Is the right to self-defense dead in England?
Homeowner Richard Osborne-Brooks, 78, grappled with and then stabbed an intruder who entered his home in the middle of the night:
The pensioner, named locally as Richard Osborn-Brooks, was upstairs asleep with his wife when he was woken by the two men breaking into his suburban home in Hither Green, south-east London last night.
He was forced into his kitchen by one of the men, who was armed with a screwdriver, before a struggle ensued.
The intruder, a 38-year-old man, was left with wounds to his chest and local residents say he collapsed in a neighbouring road and died in hospital.
The homeowner was initially detained on suspicion of causing grievous bodily harm but was later arrested on suspicion of murder.
Yes, you read that right: murder.
It seems the reporters who wrote the story couldn’t find any neighbor to interview who had an opinion other than that Osborn-Brooks should be allowed to have defended his home from threatening intruders, and should be let go. But this is England.
Here are the rules, and you can see that they’re very much open to interpretation:
British law allows homeowners to use ‘reasonable force’ against intruders to protect themselves or others in their home.
Guidelines introduced in 2005 allow people to protect themselves ‘in the heat of the moment’ ”“ including using an object as a weapon. They can also stop an intruder running off, for example by tackling them to the ground.
There is no specific definition of ‘reasonable force’ and it is said to depend on the circumstances.
Government guidance states that if a person ‘only did what you honestly thought was necessary at the time, this would provide strong evidence that you acted within the law’.
People do risk prosecution however if they carry on attacking the intruder when they are no longer in danger, or pre-plan a trap for someone rather than involving the police.
The United States’ laws on the subject are done on a state-by-state basis, but there are general trends:
In the U.S., the general rule is that “[a] person is privileged to use such force as reasonably appears necessary to defend him or herself against an apparent threat of unlawful and immediate violence from another.” In cases involving non-deadly force, this means that the person must reasonably believe that their use of force was necessary to prevent imminent, unlawful physical harm. When the use of deadly force is involved in a self-defense claim, the person must also reasonably believe that their use of deadly force is immediately necessary to prevent the other’s infliction of great bodily harm or death. Most states no longer require a person to retreat before using deadly force. In the minority of jurisdictions which do require retreat, there is no obligation to retreat when it is unsafe to do so or when one is inside one’s own home.
There have been US cases in which a homeowner has killed an intruder and been charged with murder, but they tend to feature very unusual elements. For example, here a Washington homeowner found a man in his shower (apparently not threatening him in any way), and the homeowner left his house and came back with a firearm and killed him by shooting multiple rounds into the shower. His trial has yet to be completed, as far as I can tell.
Another case involved a Maryland man named Pinkerton who killed a known intruder at 2 AM when the man (who had a history of harassing Pinkerton’s wife) crashed a party and lunged towards the shooter. Pinkerton was acquitted, and not only acquitted but the judge did so after hearing only the prosecution and ruling that it had not presented a sufficient case.
I am not aware of every single case that’s ever occurred here, but I strongly doubt that a case with the same fact circumstances as that of Osborne-Brooks would have resulted in an arrest in the US. But give us time, give us time.
Slaves, serfs, and human livestock do not ordinarily have such rights.
I remember back when instructor Tim Larkin got kicked and banned for trying to teach self defense in Britain.
Can’t have the peasants defeating Islamic Jihad or riots.
Lawyers can only determine the level of force based on the outcome. Thus deadly force is often judged based on the outcome. If someone punches a person, that is often considered non lethal force. However, that is not always the outcome. Some times people die from a single punch and various other circumstances. But these circumstances are not the cause in the legal courts for death or homicides, but the punch itself.
So any force you use against anyone else can be lethal force. It just depends on your skill and luck. For things like guns that are assumed to be more lethal or guaranteed lethal, even though it isn’t, pointing guns at people are ruled by legal jurisdiction as already requiring the justification for the use of lethal force even though force had not yet been used. So even if you point a gun or pull the trigger and someone doesn’t die, you are still stuck with the lethal force requirements.
But you aren’t stuck with the non lethal force requirements if the outcome is lethal unless something special happens in the law.
“Reasonable force” is defined in Britain as “do you have any political or powerful backgrounds that allows you to be immune to legal prosecution like Islamic jihad rapists?”
If you answer no…. then you are treated as livestock.
If you answer yes… then you are treated better under “reasonable force”.
It is much easier to keep your guns in a nation gone mad on nationalism, than to try to get them back from the socialist craze UK entered after WW2. The State or the government or other powerful human factions have no reason whatsoever to believe that human livestock need “rights”.
Yep. Its coming, and soon.
I just despise democrats.
Read that, if the same man, he was given a prison term of life, for the “murder”.
