To think that if you get stabbed by the owner of the house you're trying to rob...

[BupcakesandCunting]

That it's an occupational hazard of being a burglar?

Obviously I am NOT glad that someone has died here but if you break into a property, you cannot guarantee that you will come out of it very well off. If someone broke into my house, I don't know how I would react but if I felt that my family were under threat and I was panicking, I imagine it would be very easy to go OTT and the other person come off worse.

I know that the law says that you're supposed to use "reasonable force" but heat of the moment/panicking etc etc...

What does everyone else think?

Thats such a sad story cheerful

Oh cheerful yank thats awful I know you warned us but wish I hadn't read it. Those poor little girls.

I wouldn't want a gun in my home because statistically you're more likely to shoot someone you know by accident that an intruder. But keeping a weapon in your home (like a bat, frying pan, knife, whatever) that can be used with deadly force if you need it. is a good idea.

I know, horrific. I wish I didn't know about it; that's why I put the disclaimer. :(

This thread sort of reminds me of one of my dad's friends...older man. His ice-fishing house (do you have those??) kept getting broken into and he finally put marten traps all around inside. One of the town's teens showed up at the doctor's with a broken finger the next day and oddly enough that man's shack was never broken into again...

I am sure that in most cases the law works fine on this issue. I doubt there are too many cases where innocent householders are locked up. And that is good, because I just don't care what happens to some thieving scumbag. They should know it is potentially risky to break into that house, and if they do it, they suffer the consequences.

CheerfulYank, I'm sitting here in tears after reading the basic details of that case, I couldn't continue reading after half way through, that poor poor family

Those two criminals, fucking scumbags, barely humans, both of them.

I know. It definitely set the anti-death penalty movement in Connecticut back a loooooong way...can't say I don't understand.

All these what its are not that relevant as to whether or not you think it is acceptable to try to kill someone who has crossed that line. I think it is.

Whether I would be prosecuted or not would be the furthest things from my mind.

When I was 14, I shot a man to death.

I'd been left on my own while my parents went out and my sister went to stay with who is now her husband (she was 18).

I was sitting down at Mama's sewing machine when helicopter lights were shining in our backyard.

I knew what that meant. Someone was loose and the law was after.

I did nothing till there was someone jimmying one of the windows on the ground floor.

Make no mistake this is one the best neighbourhoods in Houston.

No matter, the window's a'jimmying. I went and got the pistol from Papa's wardrobe and the ammo from his underwear cubby where I knew it was. I had always been taught responsible gun ownership. Weapons were not loaded, ammo was kept separate and you knew where it was and how to load, how to clean your weapon, how your weapon wasn't a toy, from the age of 8 or 9.

I called 911 on the corded phone said my name and address told the lady, 'I don't know who you're aiming to catch but he's coming in here and I'm on my own with a loaded Berreta that's licensed to my daddy. He gets his body in here you can better believe I will unload this whole clip on him so you better get here real fast.'

But they didn't so he got half himself in I unloaded that whole clip on him.

I never got done for any of it all you folk think you'd be the better I hope you're never sitting like that, wondering what's going to become of you, this fellow had got loose from jail for rape/murder.

You think you're the better person go on and applaud yourself and say I'm scum. I'm still here.

Truth be told I don't feel any regret at all.

Don't go screwing around in somoone's house like that.

You don't know what the hell they're there to do. You think they're there to kill you in bad way and your family will be having that on their conscience, their virgin daughter raped and murdered like she's just paper.

You go get wakened up in the dark like that, minding your own damn business, your whole family in your house, a gang of masked people in there, and tell me how you'd act, because you don't know a damn thing.

Somebody comes in my place with my kids there I'm not going to stop and ask questions.

Don't want to go like that then don't break into peoples' houses. End of.

I'm glad he's dead. I'm glad he's not here to ruin more peoples' lives or kill me.

And that is why I'm glad I live in a country where kids don't have legitimate access to guns!

If you've got time to go upstairs and load a gun then you've got time to get out of the back door to a neighbours house.

What do you expect to get for posting that? A round of applause?

I shot him at about 5 feet range, I should add. In a guest room.

Later on, I was mugged at gunpoint. I never saw my assailant. He put a gun to the base of my neck at the mailboxes in an apartment complex off Voss Road in Houston, Texas, about 10PM after I got off work and went to get my mail.

All I thought, was that it is hard to shoot well in the dark, it's hard to tell coming from going unless you're very well-trained, so if he tried to take me to another location, it was better to run for it. The shot would attract attention, and it's likely he'd not hit me well because he's expecting me to comply.

My father was once marched to the back room of a convenience store/petrol garage, with staff and other customers. Two gunmen took all their belongings, marched them to the back and forced them all to lie on their stomachs.

He'd gone there to get ice for a party on a Sunday afternoon.

The till operator had pressed a panic button and managed to pretend he didn't speak English long enough for the police to get there before they were all shot to death.

They were in a line, holding hands and praying, in their own religions.

Now come and tell me people like this deserve the benefit of everything whilst you lay on a concrete floor thinking about your children.

LOL, yes, I had time to go to a neighbour's house, not knowing who was where.

Round of applause?

No. I don't expect anything.

Let's put a nearly 60-year-old man in prison. That will solve lots.

No upstairs. It's a bungalow.

Yes, you're so much better! So much better than someone minding his own damn business whose house is broken into with his kid in it, no matter how old.

Let me look up this guy's name again, because I want to contribute a few bob to his defense.

Texans, don't fuck with them.

