I know I'm going to possibly spark a lot of controversy and whatnot over this, but I was sitting thinking today and I quite worried myself.
Well someone tried to break in last year, but they couldn't get in, and pissed off. I was thinking what would have happened if they had gone in and I had caught them in le act. If i knew someone was in the house, I'd take a penknife or something down with me, and this is where I scare myself, I don't think I would think twice about attacking the bastard, to the point of killing them, if I could.
I don't think I'd feel guilty either, but my life would instead be ruined because it is apparantly wrong to kill people even if they commit what is in my oppinion the worst invasion of privacy (mentally, as well as physically).
I suppose this all stems from the fact that it has happened before and people have been jailed for it, usually for man-slaughter. I think that is ridiculously representitive of all that is wrong with this bloody country.
are you thinking of the tony martin case?
Yes.
Under certain circumstances.
You are SUCH a tory young Fuller.
Were you dropped on your head as a kid??
maybe not kill
but i wouldn't hesitate to kick them all over the house.
yeah,
I would punch them, and attempt to get hold of any bag they are carrying.
but not kill them,
the one marked 'SWAG'?
yeah, that one! haha
Hmm
we were talking about something similar today, not that extreme though. A guy my Dad used to work with, generally quite a serene kind of guy, not easily angered or anything, was cleaning his car and a kid tried to knick his hubcaps when he wasn't looking. He spotted it happening, gave chase and when he caught the kid gave him a clip round the ear. The kid then ran home to his mother, the mother sent the guy to court and, even though all the witnesses saw the kid with the stolen items, th eguy was threatened with a fine, jail and hence an end to his career in the fire service.
i wonder if this was the sort of thing you meant...
Nobody is ever punished for anything.
Near where I live a group of charvers went down a street and keyed every car.
They got no punishment at all.
Stuff is just stuff
In my opinion a possesion is just a thing its really not worth killing for. If you or someone else is in immediate personal danger then self defence is fine but killing for a posession just seems...wrong. Particularly (thinking of the martin case) if you shoot them in the back with an illegally owned shotgun.
You can buy new stuff, if you killed someone you'd have to live the mental effects on your self for the rest of your live...not to mention the effect that the death could have on innocent people connected with the intruder.
Plus theres the factor that it would lead to many mistaken identity killings, family members who get mistaken for intruders for example.
Added to that that you'd be putting YOU in more danger, the intruder would fight back if you tried to kill them so you would be more likely to be harmed/killed. Is your stuff worth that risk?
Maybe i'm just too young and idealistic with no knowledge of reality but i think any life > money & possesions.
but
being burgled can have serious mental effects on you as well. we were a few years ago and it made my mother incredibly paranoid, and to this day she still sleeps with her handbag next to her bed..
I can't believe you.
Why should you have to work for money to buy something again, just because someone is a scumbag?
I'm not against reaonable levels of self defence when threatened but KILLING?
I'm not saying stealing is ok, but to kill them for it?
For a starter all your stuff would get bloodstained and plus you'd of killed someone...as in they'd be dead! Isn't this just a tad extream for property?
Plus if you made it legal to kill people who entered privet property then it wouldn't reduce crime much just make crimanals arm themselves (wepons would be easier to aqquire due to the home protection market) this would therefore result in more danger for the home owner who is probably less prepared and able to fight or kill then the criminal is.
I find it impossible to comprehend that it seems worth raising the risk of YOU being hurt/killed and KILLING other people just to protect stuff.
My belife is that theres more to me then the stuff i own, i'd protect me and other people but i don't think the protection of stuff is worth deaths or the risk of harm coming to myself or people i care about.
Testify.
Life > Material Possessions.
You shouldn't really kill someone just because they're taking your DVD Player. It doesn't seem quite right, and it sounds very tabloid from my point of view.
The point is, people steal because they're poor or deprived, not because they are scumbags. Word.
Of course, I'd protect my family from others but only if they were inimmediate danger. If someone just broke in, I'd probably just let them take whatever they liked.
I agree with you.
Thank you John_Brainlove.
Yeah.
