Lazs will like this - even though it's a wall-o-text

[beet1e]

OK, OK – I’m sold. Get me a gun. A taser would do, as I don’t necessarily want to kill the intruders; - just inactivate them for a while. Can a dart taser fire at more than one potential assailant, or will I need the up close and personal type that resembles an electric shave for zapping more than one intruder?

I don’t agree that it’s because we’re “gunless” that we’ve arrived at the status quo. I blame a collapse of discipline in schools, inadequate policing, inadequate sentencing, inadequate number of prisons, more people becoming burglars because they see it’s easy with lenient sentencing or none at all, low risk of being brought to book, and the law is on the criminal’s side – the law protects the criminal from physical violence by the homeowner.

The whole law and order thing in Britain has gone tits up.

I’ve emboldened the bits that Lazs will like…


http://www.telegraph.co.uk/opinion/main.jhtml?xml=/opinion/2004/12/07/do0702.xml

An Englishman's home is his dungeon
By Mark Steyn
(Filed: 07/12/2004)

One of the key measures of a society's health is how easily you can insulate yourself from its underclass. In America, unless one resides in a very small number of problematic inner-city quarters or wishes to make a career in the drug trade, one will live a life blessedly untouched by crime. In Britain, alas, it's the peculiar genius of Home Office policy to have turned the entire country into one big, rundown, inner-city, no-go slum estate, extending from prosperous suburbs to leafy villages, even unto Upper Cheyne Row.

 
 
The murderers of John Monckton understood the logic of this policy better than the lethargic overpaid British constabulary. An Englishman's home is not his castle, but his dungeon and ever more so - window bars, window locks, dead bolts, laser security, and no doubt biometricrecognition garage doors, once the Blunkett national ID card goes into circulation.

All this high-tech protection, urged on the householder by Pc Plod, may make your home more secure, but it makes you less so. From the burglar's point of view, the more advanced and impregnable the alarm systems become, the more it makes sense just to knock on the door and stab whoever answers.

Mr Monckton's killers thus made an entirely rational choice. He was a wealthy man, living in a prestigious neighbourhood of £3 million homes, and he presumably had the best security system to go with it. But time it right, get him to the front door, and the state-enforced impotence of the homeowner makes him as vulnerable as any old loser in a decrepit urine-sodden block on Broadwater Farm.

Various reassuring types, from police spokesmen to the Economist, described the stabbing of the Moncktons as a "burglary gone wrong". If only more burglaries could go right, they imply, this sort of thing wouldn't happen.

But the trouble is that this kind of burglary - the kind most likely to go "wrong" - is now the norm in Britain. In America, it's called a "hot" burglary - a burglary that takes place when the homeowners are present - or a "home invasion", which is a much more accurate term. Just over 10 per cent of US burglaries are "hot" burglaries, and in my part of the world it's statistically insignificant: there is virtually zero chance of a New Hampshire home being broken into while the family are present. But in England and Wales it's more than 50 per cent and climbing. Which is hardly surprising given the police's petty, well-publicised pursuit of those citizens who have the impertinence to resist criminals.

These days, even as he or she is being clobbered, the more thoughtful British subject is usually keeping an eye (the one that hasn't been poked out) on potential liability. Four years ago, Shirley Best, proprietor of the Rolander Fashion emporium, whose clients include Zara Phillips, was ironing some clothes when the proverbial two youths showed up. They pressed the hot iron into her flesh, burning her badly, and then stole her watch. "I was frightened to defend myself," said Miss Best. "I thought if I did anything I would be arrested." There speaks the modern British crime victim.

Her Majesty's Constabulary has metaphorically put a huge neon sign on every suburban cul-de-sac advertising open season on property owners. If you have a crime policy that makes "hot" burglaries routine, it's a reasonable bet that more and more citizens will wind up beaten, stabbed or dead.

I've been writing on this subject in The Telegraph for the best part of a decade now and, to be honest, I might as well recycle the 1996 or 1997 column and spend the week in the Virgin Islands.

My argument never changes. All that changes is the increasing familiarity of Britons with violent crime. Mr Monckton was a cousin by marriage of The Sunday Telegraph's Dominic Lawson, who is leading a campaign to allow citizens to defend themselves in their own homes.

That this most basic right should be something for which he has to organise a campaign is disgraceful. In New Hampshire, there are few burglaries because there's a high rate of gun ownership. Getting your head blown off for a $70 TV set isn't worth it. Conversely, thanks to the British police, burning the flesh of a London dressmaker to get her watch is definitely worth it. In Chelsea the morning after Mr Monckton's murder, Her Majesty's Keystone Konstabulary with all their state-of-the-art toys had sealed off the street in an almost comical illustration of their lavishly funded uselessness.

But let's look at it from their point of view. Suppose, instead of more of these robberies going wrong, they went right. The homeowner cowered in the bathroom, while the lads helped themselves to the DVD player and the wife's jewellery, and then the coppers came round and took a statement and advised you to get another half-dozen door chains and keep the jewellery in a vault at the bank.

Is it reasonable to live like that? After some crime column or other last year, I had a flurry of letters from American readers who'd been working in Britain and had been astonished at the rate of "garden theft" - that's to say, stuff the average American would never dream of lugging indoors back home, but which, during his sojourn across the pond, had been half-inched from the patio in the course of the night.

The British establishment's current complacent approach accepts that ever greater and ever more violent crime is a fact of life, rather than a historical aberration encouraged by the unprecedented constraints placed on the law-abiding and the boundless licence extended to the criminal class. That policy leads remorselessly to more deaths, and to lives lived under small but ever more insidious and corrupting restrictions.

