" snipped-for-privacy@wdeans.com" wrote in news: snipped-for-privacy@g14g2000cwa.googlegroups.com:
What do you plan to do with these cheap handguns??? Are they an extra gift for the thieves? Do you WANT to leave firearms where they can easily be stolen???
How would these guns sitting in easily burgled autos or vacant homes going to protect your property,unless YOU are there to USE them? (and I suspect you wouldn't -use- them,nor would it be legal.)
Are you deranged? (I believe you certainly are not rational.)
On 14 Aug 2005 23:26:34 GMT, Jim Yanik scribbled this interesting note:
It seems to me (I could be mistaken) that William is pointing out one absurd way to make certain the police will respond to a non-priority call.
It is a statement of the times that things that used to be hanging offenses are now dismissed out of hand. Theft of a person's tools, by which s/he makes his/her living is not trivial. It wastes everyone's resources, including the thief (if you take into account what that thief could be doing in a more constructive way.)
William is correct. One way to make certain the police will respond is to include a little extra for him/her. (No one said the little extra must be functional...)
-- John Willis snipped-for-privacy@airmail.net (Remove the Primes before e-mailing me)
Many years ago, we left our house and came back a few hours later. On the door was a business card to call Officer Smith at the local police department.
My neighbor came over and told me this story:
Some burglars came to my house. My neighbor saw them. He got his shotgun, his wife called 911. He came over with pump shotgun and made the burglars lay on the floor. Cops came. Caught the burglars. Had to huddle as to whether or not to take my neighbor to jail.
Since it was not his property he was guarding, he was in the wrong. He could have been charged with some serious crimes by the burglars, who have rights, even when committing burglary.
Not sure what to do, they called for a supervisor. Supervisor came, heard all the stories, including my neighbor's who was then in handcuffs.
Supervisor emptied the pump shotgun of all shells onto the ground. He declared, "You can charge this man with nothing. This gun is not loaded." Eyes met and everyone understood.
They unhooked my neighbor, and he got a talking to by the supervisor about rights on HIS property and lack of rights on his NEIGHBOR's property. And a warning next time to just call in and let the police handle it.
The burglars had committed several burglaries in the neighborhood, and were sentenced to a year each.
Sometimes, police do their job, and are reasonable men.
Funny. It seems like it is related a lot to the attitude of the people they are dealing with. I wonder why that is...............
Many years back I had my house broken into. I happened to be over at my neighbor's house having a few beers & was having a leak when I looked out the window and saw a guy coming out of my back door carrying a couple of my old leather travel bags. I called the cops and they caught the loser about
5 minutes later standing at a bus stop a block away. They came & took prints, etc to build up a case. Very helpful & professional. The guy they caught had actually been at my neighbor's a little earlier soliciting business for his father's landscaping business. Guess he was moonlighting.
Then you get the regular flatfoots that have nothing better to do than harass people for minor crap whilst more serious crimes are occuring. I often laugh when I see interceptors speeding by with the lights flashing thinking that they just got a call that fresh donuts were just put out at Tim Horton's.
Don't know how it is in your state, but in mine, you cannot use deadly force to protect property. Not so with the "Make My Day" law states. But that only applies to a man on his OWN property.
Can't tell. You didn't post the relevant conversation, and I don't want to go back and look it up.
I was getting from your inference that all a person had to do was ">>>>>>>>>", and I said that might be true where you live, but not true where I live, and not true where someone else lives.
Neighbor was not necessarily in the wrong -- he was making a "citizen's arrest", which he is entitled to do if the burglars were committing a felony, or some specific misdemeanors that vary from state to state.
But the supervisor's solution worked pretty good too.
Undoubtedly the threat of deadly force for an unaggravated burglary would be the most likely cause for being on the wrong and why the unloading of the weapon solved the "problem"...
I must keep up on this, as I am licensed in Florida. Utah and Nevada call them permits, Florida calls it a license.
That's the trouble. You have to go every five years to take a refresher course, and this stuff changes every week. And each city, county, state, and borough has its own laws that supercede one another.
So, what do you do? As I posted, and so many disagreed with, you just about have to let them kill you before you shoot. And one size does not fit all, and what one does in his state/county/city may not be legal in another.
And we can all talk about it and talk about it. But the only things that matter are what each person does when it happens, and the decisions from the court when it happens.
