Mon, 07 Aug 2006

15 States Expand Right to Shoot in Self-Defense

This is reported as though it were a Bad Thing™. To me, on the other hand, it's one of the few things government at any level has done right in the past few years.

Of course, the paper breaks out some rather extreme anecdotes - the one with the taxi driver is particularly lurid.

But if somebody breaks into my house at 3am, I'm not going to make a reasonable effort to ascertain if they're armed or not, or if they're threatening my family, or "merely" my property. We might be nice and give them a warning shot before going into combat mode, but if I were a burglar I wouldn't count on it.

New laws allow crime victims to use deadly force in situations that might formerly have subjected them to murder charges.

(link) [New York Times]

/Politics | 3 writebacks | permanent link

On 8/7/2006 13:01:15
Bjorngrímnir wrote

On 8/8/2006 19:13:39
Rubicon wrote

On 8/8/2006 20:49:36
Walter Jeffries wrote

comment...

 
Notes: If you put a <mailto:> link in the URL field your address will not be mangled: this could be a bad idea as your email address could be easily harvested by bots designed for SPAM. The comments field should now format correctly for line feeds and carriage returns: when you hit the 'Enter' or 'Return' keys in your comment it should break to a new line. The text should wrap cleanly. Please let me know if it doesn't. No HTML tags will pass through - entering links seems to be the main cause of comment SPAM. Also, please be sure that Javascript is enabled in your browser before attempting to post a writeback. Sorry for any inconvenience, but this really helps cut down on the amount of comment SPAM I have to deal with.
 
 Name:
 URL:(optional)
 Title: (optional)
 Comments:  
Save my Name and URL/Email for next time