Not kill
although of course if I or someone else was in real physical danger then who can say what would happen. But I would have no hesitation in knocking them the fuck out.
i wouldnt think twice about
stopping them any way possible, its not about them stealing your stuff, its about some cunt breaking into your house and thinking he can get away with it
No
But if they break into your house, leave water all over the bathroom floor, fill your bin without emptying it and stink up the place by microwaving grody sausages, then yes.
more than
anything its an invasion of privacy and it can make you feel scared of leaving your house unattended. I should know, as my house at Uni was broken into twice and so was my parents house. I don't think I could kill anyone who broke in, I would be more inclined to try and incapacitate them or as OceanStorm put it, "knocking them the fuck out".
yeah
"incapacitate" was what I was getting at :D
lol
your suggestion made me lol tho.
It's not about nicking
your stuff, it's about invading your home, your refuge, the one place you're entitled to feel safe. I only had my garage broken into and was amazed about how unnerved it made me feel. Kill them, keep schtum, bury them in the garden, who's going to know?...sometimes I scare myself...
from a practical angle
a knife wouldn't really be that useful unless you knew how to use it, and I don't think many people do. I include myself in the ignorant majority.
I'd say a blunt instrument would make more sense: knock them [the fuck] out, and call the police or whatever. and if you accidentally kill them... well, y'know... but you probably shouldn't try to kill them by using a more fatally-inclined (if you see what I mean) weapon like a knife.
But I think it's not unreasonable to attack them at all.
youre not even allowed the death penalty when a court convicts someone
why the fuck should you be able to sentence someone to death for theft?
and housebreaking is a worse invasion of mental and physical privacy than rape?
theres a million improbable but completely possible reason for a stranger being in your house without your permission, and i fucking doubt youre going to be able to think through them all before murdering them.
a million?
in the middle of the night?
when you live alone and have no friends?
name one
theyre drunk
and think that its their house, and theyve lost their keys.
and who says it has to be in the middle of the night?
what fucking time does it tick over to be legal to murder someone, criminal or no?
as soon as the street lights go on
i'd say anyones fair game
Sorry, I was wrong
if you're drunk and have lost your keys, you're quite welcome to break into my house anytime, day or night, you'll be sure of a hearty welcome.
you get drunk and lose your keys
you live on a crappy barret estate thing where all the houses look the same.
you have to break the window on the back door to get in, and when you do, youre allowed to be murdered?
nice one, cock.
that'll teach you to buy
barrett
If you're in the habit
of doing this, it's probably for the best.
but i do disagree
i dont think you should be allowed to murder them, but if someone breaks into my house i will assault them maybe with a warning beforehand
in self-defence yes.
if they're brandishing a fat crowbar in your direction and, like, coming towards you.
otherwise just kneecap the bastards.
No.
Alcxxk
I wouldn't think here anyone would want to kill anyone.
And we weren't talking about a summary execution really were we...
"If i knew someone was in the house, I'd take a penknife or something down with me, and this is where I scare myself, I don't think I would think twice about attacking the bastard, to the point of killing them, if I could.
I don't think I'd feel guilty either, "
One
could argue that with a strange person having broken into your house, you would feel in danger and in fear of your life...
Mental effects of killing someone who shouldn't have been there versus mental effects of not ever feeling safe in your house?
I was thinking about a not unrelated happening where some charve broke into a guys house, and as the charve was running away the guy shot him in the foot. The kid was on HIS property, stealing HIS possessions.
The charver made a full recovery, and sued the houseowner. Rubbish.
A penknife??!
I wouldn't fancy your chances.
A tyre iron or hammer should do the trick, take them down without killing them
i don't think killing them would be acceptable
unless they were trying to do it to you. but i think the law, as it currently stands, is a bit of a joke as it's so undefined. it needs to be clarified.
Weird...
... Cos someone tried to break into my house on Wednesday night about 11pm, we heard a smash, went and looked in the hallway, and there was an arm reaching the window trying to open door!
There's no way he could have got in as the door's unopenable that way, and he ran off when he saw us... but damn I kinda wish he had of got in so we could have dispensed some true justice! cos all he'll get from the police is a 'telling off'
Probably just some drunk
who'd lost his keys, nothing to worry about.
I had a chat about this with a policeman friend ages ago
He was telling all the various legalities of what you can 'do' to an intruder in your house. Apparently if they come upstairs you can give them more of a kicking than if they stay downstairs, and if you stab them with a kitchen knife, you'd get less of a telling off than if you used a knife designed for something else.
