So if you go the whole hog on home defence...

In My Humble Opinion
1

Inspired by this thread, my sick and twisted :smiley: mind got wondering as what would happen if the following scenario occurred in the US:

You’re rather paranoid, so you’ve equipped your house with very loud (as loud as is legally permissible) burglar alarms and steel gates which drop, but you’ve also installed manually detonated ordnance (e.g. claymores). Not booby-traps, these have to be manually (albeit by remote electronic means) armed and (seperately) manually detonated, and are protected against accidental detonation. All legal in the US, as I understand it. You also have legally owned firearms.

So you’ve done nothing wrong and the SWAT team have got the wrong address and hit your house. The alarms go off and you wake up. Your bedroom is also your safe room. Now, because you know that burglars have dressed themselves as SWAT, you can’t trust that they’re really SWAT. So you activate and detonate the claymores, killing most of the team. One is left trapped by the portcullisses so you leave him (he’s trapped, so killing him could well be murder), but the last approaches your room, heavily armed, and pissed off. You shoot him (not necessarily killing him) through the hole in your disguised steel door. You then ring 911 to say that a group of heavily armed people dressed as SWAT tried to invade your house and you’ve downed all - you don’t yet know whether any are dead - but one who’s been contained but not captured and could they send some people over to take care of him as well as ambulances for the rest? You, being rather paranoid, then ring your lawyer; he’s not in, of course, but you leave a detailed message on his voicemail. You then ring others and tell them what’s happenned so far. You make contemporaneous notes.

Now what?

2

I am 99.99% sure that protecting your home with claymores is NOT legal in the U.S.
But if it is I am getting some!

3

Get into your magic escape capsule and fly away to Tahiti?

4

If I can do a small hijack (and tune things down a little), what if one was to replace most of the stuff in the OP with a wrong house no-knock raid, and a person shooting and killing the no-knockers? Same call to 911, same call to lawyer, same basic assumption that the guys busting in unannounced are not cops (because they didn’t say “Police, open up” or whatever).

Or do they shout “police” as soon as the door is down?

5

Claymores! :eek: Dude! Even my little burglar snuffing OP wasn’t that hard core.

6

Wow.

I’m sorry I’m not answering your question, but this shows a major cultural difference between the US and the UK.

  1. We rely on calling the police, since we are not allowed guns for home defence, let alone mines.

  2. Sadly our police (usually unarmed) have recently shot a couple of innocent people (one fatally). Part of the War against Terror…

7

I think Quartz is actually from the UK, but I could be mistaken.

8

You are not mistaken, but that doesn’t mean that Glee’s astute observation is incorrect.

9

Most likely every surviving cop would testify that you only shot them after they said they were police.