I wonder how much of this is a country/cultural thing.

I grew up in the bush, where 'your' place was your place and you are/were entitled to defend it. Perhaps harsher lands make for harsher people.

Green and gentle England perhaps doesn't result in the same sense of 'mine' because you don't have to struggle for it so much.

Such a thing, to have your life threatened. In the dark. Alone. Let's see how you get on. Knowing you are all that stands between you and your children. All you want to do is live, and see them living. Let's see you beg God, 'I don't want to go like this, please! Please don't let my mother find me, raped and murdered.'

Live with it, too, every day.

And tell me and that man they are scumbags.

For many years I had a license for a handgun. I kept one under the seat of my car (I took the deposit to the bank every night) and one under my bed. I lived alone at the end of a dead end road with only 3 houses. The other two were vacation homes so no one was there most of the time. Anyone who tried to harm me would have been making a serious mistake.

My license has lapsed and I don't carry a gun with me anymore but would still do whatever it took to keep my family from harm.

I live in the US. Our laws may not be perfect, but I'm glad I have the right to protect myself.

I know the "rules" have changed but there are people under arrest here and this is thinly masked speculation about innocence or guilt. Internet control is different to press regulation but there should be some self-censorship.

What Morloth said.

I didn't want to die, is what it boiled down to, both times. I didn't want to get murdered and die, same was when I was mugged at gunpoint. I thought, 'I'd rather he just killed me now, running away, then I went off with him and he did God knows what and no one would find me and my father will just die, he'll die I know it, all for this scumbag, who doesn't care.'

So fuck you, I'm running, at a 45 degree angle in the dark.

I ran.

He fled. He was arrested later.

I have no criminal record. I lived 4 years in the bush of Colorado and Wyoming, in the wilds, without electricity and wells for water. From north of Ft. Collins into Cheyenne, WY, is a vast, empty space. From noth of Cheyenne is a very vast space, north all the way to Canada. It is a space known as 'The Big Empty', stretching over a thousand miles through the state of Montana. To the west is bear country. Many carry guns through there, it is bush.

That is the advice isn't it expat? A police friend of mine once told me that the worst thing you could do was to go with someone, even if they were threatening you/your kids.

You make whatever is going to happen, happen there or you try to run away, going with them pretty much guarantees you end up dead.

Same with crossing carparks with your keys in your hand. I always do this. This means I can either get into my car quickly (and now I have a great big weapon) or at the very least I have something sharp in my fist if I need it.

He also talked about how you walk when alone, heads up, eye contact shoulders squared. If you walk like you are afraid you might as well broadcast an invite to all the predators in the vicinity.

It is the advice I was given, and advice I role-played, in school and at home, and do with my own daughters.

Never let them take to a second location alive, if they get you in motion, do what you can to attract attention, you are dead already.

There are few weapons which are truly silenced, and they are hard to get hold of, even on the best black market. They are the tools of asssasins, and sourced likewise. So if a shot is fired, it will attract attention. There's no sound like it, I can well vouch for that, even animals can perceive it. I was once in my Denver apartment when a road rage incident spilled into the adjoining car park. Shots rang out. My cat ran into the windowless hall before I did.

As for Tony Martin, I don't know, but I've fired in the dark. My father was an Army officer and a sharpshooter. In the dark, it's not easy. Take your chances.

If you run at a 45 degree angle in the dark, there's less than a 40% chance even the most well-trained assailant can get off a fatal shot.

So we'd practice running. Like a train. He'd always say that, too, if you get out of your car because a train is hitting it, run south of the train's direction at a 45 degree angle, the debris will spread first at close to 90 degrees or an oblique angle.

We practiced, over and over. Go for the abdomen if you're not at close range or your target is moving or it is dark, unless you're Lee Harvey Oswald or Charles Whitman, which not many are, thankfully. Once felled, unload the rest of the chamber on the head. Don't stop except to reload.

If a bear is that close, it is going to maul. Cover face and head. If it is cougar, fight. Cougar will drag you into the bush if you don't fight. Don't be small and alone at dawn or dusk.

if snake bites on the leg, stop moving and breathe shallow.

After I killed a man, my father took me on a cattle-drive that summer for a whole month, from New Mexico into Montana, though then I was afraid of horses. There's no horse he can't quell, even white-eyed, flint-hoofed mustangs. He can approach them and put his face to their flank and get at them and blow in their noses and eventually, they all calm. He acts like he has the time in the world.

He took me away, and he and two hands taught me to ride bareback and bare-footed, for he never wore shoes till he was 6 and had to go to school and even now in his mid-70s, he hates wearing shoes, he takes them off when he gets in his house and walks about in his high-arched, brown feet. He told me he was nothing but a half-breed, and all who looked on him knew that, and thought he must be part-Mohican, for he is 6ft. tall. But no, it was the white man in him. His father was a tall, blonde, blue-eyed man, his people being from Aragon in the north of Spain.

So we went, and then we went into where he was in the Army in 1954, just after Great Northwest Territory achieved statehood, onto a flight from Sea-Tac to Juno, and he told me this was Stewart's Icebox. There we trekked and stayed with native people who accepted both him and me on account on our half-breedness.

And he was like them. He'd never register displeasure, but to look over the shoulders of those to whom he spoke, or stare into the distance. His Mayan mother was like that.

But he said, 'I am glad, you did not die, daughter.'

If someone broke into my house with the intent of hurting us and stealing from us, if it came down to it...that person deserves to die more than my four year old.