[quote]pushharder wrote:
[quote]batman730 wrote:
[quote]Maiden3.16 wrote:
[quote]countingbeans wrote:
[quote]batman730 wrote:
You are not permitted to shoot someone just because they are in your home, even if you were able to access your properly stored firearm and lock and load in time to do so. You need to be able to show that they posed a credible threat of grievous bodily injury or death to yourself or others in your home at the time that you shot them. [/quote]
I don’t know man, this one bothers me.
I don’t feel it is safe to hang around and ask the person breaking into your home what their intentions are. The only assumption that is 100% is they intend to do you harm, and to end the threat.
I’ve had more than one CO tell me that 9 times out of 10, the person breaking into your home is going to go through you if they have to in order to get what they want.
[/quote]
Agree. A reasonable person would feel for their life the instant someone broke into their home while they were inside. The first reaction is “this person is here to abduct/rape/kill/harm my children.” Nobody breaks into someone’s home to bake them a cake. [/quote]
Well, like I said in my post, I personally know no fewer than 5 people who have inadvertently ended up in someone else’ house. Most of them were drunk off their ass. 2 thought they were paying a surprise visit to a relative who had moved. I also wouldn’t doubt that my grandma wandered in a few places when she had Alzheimer’s. On the other hand, I personally know no one who has been the victim of a violent crime in their home (with the exception of one or two of my shadier acquaintances). These are not statistics, just my experience.
This is not meant to imply that home invasions don’t happen, far from it. I also don’t mean to suggest that a person shouldn’t have the right to defend their home. I absolutely believe they should. My point is that there are ways a stranger can end up in your house that don’t necessitate killing them and in my experience these ways are at least as likely as situations where you do need to use lethal force.
Had the home owners opted to “execute with extreme prejudice” any of my misguided friends or relatives, as was suggested elsewhere in this thread it would have been a bad day for everyone even if it was a “clean shoot” legally. Absolutely no harm was intended by any of them. I know that many people advocate shooting from ambush and using your superior knowledge of the layout of your home to your advantage for home defense. This is probably very tactically sound. Depending on where live it might be completely justified. However, I’d find personally find it difficult to live with if I blasted my drunk 19 year old neighbour while he was stumbling around my living room drunk…[/quote]
My experiences, or of those I know, are exactly the opposite of yours.
I’m over a half century old and have never had someone inadvertently stumble into my home or someone I know.[/quote]
I know how it sounds, but it’s the God’s honest truth. The first example I can think of was my father-in-law 40 some years ago. Identical company housing in a mining town and immoderate alcohol consumption were contributing factors. The most recent example I can think of was a kid who worked for us a few years back. Came home (he thought) pissed drunk and couldn’t figure out why his key wouldn’t work in the front door. Drunk logic dictated that the best thing to do was to force a basement window and pass out on the couch. The neighbour (who happened to be a cop) found him in the morning when his kids went downstairs to watch the Saturday morning cartoons.
Now that I think about it, my wife and I once walked into a condo exactly one floor above my buddy’s girlfriend’s place where we were expected (no need to knock). The guy was confused but friendly enough, but then again we had beer and my wife’s good lookin…
My boss’ brother booted his neighbour’s door in the wee hours because the house was on fire. The guy was fast asleep and would have died otherwise. The neighbour had no idea what was going on and had to be told several times before he realized who was there and why. Had the neighbour been a default to shooting type who slept with a weapon handy, it would have been a different story in the news.
My boss and his brother were over in Amsterdam and they decided to visit an aunt over there. Found their way there on public transit and let themselves in (hide a key I think). No one was home and they were in the house for a few minutes, went to the bathroom, had some juice etc. before they realized that they didn’t recognize anyone in the family photos on the walls. Turns out Auntie had moved several months before. They made their exit directly.
Actually, a childhood neighbour of mine had someone break into his house and literally make a sandwich and grab a few other food items before leaving the place otherwise untouched.
Like I said, just experiences taken from very diverse groups of people I know. Obviously not arguing about your experiences to the contrary. However, it is enough to make me think twice about shooting a silhouette in the dark, no questions asked (even if my Country’s laws did allow me to store firearms in a way that made that at all likely). I understand the logic behind going directly to deadly force if your local legislation allows, I’d just need a tiny bit more than “someone’s in the house” before I’d get there myself. But that’s just me.