The getting pissed thing does happen, happened to a friend of mine actually. Just moved into a new house, wasn't having the best of time's mentall having just come out of a very serious relationship, went out for some drinks, went home, lost his keys, broke into 'his' home, slept on the sofa, woken up by a policeman referring to his jacket as 'Exhibit A'.
well
i think its a little extreme to kill someone for trying to steal some stuff... but if they threatened YOU, and tried to kill YOU, then it seems stupid that you should only be able to act after they have either shot or stabbed you..
i dont think i would be able to kill someone, without it having a really tremendous effect on me, in a bad way (obviously).. which wouldnt be cool.
what the fuck
is a charver
its
A northern "Chav". Apparantly the word migrated south and was changed to Chav.
It's charver.
No.
The original word in the north was Scally. Then it migrated south and for reasons best known to themselves, the south decided to change it to Chav. I've never heard the word Charver before.
In Middlesbrough
we mostly call them Townies.. but i suppose we are dulled by all the factory fumes...
Tony Martin
is a dispicable shit who have should have been done for murder and imprisoned for life. A sympathetic jury and public outrage saw that he got off lightly.
Whilst it is impossible to say what is and isn't justified without hearing "the full story", in the vast majority of cases, if the only thing at stake is your property, then no, of course you shouldn't fucking kill someone. It makes my blood boil that people think this could ever be acceptable and frankly the level of support for such a change in the law is a sad reflection of the miserable nation that we are apparently intent on becoming.
The whole thing screams of an ostensibly oh-so-liberal section of the professional middle classes acting out their depraved punitive desires on an unspecified "underclass". It sickens me to my core and I think anyone who would put their own property over the life of another human being - no matter what or how severe the flaws in that person's character - is a potential murderer and seriously needs to rethink their priorities.
</rant>
I agree
(except for the class bit). It is always wrong to kill someone, always. It shocks me that people would even contemplate it.
Alright.
Lets just say for a minute that you have a family, two young children, and a wife asleep upstairs. You hear a noise downstairs and you go down and find a guy poking around with a knife. A guy with a knife has the potential to kill everyone upstairs.
You're saying that if he attacked you, you wouldn't try to kill him, for the sake of not only your property but your wife and children too?
That's a completely different question.
If you are being attacked then I think you have the right to defend yourself but there's a big difference between defending yourself and actively trying to kill someone. Someone who is trying to burgle you is unlikely to be wanting to kill your family.
oh for fuck's sake
'The whole thing screams of an ostensibly oh-so-liberal section of the professional middle classes acting out their depraved punitive desires on an unspecified "underclass".'
what are you talking about?
this isn't about class at all and to be honest it quite fucks me off that you've brought it in irrelevantly as people KEEP doing lately with EVERY issue.
do you think people who wake up to hear a burglar in their house are worried about the 'class' of the burglar? no. they're concerned for their safety and will act upon this concern. the extent to which you are allowed to go to act on this concern is certainly a debate worth having, but I fail to see the relevance of 'class' to the argument.
also does the fact that he had been burgled before and left in shock make any difference?
also the fact that he shot the guy in the leg
doesn't really sound like 'trying to kill him'
LOL
Way to misunderstand me.
Firstly, Tony Martin shooting his victim at all immediately evinces a de facto intention to wound his victim and henceforth to do him grievous bodily harm. Coupled with the result of the victim's death and you have a murder on your hands. A shaky defence which the jury accepted on sympathy grounds isn't good enough.
As for the class point, I should have known that it would piss some people off given the "class thread" the other day. Apparently everyone on DiS is in denial that class is still alive and well in British society. You might have done well to read my post properly - in doing so you would have noticed that I am only talking about a certain section of the middle class, and I am talking about the attitude that people have taken towards this issue, not whether they would consider the class of the burglar in specific circumstances.
Try and tell me it's not true: tell me you NEVER see professional, usually liberal people reduced to barking about "chavs", watching the rage swell in their eyes every time they see someone in a hoodie. Try and tell me that the people who whinge about Tony Martin aren't the same people who blame all of this nation's supposed ill-fortune on a non-specific criminal underclass.