John Willis wrote in news: snipped-for-privacy@4ax.com:
And this is why the anti-gunners want to prosecute those crime victims who "allow" their firearms to be stolen.
A cheap,"non-functional" handgun can STILL be used to commit crimes;how will you know if the gun a crook is pointing at you is functional,or even loaded;it doesn't matter,you HAVE to treat it as a real,working gun.
Point an unloaded or fake gun at a police officer,and they will shoot you if you refuse to comply with their instructions.Shoot a crook threatening you with an unloaded or non-functional gun,and it gets logged as a legit self-defense and you do not get prosecuted.
And such guns -could- be repaired to make them functional enough for their crimes.
This idiot thinks it's better to increase the severity of a theft(by leaving firearms with his other goods) rather than make any effort to protect his property *before* it gets stolen.
"An ounce of prevention is worth a pound of cure."
A Thousand Bucks would buy a really decent alarm(several),with a pager so he could go out there and detain or even shoot the crooks,doing a real public service,rather than arming criminals and hoping it makes the police "look harder" after it'a all stolen.
I bet he also was too LAZY to write his local paper about how law enforcement ignored his theft,to make a big,public stink about it.
I made no statement that anyone "had to" do anything nor that any particular action would be generically true--simply stated that the use of deadly force in a situation of only nonaggravated burglary was would be a likely reason for there being fault . Any further inference drawn was yours, not mine.
On the 1st of October this will be changed in Florida. I assume by the middle of October there will be a test case. They don't say you can use deadly force to protect property but they do say you can use deadly force to protect yourself and you do not have the obligation of retreat anywhere you have a right to be. This puts you on par with the cops. They can't shoot a fleeing felon but they can interpose their body in the direction of flight and shoot the felon if they think the person presents a threat of imminent bodily harm. I really think the CCW holders will need another step in their training to sort this out but it does give someone more latitude in confronting a person committing a non-forceable felony. Forceable felons were always covered by the CCW law.
Here in Indiana, a citizen may use deadly force to stop a break-in at *A* residence. Not necessarily his *own* residence. There was a case in Indianapolis some years back, where a homeowner shot a guy trying to break into the house next door. Reporters wondered why the shooter wasn't charged; prosecutor said "nothing to charge him with."
He wasn't using deadly force to protect property. He was using threat of deadly force to detain the burglars he caught-in-the-act until the police he summoned got there. I don't know if that's OK in his state or not, but it is a quite different issue. The police at the scene could have been wrong too, and since it didn't go before a judge we'll never know. (I suspect is was a proper arrest.) But the story had a happy ending anyway because the supervisor had enough sense to unload the shotgun and let the guy go -- so the actual details of the law were a moot point and justice prevailed.
snipped-for-privacy@aol.com wrote in news: snipped-for-privacy@4ax.com:
In Florida,you can use deadly force to stop a "forcible felony". In the Florida concealed weapon permit pamphlet I have right here at hand,it says burglary is a "forcible felony". It does not specify on one's own property. This pamphlet is current,not effective come October.
If "using threat of deadly force to detain the burglars caught-in-the-act until the police [arrive]" is in fact illegal then all of us here, as well as the police supervisor and the neighbor, appear to believe that the law is unjust. We are therefore happy with the outcome (the law wasn't enforced).
The problem I see with this is that the majority of the citizens in the state believe otherwise. In my opinion those citizens are, to say the least, "misguided." Still, in their minds, the thieves were just after money when the neighbor was risking their LIFE. This is not a case of the supervisor showing leniency; this is a case of the supervisor disregarding the moral code of the citizens of the state in favor of his own moral code (*which I happen to agree with this time).
I had an instance where someone was defecating in the back yard of one of my properties and smoking crack there. The house was broken into during this time period. A few days later I came in the early morning and found someone asleep in the back yard about 6 feet from a no trespassing sing. I called the police expecting them to charge the individual with trespass, defecating on my lawn, and possibly the break in if they could find any evidence. Instead the police just asked the individual to leave. I asked them why they didn't at least charge them with trespass and they told me it was because the individual couldn't pay. In this case I disagreed with the decision of the police.
I was furthermore the object of much hatred from the neighbors when the person sleeping in my back yard supposedly later died of exposure and my response was that the police should have arrested them.
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