the circumstances as you saw them at the time.
Now this obviously leaves a whole bunch of things open to interpretation but in the case in point a homeowner who had suffered several prior burglaries shot a couple of burglars using an illegally held pump action shotgun (the normal justification for holding a shotgun licence in the UK is sport or pest control - neither of which requires a pump action).
From memory the guy lived out in the country and police reaction times were accordingly slow, after previous incidents he had said he would take care of the problem himself. In this instance the two burglars had (I think I recall) knives. As it turned out the legal issue that got him a conviction was whether he had the necessary fear for his life to make firing "reasonable" under the circumstances. Also his statements that he would "take care of it himself" indicated pre-planning on his part - which is also legally a no-no here (the common law intent is that when confronted with a situation you have the right to defend yourself but you are not allowed to prepare for such a situation). This guy had also booby trapped his property which is also a no-no under English common law.
He was originally convicted of murder but this was reduced to manslaughter on appeal when the Court of Appeal accepted the fact that his mental state put his actions in the category of manslaughter rather than murder:
http://news.bbc.co.uk/1/hi/uk/1627540.stm
But giving people absolute rights as in Montana is, in my opinion, a bad idea - you are always going to get someone who shoots the double glazing salesman because they are paranoid and then claims protection under the law. (Not that I'm suggesting that shooting double glazing salesmen might not be the right thing to do
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