Home Defense Sense

Read this article from ABC News in Portland, Oregon -- or just check the meat of it here:

Robbery suspect caught by well-armed homeowner

KELSO, Wash. - Cowlitz County Sheriffs say they have taken a bank robbery suspect who has been on the loose into custody.

Deputies received a call from a resident on Kalama River Road
Wednesday at 5:10 p.m. saying they were holding a person at gunpoint on their property who matched a description of the bank robbery suspect.

This kind of story may be big news to you. Of course, National Rifle Association members read a number of such stories each month in "The Armed Citizen," a column in the monthly members' magazine American Rifleman. The stories usually end with the intruders fleeing, sometimes injured. But sometimes the homeowners shoot and kill.

Even if you aren't a gun owner, ask yourself: If you were faced with an intruder in your home, with seconds to determine if your life is in danger, whether the intruder is armed, and what constitutes "reasonable force," would you want to have some publicity-seeking prosecutor or a comfortable police desk jockey second-guessing what you did to protect your family, home, and life?

Now read this, from the December 9, 2004, issue of The Economist:

SIR JOHN STEVENS, the head of London's police, thinks that Britain's burglary laws are too soft on criminals. A troupe of indignant newspaper columnists agree. Listeners to “Today”, an influential BBC breakfast radio show, voted it their most-wanted new law.

This week, the Tories hoped to catch the mood, tabling a bill that replaces the old idea that householders can use “reasonable force” against intruders with a new one, that all but “grossly disproportionate force” is allowed. Tony Blair, always unwilling to be outflanked by the Tories on crime, responded by saying that the law might need to be changed.

The facts suggest otherwise. Under the existing law, only two people have been imprisoned for using force against burglars within recent memory. The first, Tony Martin, shot a teenager in the back with an unregistered shotgun while the boy was climbing out of a window. The second, Barry-Lee Hastings, stabbed a man 12 times in the back, and kept stabbing even after the burglar had left the house. Neither makes a credible folk hero. Dominic Grieve, the shadow attorney-general, who drafted the bill for the Conservatives, concedes that no have-a-go heroes have been convicted.

We can judge the bias of The Economist by the author's failure to mention that Mr. Martin was alone in his isolated rural house, at night, and was confronted by two intruders (he killed one and injured the other with a single shotgun blast). But regardless, the lad he killed had broken into his house. But in Great Britain, all handguns are banned for the general public, and all other firearms, including BB guns and air rifles, are heavily regulated. Mr. Martin's shotgun was unlicensed, and he ran afoul of the "reasonable force" law so favored by The Economist. (Great Britain is also experiencing a horrendous wave of violent crime and home intrusions, dating -- curiously enough -- the the laws that largely disarmed the populace.)

A just law should be very simple: Any force in such a case should be justified. An intruder, armed or not, should be seen as an immediate threat to the lives of all those present in the home. To set up a tribunal to judge after the fact (and usually ignoring or belittling the inevitable panic and uncertainty of a homeowner faced with such a threat) whether force was justified, when fractions of a second in such instances often determine whether the innocent live or die, is ludicrous.

Tony Martin himself, the reclusive farmer who acted properly to save his own life, only to have it ruined by the criminals who preyed on him and a society that made him pay with years of that life lost to an unjust prison sentence, said it best: "We are supposed to live in a civilised society. It's not the way I have been treated... People are not aware of what it's like in the countryside. Criminals prevail. It can't be right."

No, Mr. Martin, it isn't right.