It's seems that in this thread, all the shades of grey are reasons TO shoot, not to refrain from shooting. It's all been "It'd be bad to shoot him if he was running away", "if he was kneeling down", "if he was unarmed", as if the burden is on the damn kid to explain why he shouldn't be shot dead. That's what I meant.
It strikes me that the default assumption amongst the gun-toting here is "Shoot", and only to refrain from doing so unless the guy happens to be Ghandi or something. That's entirely the wrong way up. Shooting someone should always be the last resort, if it is a resort at all.
I think wanting to kill people for stealing your stuff or in case they might hurt you is pretty psychopathic. Is that an outlandish opinion in your world?
It doesn't make you a Nazi, though. We agree on that point.
Do you understand why the age of criminal responsibility exists? Do you understand why it is perfectly reasonable to take someone's age into account when deciding appropriate punishments? Do you understand that recklessness and youth go hand in hand, and that maybe the appropriate punishment for adolescent misdemeanours should not be instant death without trial?
Of all hot burglaries, how many compliant homeowners were seriously wounded or killed? I don't know, you tell me. I suspect it's a very, very small number. I also suspect the number of hot burglaries itself is rare enough in itself.
Have we not moved on a society in the past two centuries? Do you not see that this type of behaviour, as I explained to FuelAir, breeds an angry, violent, paranoid, cowed society. Imagine if everyone shot first and asked questions later when the potential for them to undergo some harm occurred. It would be anarchic.
Please try and reasonably imagine a society where everyone behaved as FuelAir, Ranb and Drudgewire have advocated in gun threads on these forums. Imagine a world where everyone was "rather safe than sorry" in the face of possible (even only marginally possible) harm. Imagine a world where property and personal crime was subject to instant vigilante death penalties. That's where your line of thinking leads. It's horrific.
Exactly. So why the need to have a dangerous weapon 'just in case'?
Do you disagree that the chances of you getting burgled are low, the chances of you being burgled whilst at home are even lower, and the chances of you suffering serious injury whilst being burgled at home are so vanishingly small as to not even be worth worrying about?
If someone I loved was injured during a hot burglary, I'd change my tune on the sanctioning of instant, vigilante-administered death penalty for property crimes. I doubt that.
In fact, you only have to look at the reactions of the British in general after the Tony Martin case (which Rofle has already mentioned) to realise that we, as a nation, do not generally see the benefit in combating violence by escalating the lethal potential of our population.
And as for condemning others for "protecting" themselves - you're damn right I'll condemn those who are content to see our society crippled by division, fear and violence, and who revel in, laugh at and even celebrate the brutal murder of a child. You're damn right I'll condemn those who think that they can take the law into their own hands. You're damn right I'll condemn those who think that an arms race is the best way to deal with criminality, that criminals do no deserve their lives or that society would be better off if we were all "better safe than sorry".
What you want is war. I hope you never get it.