Reading carefully (including the original article), one of the burglars was armed with the screwdriver, which eventually ended up in a burglar’s chest. The homeowner was unarmed at the beginning of the altercation.
So in reality the homeowner is being charged with murder because the burglars’ weapon ended up in one of their chests.
Unfortunately, I have seen a lot of reports like this over the last few years coming out of Britain.
It really seems as if the whole of Western Europe has been ensorcelled, staring off into space like King Theoden of Rohan in the Lord of the Rings, as Grima Wormtougue whispers in his ear, he grows ever more feeble, and his kingdom falls into ruin.
How, I keep wondering, can they not see what is happening–what is clear as day–right in front of their faces?
How can the England that was the birthplace of the ideas of freedom and the Liberty we enjoy, have gone so wrong?
How can the men of the West–so valiant in the past–have turned in a compliant herd of sheep, too afraid even to bleat, ready for the slaughter.
How can they follow traitorous leaders over the all too obvious cliff, to their doom?
[your referring to the castle doctrine]
the incident is recent, the concept is old news and goes way back… decades… which then is where health and safety now is… you know… someone drowning in 3 ft of water, and you cant save him till the professional divers arrive (actually happened).
This by the way, equalizes men and women in certain professions in that now officers don’t have to rescue people or try, they can put a tape up and wait for the specialists. now every male or female officer and such performs the same.
well, the logic behind the murder thing is a bit different. it turns on you being a product of your environment (given i grew up in a inner city low income area, what should I be?) – you are not responsible for what you do. (remember who made this the dominant idea along with tons of others! or we going to ignore that as if this isnt being maintained and pushed by such).
The person committing the crime did not commit the crime because of their own free will, they committed the crime because of something in their environment at some time – since they are not responsible for the act, killing them is not acceptable is it?
[this is how a certain movement sold freedom without responsibility to the majority that fought for it – you poor thing, your just who you are because of all this reality bearing down on you and forcing you into this mold with little choice]
NEO says:Here are the rules, and you can see that they’re very much open to interpretation
however to REALLY understand it you have to take one more step to “health & safety” la la land…
“How, I keep wondering, can they not see what is happening—what is clear as day—right in front of their faces?”
No need to go to the bother of visiting Europe to see this phenomenon – it’s alive and well right here in the USA. Just visit Coastal California or any of the other carefully tended parrot farms around the country. Bubble living at it’s finest!
BTW, I highly recommend Victor Davis Hanson’s latest about his travels around NOT Coastal California, the squalid backyard of progressive America that no one likes to talk, or report, about.
your looking up laws but now we are in the world of rules as laws, by delegated powers… so your answer may not be in law, it may be in the end around health and safety laws…
the kind that creates this:
Charity shop worker drowned in lake just 3ft deep after firemen refused to wade in due to health and safety rules
Drowning Simon Burgess, 41, was just 20ft away from firefighters but inquest hears they refused to save him
Police officer who went in to water was ordered back
Witness claims firemen told her they couldn’t go in if water was more than ‘ankle deep’
http://www.dailymail.co.uk/news/article-2104358/Simon-Burgess-drowned-firemen-refused-wade-3ft-deep-lake-health-safety-rules.html
you know how all in on safety women are, till you get some really wacked out stuff… its all about safety and they are all lining up for it, the more the better…
you think that was a one off? Jordan Lyons?
John Collinson, an angler, told the inquest: “Two community police officers, a man and a woman, arrived on bikes. They asked where the boy was and I pointed to the area of the pond but they did not go into the pond. The water was black. The community police officers just stood there. Then two men arrived and they just dived into the water.”
[if ya cant get the ladies to behave like that for a paycheck, then what else CAN you do? you cant refuse to hire them, can you? you should see how they are fixing up the marine corps now with all kinds of new rules!!!]
Police officers have been warned not to hold out a hand to drowning swimmers, and to think twice before throwing a lifebelt, in case they are pulled into the water themselves.
the police in England been doing their thing since 1829…
why in the past, say, 20-30 years has there been this transformation?
I dont particular see the guys calling for more and more of this..
If a homeowner kills burglars and police….
Hows that look?
Given we are perfectly happy to have funerals for the fallen
and that this is an accepted part of these jobs for almost two centuries
there is only one reason we no longer get the protection we used to get not too long ago, when the people we dont care about much, were doing the job – the disposables.
OR (also from the same academic areas)
if you want to close the circle, go into oppressed oppressor dialectics and then the person robbing the house is an oppressed person and the oppressor class has no right to self defense.
“there is no right to self-defense among the colonized and oppressed people.”
There’s a move on in the California legislature to alter laws that require a police officer to use “reasonable force” to protect himself to the phrase “necessary force.”
Criminals will figure this out real fast.
Winston spinning in his grave.
Yes.