For the record, I am aware that the use of the word "class" is unfortunate and is capable of pissing some people off even through completely non-normative use. If you don't like it, pretend I said "university-educated suburban professionals" or something like that. And before anyone starts to go on about inverted snobbery, I am a second-generation member of this demographic, not an envious prole...
Smileadelic
Thanks for qualifying your views in your follow up post, which made quite a lot of sense, and sorry if you feel I misunderstood you.
However, drawing on your second post, I would still feel that the class issue is irrelevant to the particular issue at hand.
Correct me if I'm wrong, but this seems to be your reasoning:
1) Some people believe in an 'underclass' and hold illiberal and bigoted views on this, which Smileadelic repudiates.
2) Some of the same people think that one should be able to defend one's property against burglars by any means necessary, a view which Smileadelic again repudiates.
3) Smileadelic uses the fact that there is an overlap of people who hold both views to cast all people who would support a greater emphasis on householders' rights as 'a certain section of the middle class'.
4) The well-recognised, little-understood and emotive term of 'class' lends legitimacy to the stereotyping of all people who hold one of those views as also holding the other, and makes those views easier to dismiss. It contaminates discussion of the issue at hand by imbuing it, under false pretences, with emotive power derived from another issue altogether.
Some people believe something you don't like. Some other people believe something else you don't like. Why not argue against each of the two positions individually rather than using the rather underhand tactic of stereotyping your opponents in order to make what is two issues into a single issue? Even if you didn't rampantly exaggerate the overlap between the two groups of people, pointing out that a certain group of people believes both things isn't really an argument. In my opinion you have to show how the ISSUES are linked, rather than relying on quite offensive and irrelevant classifications to show how the people who take a certain stance on those issues are linked.
Thanks for the response, dude
Actually I agree with you. I wasn't using "class" in the emotive sense that you describe but I should have avoided it because of those connotations. You're wrong on my logic on point 3; however, you are right that it was essentially a piece of underhand rhetoric which I shouldn't have engaged with. So I apologise for that.
Nevertheless, there's an intuition involved in my incoherent rantings - which I'm not sure I can adequately explain in text - which I feel is very difficult to deny. In the same way that "middle class" is an emotive / normative term, so is "chav". People defend their use of it by saying "oh, I don't just mean people who dress a certain way, I mean people who behave in a certain way too." And yet, many of those same people, when they see someone dressed in a hoodie and burberry cap, immediately call them a "chav", without any regard to their behaviour.
I guess my point is, I really don't like such normative terminology - a point which I accept I may have undermined with my shaky class argument. I can't help shaking the feeling that this distinctly neo-conservative brand of stereotyping is so pervasive that some people engage in it without seeing how destructive it is - see e.g. Loque and Milnosh on this thread.
I personally
love the "chav" underclass, I loved it when four of them set on me for not having a fag for them (i don’t smoke), I loved it when a gold loop earring wearing lass blackened my girlfriends eye because she was wearing a black jumper with a Dimmu Borgir logo on it and I loved it the most when a gang of them kicked my friend’s 12 year old brother in the face until his jaw was shattered.... no wait i think i hit the sarcasm key on my keyboard.
I do hate the stereotypical "chav" underclass i do bitch about them all the time, but yes i do have friends that are often referred to as Chav but definitely would not fit that stereotype.
Point is i agree that Tony Martin was too extreme; he should never have killed that lad. I also agree that you should not have the right to kill someone for breaking in; it would lead to too many accidental killings and this country has done well so far to not let everyone keep a gun under their pillow.
But if someone broke into my house, if they are wearing a burberry cap and addidas trousers or an Italian hand made suit, they are asking for trouble and i would try not to kill them while i was kicking the crap out of them.
Post of the day,
cynic.
No offence, Smileadelic, as its your opinion and everything, but when people bring class into every single discussion, it pisses me off.
Some people on DiS need to get off the high-horse and realise what they're talking about.
As soon as someone enters your house,
without your consent, with the intent to steal, they should lose all their rights. Regardless of the circumstances, be it they have some mental 'incapability' or they are suffering extreme poverty, you should have the right to smash their face in.
Yes
especially if you see that they're fucking armed.
Generally Yes
Tony Martin however is extremely lucky he is a bit nuts, cos he murdered that kid...
http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Tony_Martin_%28farmer%29
Ridiculous really.
Wut is?