Curtman Curtman:
Life is precious not property, that's what insurance is for. Another step backward by the chicken little party to increase violence rather than decrease it.
Shortly after we moved into our old house in the West End, 6 years ago the neighbours told us about the guy who used to live there. Poor guy tried to stop the gangsters from stealing his car. He spent 6 months in the hospital, and had to sell the house.
Then there's my friend Jeff who was shot in the face with a sawed off shotgun way back in 1997 when he tried to stop the gangsters from stealing $60 from the Family Foods on Arlington where he worked.
It's not worth it, and our government shouldn't be encouraging vigilantes.
So what about when someone breaks into your house? What if he is there to do more than just steal the television? What if they came to kill you, and rape your wife and children? Sure the vast majority of the time this isn't the case, but people should be lawfully allowed to defend themselves from a perceived threat. And if some poor chum who broke into your house to steal your piggy bank gets a bat to the back of the head or buckshot in the chest because you perceived him as a threat and weren't 100% ready of his weapons stake, sucks to be that poor chum. It should be his risk when he decides to break and enter, not yours.
And really, it's not like the government is actually giving people the ability to be vigilantes, it is just bringing clarity to what is a very convoluted and confusing set of laws. R.O.E.s for soldiers in combat are incredibly simple and easy to follow, and they make sense. I don't understand why the same rational couldn't be applied to self-defence and citizens arrest laws.