I would have thought so too, but real world evidence doesn’t seem to support that idea.
then, logically, a heavy duty mailbox made by a homeowner is fine. There is no way to distinguish among any of them.
That’s ridiculous.
You understand that a $50 “heavy duty” mailbox like the one you linked above, if hit by a baseball bat, will not cause the same impact as a normal mailbox that has been filled with concrete, right? In fact, it would react much more like a normal mailbox would.
the example was of someone hitting something from a moving vehicle with a bat. Someone was injured. As I predicted up-thread, the driver and person with the bat were legally held responsible for the injury.
Since it was a telephone pole that looked like a telephone pole, not a block of concrete that looks like a mailbox, that’s completely irrelevant.
It’s completely relevant. It was the dangerous act of hanging out a car swinging a bat. You cannot differentiated as to how a mailbox is constructed by looking at it.
As has been stated repeatedly, we’re not discussing non-functional mailboxes. We’re talking about one that is reinforced.
As opposed to who? The power company who secretly installed a reinforced telephone pole to mess with the kids who kept knocking over their regular pole?
Anyway, I’ll just wait for your evidence that hitting mailboxes with a bat is dangerous.
We are not talking about a particularly sturdy mailbox. We are talking about this:
Where do you get the idea that the mailbox-rigger’s intent is assessed only on the basis of the consequences of their actions in normal use, as opposed to what they expected to happen?
Sure, whacking somebody else’s mailbox with a baseball bat is not “normal use” of a mailbox. But if you reasonably expected mailbox-baseball vandals to come along and whack your mailbox with a bat, and carried out your deceptive-looking mailbox-rigging in that expectation, then your expectation is an indicator of your intention. And it indicates that your intention was malicious retaliation against the mailbox-whackers.
(Moreover, I think one could argue that stealing somebody else’s apples to eat them doesn’t really count as “normal use” either: it’s criminal theft. In any case, as I said, the key to your intent and hence to your responsibility is not what behavior you define to be “normal”, but what behavior you actually expected.)
I’ve been following this thread from the beginning, though this is the first time I’ve posted. It has long since ceased to be about the legality of mailbox baseball, and more of a fascinating study of willful ignorance.
Anybody else following just to see how you-know-who manages to completely miss the point over and over?
I hope this isn’t considered thread-shitting, if so my apologies in advance. I really am curious.
Hell, just install one of these. It’ll deter the little bastids.
Voldemort??
Because you can’t be expected to engineer something to accommodate the stupid reckless actions of others.
eating an apple is normal use even if it’s stolen. Putting mail in a mailbox is normal use. You can even hit a reinforced one with a baseball bat and it won’t hurt you. If you try it from a moving vehicle then the forward motion of the car is going to move the end of the bat backwards with the pivot point being the person holding the bat. It’s clearly a dangerous act despite the assurances of someone on the internet who knows someone that says it’s safe.
There’s simply no way of knowing if the mailbox will stay attached or the batter hits the wood post that doesn’t detach. How do you know if it was attached with (2) 1 inch screws or (6) 3 inch screws? what if 5 cents worth of washers were used to spread the load of the screw heads? How do you know if the wood columns were made of pine or white oak?
There is simply no way to demonstrate in court that hitting anything from a moving vehicle is safe.
Note the dent in your mailbox example. It’s what you would expect from hitting a reinforced unit.
Explain how this differs from a mailbox with thicker steel?
But in this situation, it’s pretty plain that you are engineering something to accommodate—in fact, to encourage—the stupid reckless actions of others.
You’re not trying to make a mailbox that will actively discourage them from repeating their stupid reckless action of whacking it with a bat. Which would be the logical thing to do if you really wanted them not to whack it with a bat any more.
On the contrary, you’re trying to lure them into whacking it with a bat again and getting a much different, and potentially more harmful, outcome than their previous mailbox-whacking experience led them to expect.
There’s no need to. The point is that with your surreptitious mailbox-rigging, you are actively trying to make this particular stupid reckless action of hitting something from a moving vehicle more unsafe.
That is not the behavior of a well-intentioned responsible person. No matter how stupid and reckless (not to mention criminal) the original act of mailbox baseball is to start with.
I think your fundamental mistake here is that you imagine that if you can just blame the mailbox-whackers hard enough for their stupid and reckless (and criminal) behavior, there won’t be any blame left over for your own maliciously endangering behavior.
But actually, there’s plenty of blame in such a situation to go round.
No it’s not plain that is what is happening. It’s a simple cheap solution.
Again, explain the difference between a heavy gauge steel mailbox and one that someone built that is reinforced with concrete.
There’s nothing to indicate you’re luring anybody to do anything. A heavy gauge steel mailbox is going to be visually the same as one reinforced in concrete.
I think your fundamental mistake is imagining a mailbox has to be installed so that it detaches if hit from a car. Otherwise the forward motion of the car will force the bat dangerously backwards. Here’s an image of a mailbox that’s still attached.
There is no certainty in this regardless of the statement made earlier that it will detach. Therein lies the danger.
Note the image of a mailbox posted above. there are 7 screw holes on each side. If I install the crappiest thinnest mailbox using (6) 3 inch screws (less than half that are possible) is that a trap? How about 4 screws on the side and one in back?
If you believe that the $50 or $150 mailboxes you linked above would stand up to a baseball bat hit as well as that concrete monstrosity, I have no idea what to tell you.
Eta: scratch that, I do know what to tell you - want to buy a bridge?
You’re not really fooling anyone, you know. We’re in a thread explicitly started to discuss the potential liability of an angry mailbox-baseball victim who surreptitiously rigs an ordinary-looking mailbox specifically in order to make it much more solid, and more dangerous to hit, than the mailbox-whacking vandals expected.
And you’re standing there trying to look as though butter wouldn’t melt in your mouth and repeating “Gosh no, honest, it never crossed my mind that rigging the mailbox in this way would increase the likelihood of serious harm to the vandals!”
Nobody believes you, because we’re not that gullible.