Just ran across this article today in a rather liberal online publication and was sickened by what I read. I had no idea that self defense by a crime victim was considered more punishable than the perpetration of the crime itself. Someone please tell me that the facts in this story are not really true. If they are true, how do we avoid going down that same road in the US?
Flex,
i’m not sure i’d call the FT particularly liberal, but that’s another debate.
This article has taken several cases from a very long history and presented them in his argument. i count 4 cases in a 29 year period that show individual decisions that punish the armed “victim” more than the “perpetrator”.
I can’t comment on the minutiae of his first three examples, but I remember the Tony Martin case. And I have to say, i think he deserved his punishment. In my view you are wrong to shoot to kill someone, even if that person is a career criminal who is in the process of robbing your home. Martin should not have been in the position of having to defend his home, that should be up to the state to provide adequate police, or keep criminals in jail. However he took it upon himself to deliberately act as judge, jury and executioner.
I might think differently if you could show me a case where a criminal has been prevented from killing and then robbing a homeowner by the homeowner gunning them down, but then how would you know? the criminal would be dead.
I think you would find that in the majority of cases, self defence is not punished by the courts. These cases are well known because they run contrary to the norms.
In answer to your question, I don’t think you are in any danger of going down this road in the US. You have extremely powerful lobbies such as the NRA, who aggressively pursue the rights of indivduals to arm themselves and wield those weapons.
I don’t think that this about gun control. It’s about sentencing. ASAIK if there where no guns involved in say for example the Tony Martin case and he attacked the burglar with a pipe and killed him the case would have probably ended up with the same result. There is something knocking around in the back of my head that the martin case wasn’t as clean cut as that article makes it out. I think there was evidence that showed that martin lied in court about the events turned out. I’ll have a look around and see what i can find or maybe a UK poster will have some facts closer to hand.
Most Brits I know or talk to are quite happy with the gun control situation in the UK. We here in Ireland have basically the same system and the vast majority of people here are happy with the fact that people cannot get their hands on guns easily. The police here are also unarmed like the British police but have access to armed police if required.
Is the Financial Times a “liberal” paper BTW??
The FT is considered slightly right of centre in Britain, you know… which might still make it liberal by US standards.
I think the question is one of proportionate response… generally speaking, it’s considered disproportionate to use deadly force in response to a threat against property, for example. Generally speaking - these cases need to be decided on their individual merits.
For example, the Tony Martin case, which your article references, and which has indeed provoked a great deal of discussion on this issue: there are details of this case that aren’t covered in the article (for example, that the sixteen-year-old burglar was already fleeing when Martin shot him), and which convinced the jury in that case to return a guilty verdict. ISTR (sorry, no cite, I just remember the headline) a case within weeks of the Martin verdict, where a man was attacked with a knife, struggled with his assailant, and finally turned the weapon against him and killed him; this was considered a clear case of self-defense, and the man wasn’t even charged. So, circumstances alter cases.
Personally, I’m inclined to the same view as Lao Tzu: "The more sharp weapons the people have, the more troubled the state will be. " I’m happy living in a (relatively) unarmed society.
“Yes, your honour, I shot him in self defence, in the back, as he ran away”
The Tony Martin case was unusual because of Mr Martin himself. The FT article is disingenuous in leaving aside some other facts of the case:
[ul][li]The prosecution claimed ballistic evidence showing that at least two shots were fired from the ground floor, indicating Martin had actively pursued the fleeing burglars, rather than acting in self-defence only.[/li][li]Martin’s local reputation for xenophobia and talking of “putting Gypsies in one of his fields surrounded by barbed wire and machine-gunning them” were at odds with the defence’s portrayal of him as a quiet, terrified man.[/li][li]The dead man was shot three times, twice in the legs and once in the back. The prosecution claimed this indicated Martin continued to fire even as the burglars were fleeing.[/li][li]Martin had twice been involved in firearms offenses before (the murder weapon was an unregistered illegally-held pump-action shotgun).[/li][li]Martin had ‘rigged’ his house to booby-trap unwitting burglars, with false stairs and barbed wire. I cannot find a cite for this point, however.[/ul][/li]Draw what conclusions you may, but this particular case should not be used as a general example of the English legal system’s treatment of self-defence cases.
