Good thing no one is advocating for that to be legal.
You don't need to - it already IS in the USA.
No. It is not. In no place in the U.S. are you 'entitled to kill someone without sanction, just because you are scared of them'.
And it is EXACTLY what you are arguing for when you say:
... I am strongly in favor of the right for people to defend themselves, and that goes along with a general belief that people shouldn't have to perform in-depth analyses of people breaking into their homes to determine if they are really 'just a burglar' or are there for more violent purposes: they should rightly assume the worst and be entitled to act accordingly.
Defending yourself isn't the same as killing someone just because you're scared of them.
You are saying that it is OK to kill someone based on your assumption that they mean you harm. This is indistinguishable from saying that it is OK to kill someone who is in your home because you are scared of them.
It is not the same at all - once you add the 'in your home' it becomes entirely different. It is not okay to kill someone just because you are scared of them. But if they come into your home not only is it justifiable to kill them
if you're scared of them, but being scared of them should be the default stance. I mean, who the hell wouldn't be? It is unreasonable - unconscionable - to say to someone who has just been a victim of such a crime 'well, you should have known he wasn't dangerous and was just there for a TV'. How the fuck should anyone know that and why the fuck should anyone be expected to make that their default assumption when it is
their life at stake because someone has broken into
their home to do
only God (and apparently bilby)
knows what?
I could not live with myself to ever ask such of another person. I find it so callous to dismiss someone's fear for their life as unreasonable in a situation where I think
every fucking person in the world would easily feel the same fear.
Anywhere else in the developed world, that situation would not have resulted in anyone dying.
You don't know that.
OK, fair enough - Anywhere else in the developed world, that situation would
almost certainly not have resulted in anyone dying.
And again; that's just something you don't know. And no one at the time it was happening knew either.
And the rest of the developed world does not have a burglary rate so far above that in the USA as to justify the death as a deterrent
That is false; and this is the second time I've called you on it. Time to present some evidence.
OK; Stats on burglary are not easy to find
I just googled: "burglary rates by country". It led me to this list:
Countries Compared by Crime > Burglaries. International Statistics at NationMaster.com
Seems the U.S. is about average as far as developed Western nations go.
That's a VERY long way short of obligating me to be bludgeoned to death in my own home. That you can't see the difference suggests that you are letting your emotions rule your intellect on this issue.
Bullshit. If someone is beating me to fuck and there's a legal system that makes it a crime for me to defend myself by the only means I might have available to me, then that is exactly what the law is requiring.
The law elsewhere in the OECD does NOT makes it a crime for you to defend yourself by any means you might have available to you. The law DOES make it a crime to purchase a firearm for the purpose of having that means available for personal defence. This has the effect of dramatically reducing the likelihood that either the home-owner OR the intruder will be armed with a gun.
You just said that the law obligates you, re guns, 'not use them in defence of my person'. If that is the only item available to someone for their defense, then the laws you propose are by all measures laws that obligate people to be bludgeoned to death in their own home.
But that is NOT an item that is available for their defence. The law doesn't prohibit the use of a gun, it prohibits it from being available in the first place.
Worse yet; by outlawing the one thing that I could have used to defend myself, the law is sealing my fate.
You cannot completely remove guns from society and reap only positives regardless of the
trend - you know that. In those cases where a homeowner is dead for the lack of a gun to defend themselves, then it is an unavoidable conclusion that the law banning gun ownership served as a law that obligated them to die, especially if they were someone who would have otherwise had a gun.
Only an American would be so unimaginative as to imagine that the ONLY way to defend oneself is with a gun.
What's this about? Hell, what is any of this gun stuff about?
Are you just bitching 'cause the homeowner used a gun as opposed to something else?
It seems she had a right to own her gun, so the issue of whether she was justified in using it the way she did - the topic of this thread - will not hinge on whether she was justified in owning it in the first place. Whatever you think of gun ownership the fact that Jenrette had one is not one of the problems of this case.