The Tories' big mistake was their failure to understand that "freedom" isn't just about consumer choices or buying your council flat. It's also about being free to defend your home - after all, you're there on the scene and the West Midlands Police 24-Hour Crime Hotline answering machine isn't.

And an assertive citizenry, confident in its freedoms and its responsibilities, is a better bet for long-term survival than the passive charges of the nanny state. If the Government declines to pay any heed to The Sunday Telegraph campaign, and if the police persist in victimising the victims of crime, then I hope we'll see widespread jury rebellion and a refusal to convict.

The right to protect your family does not derive from any home secretary or chief constable.

[GRUNHERZ]

I think that, at least in part,  you arived at this stage by putting that guy who shot the burglars in jail for several years - and being so very very public and persistent in doing so...

[Gunslinger]

A convert......I've seen it all!

[lazs2]

in order..

I am not a big fan if "less leathal" weapons.   They don't work well enough or they work too well.   they tempt people to use em when they shouldn't and they don't work when they need to.   They kill or maim when you only wanted to warn and they do nothing when you really needed to kill or maim.

The article..  yes... of course I liked it.  It is the basic premis of most of mine when people try to take away my basic rights.

As to why bad people are doing bad things..   fun to specuilate but in the end... who cares?   That is as worthless a road as "less leathal" weapons.... mental masterbation.... if you believe that you have the reasons for bad people doing bad things then if you change those things you get a false sense of security...  Bad people have been around all my life no matter what the laws were... Human nature is such that they will continue to be around for the forseeable future.

The absolute main point tho is... I could tell you what kind of gun to get and to go to front sight or some other training facility and tell you to fire a couple hundred rounds a month but.... none of those options are available to you.   You gave them away when you figured you could disarm the bad guy and therefore make him harmless or... at least polite.

I got no answers for ya.

lazs

[Stringer]

Originally posted by beet1e
 A taser would do, as I don’t necessarily want to kill the intruders; - just inactivate them for a while.  

Just start giving them the speeches you give to your pets, that will put them to sleep in no time.

[ra]

I thought shotguns were still legal in Britain?  You can't get better home defense than a shotgun.

[Airhead]

"One of the key measures of a society's health is how easily you can insulate yourself from its underclass. In America, unless one resides in a very small number of problematic inner-city quarters or wishes to make a career in the drug trade, one will live a life blessedly untouched by crime."

This is so patently false I stopped right here. Crime limited to the Inner City? I lived in a great neighborhood, complete with Neighborhood Watch, and I can guarantee you that if I left my garage open for an hour or so some a-hole would steal my fishing poles. Now I live in the country, and there's every bit as much crime here as there is in the City.

The only thing we DON'T have is as many home invasions, and that's because bad guys in America know they may get shot breaking into an occupied dwelling, while England has created "easy" victims for the criminal element by banning their citizens the right to protect themselves.

[ra]

I lived in a great neighborhood, complete with Neighborhood Watch, and I can guarantee you that if I left my garage open for an hour or so some a-hole would steal my fishing poles.

Doesn't sound like a great neighborhood at all.

[Airhead]

Originally posted by ra
Doesn't sound like a great neighborhood at all.

Ra, point is it was a pretty typical upper middle class neighborhood and was still subject to crime....just like every non-gated community in America.

[Lizking]

Pretty broad statement there, Airhead.  We leave the keys in the cars, the bikes in the front yard, and usually, the doors unlocked (except at night when we are sleeping).  Hell, even in urban New Orleans, the most crime-ridden city in the US, I always left the keys in the car, and never have I had a burglrey or anything stolen out of my car.

[GRUNHERZ]

Airhead, admit it you just look weak and vulnerable to your neighbors...



But I do hear Ripsnort just loves your fishing poles...

[mosgood]

Originally posted by Airhead
"I lived in a great neighborhood, complete with Neighborhood Watch, and I can guarantee you that if I left my garage open for an hour or so some a-hole would steal my fishing poles.

Maybe your neighbors just hate you?

[beet1e]

Originally posted by ra
I thought shotguns were still legal in Britain?  You can't get better home defense than a shotgun.

Yes, I could buy a shotgun. I would be expected to keep it, unloaded, in a gun safe. But in the event of a "hot" burglary, who's going to analyse how quickly I had taken it from the safe, and whether the safe had been locked at the time!

Lizking, I don't know about the US, but here if you leave the keys in the car, your policy is void. If the car is stolen, and the keys were in it, the insurance company won't pay out. Maybe you should take the keys out and lock the car.

[Muckmaw1]

I don't particularly like guns, but I do keep a 20 Gauge in my closet in case of a home invasion.

For saftey purposes, my wife knows everything about how to use the weapon.

It is kept unloaded, top self of my closet with a trigger lock.

Key to the lock is someplace easily accessable to me at all times, as it the ammunition.

I can go from a dead sleep to ready to shoot in under 90 seconds.

And once the gun is loaded, I will wait on the second floor where Me, my wife and 2 daughters sleep.

Whoever breaks into the house can take whatever they want from the first floor.

If they put one foot on the stairs to come up, I'm shooting.

[Krusher]

Originally posted by beet1e
OK, OK – I’m sold. Get me a gun. A taser would do, as I don’t necessarily want to kill the intruders; - just inactivate them for a while. Can a dart taser fire at more than one potential assailant, or will I need the up close and personal type that resembles an electric shave for zapping more than one intruder?

http://www.telegraph.co.uk/opinion/main.jhtml?xml=/opinion/2004/12/07/do0702.xml

The funny thing is, here in the states they are starting to make noises about stun guns killing some people.  So give the lawyers a few more cases and the MFG's will be sued into poverty.