BBC story with realted links Farmer guilty of murdering burglar
Legal page talking about case http://www.law4today.com/info/crime/crime100.htm
Yeah, just to add to what’s already been said, I think it’s highly unwise to assume that the present crime problems in the UK are the result restricting private legal gun ownership.
This has never been a country with a high level of household and personal gun ownership, even before the various restrictions were imposed during the 20th century. We aren’t all sitting here thinking, “blimey mate, only last week I could have protected myself from miscreants and now I am helpless!”
There is a rise in the use of illegally held guns in the commission of crime in the UK. My guess is however, that the impetus for this is not the lack of privately held defensive weapons, because these were not particularly significant in the first place. In fact, if criminals know that householders are now poorly armed and defenceless, why do they bother with guns? Why not just a nice set of knuckledusters and Big Vinnie in tow? It is also illegal to walk about the streets carrying a big knife - I bet plenty of crimes are committed using big knives as well, but that’s not because it was made illegal for “nice people” to carry them.
To my mind this is typical of the sticky mess that results when people engaging in the debate over gun control in the US attempt to use other countries as illustrations. Different history, different situation, different mindset.
Embra
Thanks to everyone for the solid responses. And special thanks for actually sticking to the topic of the OP and not degenerating to a standard gun control argument.
The article is by one of several academics who are broadly “pro-gun”. Another is a guy called Lott (IIRC) at Chicago Law School, who found credible evidence that concealed carry laws lower crime levels.
My view is that the UK has definitely gone too far. Tony Martin was undoubtedly an unpleasant person, but his personality is irellevant. Why should anyone have to tolerate repeated break-ins? In many places in the US, he would have had a right to shoot an intruder - and the burglary rates in those places are near zero.
It’s not simply that you are being denied the right to defend yourself without being treated as a criminal, but you are being forced to become reliant on the state (though the state is obviously unable to deliver 24-hr protection for each person). Obviously the powers that be enjoy having people being reliant on them - it gives them more control. It’s a pity that the country that first established the concepts of individual liberty and sovereignty of the individual rather than government has gone down this road. It’s Europeanization. Which brings us to…
Yes, it’s as pink politically as the color of its newsprint. It supported Labor in the election before the first one Blair won. It’s very pro-Europe and pro-scrapping monetary independence for the UK. It even has a columnist on page 2 of the Saturday features section who’s basically socialist. It’s no Wall Street Journal. The crossword’s good, though.
Hemlock,
I would be interested to see evidence of the correlation between the right to shoot an intruder - and “near zero” burglary rates. My guess is that if this is the case, its because what actually happens is that both burglars and homeowners are armed and the result is homicide (whether legally sanctioned or not) and treated statistically as such.
And for heaven’s sake, the FT is not a pinko paper. The columnist you mention is in the features section, he certainly doesn’t write the editorials. I know several FT journalists personally and can attest to the fact that they are by no means lefties.
What has the pro-europe argument got to do with whether you are left or right? There are plenty of hard right Tories who are pro europe and pro-euro on economic grounds.
I’m sorry but in the context of the UK this statement is utterly bonkers.
Have you got any idea what a total non-started that argument is politically speaking, socially speaking, any kind of speaking. The British (general) public aren’t interested in legalising gun ownership and, perhaps not surprisingly, they don’t particularly want criminals to legally own guns either. It really doesn’t go any further than that although it might be fun to see a political party try to argue the case for legalising private handgun ownership.
And it really has absolutely nothing to do with Europe whatsoever.
Why do you assume this? Apart from the case of Tony Martin, Dr. Malcolm doesn’t actually specify what punishments were handed down on whom. As for Mr. Martin, the two sentences might have been very different had there been any evidence that his life had been in danger.
So “refusing to tolerate repeated break-ins” is the same in your mind as “shooting a burglar in the back”?
