None of that matters. Again, you can assert that it does, but the reality is that the law sees it differently.
You have no right to intentionally or recklessly endanger another. That rule is higher up in the chain of rights and responsibilities than any of the other arguments. If someone in injured or dies you will be charged and judged on that basis. Not any of the others. I still don’t get why this is hard to understand.
Exactly. You have no right to intentionally or recklessly endanger yourself. I’m not sure why you find this difficult to understand.
Not pertinent to the question.
Look this is simple. You don’t have the right to endanger others, even if they are being total dicks. You have no right to set mantraps for burglars, you actually have no right to metre out punishment. If there was a reasonable expectation that an injury would result, it doesn’t matter how stupid or idiotic the behaviour of the others are, it is your action that has escalated the risk to one of serious injury or death.
Say there are a bunch of teenagers that occasionally go out swatting mailboxes in your neighbourhood. You know this. By creating a concrete filled mailbox you are already clearly cognisant that there is a good chance your mailbox will be swatted. Now did you, at any moment think, “this will show the little bastards.” If you did, you have intent. Would any reasonable person seeing the mailbox conclude that a stupid teenager might be seriously injured by it, if so you are are recklessly endangering. Teenagers do stupid things. That is life. If you claim you were pure as the driven snow innocent throughout your teenage years I probably won’t believe you.
I am getting the impression that @Magiver is arguing from the standpoint of how things should be, and @Francis_Vaughan is arguing from the standpoint of how the law works in reality. It is pointless to pit these two perspectives against each other. I can argue all day that I should be able to go through a red light if I can’t see any traffic or any living thing for a mile in every direction–it makes perfect sense to me–but the law and the red light camera say different. My argument doesn’t matter unless we are debating a change to the law.
Making a mailbox or front door crush resistant doesn’t endanger anyone and there is no law that says you can’t make them crush resistant. If there is, please cite it.
What endangers someone in the op’s example is the act of trying to hit something with a bat from a moving vehicle. This is an obviously dangerous thing to do. Seriously, what don’t you understand about this?
The issue is not who commits the final act of endangerment, it is the intent of the mailbox owner. If he can reasonably expect someone to try to hit his mailbox with a bat (especially likely if it’s happened before) then he can reasonably expect that such a person could be injured in the process. This is what the law frowns on, regardless of the culpability of the bat-wielder.
It’s not about how you think it should work because of what makes sense to you, it’s about how the law actually works.
Same question. Read the point above.
Any person has the right to expect that their life is not being deliberately endangered by another. Even children and teenagers have that protection. This is a basic right that trumps your right to construct anything. There are not individual laws about construction of mailboxes that need to enshrine this.
If you are being a total idiot you still have the right to expect that nobody else will deliberately make things worse. That is they key point. As above, you can argue forever what you think the law should be. But it isn’t what you think it is. No amount of vigorous assertion will change this. The reality is that if you endanger someone even if they are engaging in a risky act, if your additional endangering of their life results in injury or death you are screwed. Simple fact. No amount whinging or special pleading will help. If you don’t like it you might be able to find a different country to live in, one where such basic rights are not part of the law. But right now you live in one where they are.
At the end of the day, you could just encase your mailbox in brick, as has been said. This is a common feature in many communities. No one can reasonably expect to hit a brick column with a baseball bat while driving by in a car without it being unpleasant, so there is no moral hazard or legal concern like there might be with rigging a “normal” looking mailbox with metal or cement innards.
Moderator Action
While the OP was about the facts of the law, this is getting into the area of legal opinions. Since the OP has been addressed factually pretty well at this point, let’s go ahead and move this thread to IMHO (from GQ).
Nevermind.
The counter-arguments seem to mostly center around the perception that the law being presented in favor of the putative injured mailbox baseball participants* is unfair and that they’d find against the alleged victim if they were on the jury.
Which they can do. However, to avoid matters getting ugly if you are the person targeted for erecting a secretly concrete-reinforced mailbox, it would be best to just buy a heavy-duty box which vandals would be much less likely to attack.
*I can’t readily find any instances in which mailbox vandals suffered serious arm injuries going after reinforced mailboxes. There is a story about one such person who whom mailbox destruction was not enough, and swung at a metal telephone pole, resulting the bat bouncing back and inflicting serious head injuries. No word on whether a suit was filed against the telephone company.
This very much sums it up accurately. We are responsible for the reasonable and foreseeable consequences of our actions.
If I build a ramp on my side of the fence, ride a four wheeler up it, do a flip and splash into my neighbor’s pool, that is wrong, stupid and dangerous. It is trespassing. By doing that, I accept the reasonable risk that I might crash and seriously injure myself. Nobody disputes this at all.
What the law says is that in order to deter me, the neighbor may not fill his pool with water moccasins. If he does and I get seriously injured or die from a snake bite then that wasn’t a risk that I assumed due to my dumbassery. That is the defining point here. I assumed the risk of crashing a four wheeler, not a snake bite. The snake bite was my neighbor’s doing.
And if the neighbor decides he doesn’t like you doing that and decides to drain the pool in the middle of the night specifically so next time you break your neck, he’s liable.
However, if the grease and oil from your 4-wheeler so contaminated the water in his pool he needed to have it drained and cleaned, and you jump into it again while it’s empty, he’s not liable.
Generally speaking.
Right. But @Magiver seems hung up on the fact that but for my reckless, stupid, and illegal behavior, I would not crash into an empty or snake infested pool, and therefore it is all on me.
But that is simply not the way it has worked from the beginning of the English common law. The intentional and/or reckless mantrap that the neighbor sets make him (at least partially) liable for my injury because society wants to deter that sort of “self help” which can cause physical injury disproportionate to the original harm. As we don’t punish kids for bashing mailboxes by breaking their arms, we don’t allow a private individual to do it on his own.
@Magiver or anyone else is free to disagree with this as a matter of personal belief, but it doesn’t change the law.
A snake infested pool would by it’s existence pose a hazard assuming they’re poisonous.
A mailbox, a statue, a tree, a large decorative rock or any other object does not pose such a hazard. You can take a baseball bat to all of them to your heart’s content. If you try to strike any of the above from a moving vehicle the danger involved is in the act of doing so from a moving vehicle and not the solidness of the object. The vehicle adds velocity to the bat and hanging out a window risks falling from a moving vehicle at speed.
Again, you can buy a mailbox made from heavy gauge steel that resists being hit with a bat. Here’s one with a video of someone hitting it with a bat..
I would say there is no reasonable safe expectation of hitting an object made of wood and steel from a moving vehicle. It’s a dangerous thing to do.
To be consistent with your earlier arguments, why shouldn’t a person be allowed to build a snake habitat on their own property?
They are allowed to build such a habitat. But it is dangerous by it’s existence just as a swimming pool is. A mailbox or tree or statue are not. You can touch them all you want. You can even try to damage them all you want.
That changes when you do it from a moving vehicle hanging out a window. I seriously don’t understand the difficulty in understanding the danger is from the methodology. There is no safe way to hit something with a bat from a moving car.
I went to school with someone who hit his head on a parked car while hanging out of the window of a moving vehicle. It wasn’t the parked car that caused the injury. It was hanging out of a window of a moving vehicle.
Nobody disagrees with you. There are risks inherent in hanging out of a moving car. You could fall out the window. The driver may get too close to a tree or a parked car. You might lose your balance when swinging a bat.
Hitting a concrete-filled mantrap is not one of those inherent risks. It is a deliberate and reckless risk that was solely in control of the person who put it there for the sole purpose of injuring his fellow man.