The whole point of this thread was to discuss the concept of self-defence. Self-defence is based on the concept of a reasonable response to a perceived threat. If Tony Martin had actually believed that Fred Barras was coming at him with a gun, or other weapon, it might have been considered reasonable for him to fire a gun at him. The fact is, it is not considered reasonable to fire repeatedly at people who are running away from you.
In the Martin case, he was eventually found guilty of manslaughter on grounds of diminished responsibility, based on his paranoid personality (so his personality is at least partly relevant here). The appeals judges repeated however, that the jury was right to find his response unreasonable. Mind you, that article comes from the Guardian, so if you’re worried about the relative pinko-ness of your news sources, perhaps best to get the same story from the Telegraph…
You seem to believe that killing someone who breaks into houses is a perfectly acceptable response to burglary. I disagree with you entirely. It’s a dreadful experience to be burgled, and I am glad that I have never had to confront an intruder in my home, but the requirement of self-defence is that one’s response must be proportionate to the threat to your person. In many cases this is a fine line, but in the Martin case, it wasn’t.
Embra
Looking over the FT article again, I notice another point where the author has, perhaps, been disingenuous, and someone without a working knowledge of English law could be misled.
It’s not necessarily clear from that passage that “wounding” is a serious offence under English law… my desultory searches refer me to section 18 of the Offences Against the Person Act 1861, which admittedly is no model of clarity, but suggests that someone found guilty of this offence could face a sentence up to life imprisonment. I’m pretty sure (but will keep digging) that carrying a concealed weapon does not carry so high a penalty.
The quoted academic also has a book to promote.
If I remember correctly, after he shot one burglar, he drove around looking for the other one.
You can certainly argue that some UK countryside police forces are underfunded.
But I personally want the police to sort out burglars, not some armed householder with mental problems.
This example is about as helpful as the case I heard of where an American shot someone on his doorstep because the (unarmed) visitor was dressed for a party.
(I deliberately put it that way to emphasise how the academic has used exaggeration.)
Do try to remember the baseline here. The US has two parties that would be considered ‘right of centre’ and ‘rightwing’ here in Europe. We have Socialist parties and Governments.
The FT is certainly right of centre.
Why the UK even has a communist newspaper. :eek:
http://www.poptel.org.uk/morning-star/
Fortunately, in the US, there are a number of DA’s who don’t agree with you, like this incident.
There are important distinctions between these two cases. In the des Moines case a householder used a legally-held shotgun to shoot a visibly armed man who was trying to get into his house. He used birdshot which, even at close range, offered the lowest chance of causing a fatality. He fired only one shot, and the burglars ran away. In the Martin case, the householder used an illegally-held, and illegal, sawn-off shotgun to shoot an unarmed man who was already fleeing - three times.
See the difference? Now reread the bit in Embra’s post about “proportionate response”.
Richard Littlejohn deals with the Martin case in his latest column: http://www.thesun.co.uk/article/0,,2002290601,00.html
The whole article is low on details of the crime, demonizes the burglers and is pretty damn high on anti-‘Gypsy’ sentiment.
Wonderful little cartoon accompanies the article too.
Well, as we might expect from the Sun - not, even by flex727’s standards, a “liberal” paper, and not one overly-wedded to letting the facts stand in the way of a good rant - this column is highly selective in what it presents. It goes into considerable detail about the prior convictions of the two burglars (and the prior convictions of someone else at whom Mr Martin never shot and, indeed, who he never saw at all) but it says nothing at all about Mr Martin’s prior convictions. I wonder why?
I think the bottom line is this. Unless you beleive that a property-owner has an absolute right to execute someone who enters his property without permission, there must be some relationship between the threat which an intruder poses and the degree of force than can be used to resist him. By all means give householder’s the benefit of the doubt, and a wide margin of uncertainty. But once you accept that there has to be some degree of proportion, it follows that there will be cases where a householder uses disproportionate force, and in those cases they householder will commit an offence. To beleive that Mr Martin was rightly convicted in this case is not all the same thing as to believe that householders have no rights at all to defend their properties.