David Jay Says:
April 4th, 2018 at 6:56 pm
Reading carefully (including the original article), one of the burglars was armed with the screwdriver, which eventually ended up in a burglar’s chest. The homeowner was unarmed at the beginning of the altercation.
So in reality the homeowner is being charged with murder because the burglars’ weapon ended up in one of their chests
* * *
Ah, now I understand the article I read last night.
https://libertyunyielding.com/2018/04/01/image-day-london-police-keep-dangerous-weapons-off-streets/
Take a look at the picture of what passes for “dangerous” in the UK — obviously they are, when wielded by a terrified homeowner, but does that mean every customer of the hardware store now has to pass a background check?
You can have my Craftsman phillips-head when you pry it from my cold, dead hands.
Back in the seventies I had a sweet Jesus Freak friend who was sure the End Times were coming. But he still wanted to sneak in a summer trip “to see Europe while it was still there.”
He was wrong then, but he might be right today.
“How, I keep wondering, can they not see what is happening—what is clear as day—right in front of their faces?” Snow on Pine
When people behave in an inexplicable manner, I’ve learned to look for what I call “secondary gain”. I suspect they see exactly what’s happening… yet resist changing their self-created reality.
In the West, many decades of indoctrination into leftist memes has resulted in subconscious acceptance by the majority of the Left’s unspoken proposition that only the West’s cultural suicide can atone for their ancestral ‘sins’.
The West’s racial and colonial past must be atoned for and, given the monstrousness of the ‘sin’, near genocide is the ‘proportional’ price that must be paid.
It’s a secular form of self-flagellation with a remarkable similarity to “Mortification of the Flesh”
“When people reject traditional religious beliefs, they merely go on to create some other faith-based schema to believe in; whether it be money or power or the various religions of the left; socialism, communism, feminism, environmentalism or anthropogenicism (who believe that humans are the sole root of all evil and thus are the cause of all earthly problems, from weather and climate anomalies to earthquakes, floods, volcanoes, tsunamis, hurricanes, and species extinction) etc. human nature demands something larger than itself to believe in.” unknown attribution
It is very hard for those inside the bubble to identify with, or even understand, life outside the bubble.
Chelsea Handler unwittingly made the point in a tweet in which she bragged that her armed security did not carry semi-automatic weapons. Aside from betraying her abysmal ignorance of weaponry, it revealed her self-appointed privileged status accruing simply from her celebrity, as well as her disdain for the rest of us; i.e, armed security for me, but not for you little people. Lawmakers exhibit many of the same characteristics; while prosecutors appear to be no more than ruthless predators on the prowl for victims. We, the sheep, must shoulder some of the blame, since we do have weapons of our own; i.e. the vote; but, we often do not use it wisely.
A piece in The Sun says that “some neighbours have suggested Mr Osborn-Brooks had chased and caught him.” If that’s when he stabbed the burglar, then, according to The Mirror, this comes into play: “If you are chasing someone off your property, you are allowed to use reasonable force to recover property and make a citizen’s arrest but the amount of violence seen as acceptable is a lot less than if you confront someone inside the home.”
If someone, unintived, its inside my house they pose a threat to me and mine. I will kill them if I can. If that someone has grabbed a piece of my property and has fled my house I will not shoot them in the back.
Why I don’t want England to get a second chance.
And I like England. As long as we have superior strength.
https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/CAM_ship
https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=Ij7b1te6LHo
British L129A1 Sharpshooter Rifle
They got that from us. The Sharps rifle.
https://gundigest.com/wp-content/uploads/Sharps-sporter-3-high-res.jpg
But though the British Navy and Arrny are smaller, I would never face up to a member of the SBS or SAS.
They do get these rifles from us.
I think they get their ATVs from Canada.
http://i.dailymail.co.uk/i/pix/2015/12/14/03/23607FE400000578-3358813-image-a-7_1450062028174.jpg
https://www.army.mod.uk/equipment/small-arms-and-support-weapons/
No, Japan.
https://www.yamaha-motor.eu/uk/professional-user/atv/grizzly450/index.aspx
The brits aren’t much different than we. Other than dentition and the food. Gawd, the food. On the plus side is that Asian immigration improved the food. Except for bangers and mash.
https://www.allrecipes.com/recipe/97806/classic-bangers-and-mash/
Not sure it was worth the trade off.
Heaven is where the Germans run the railroads, the Italians are the chefs, and the British are the police,
H3ll is where the Germans are the police, the Italians run the railroads, and the British are the chefs.
Would she know what a self loader even looks like?
I guess her security detail only carries revolvers. Which are not to be despised. But then I’m good with a speed loader.
I’m also good with a single action. I carried one when I hunted. Yes, I preferred my rifle or shotgun. But try carrying one all the time. My .44 Blackhawk was with me all the time. It was freaking strapped on my body. Which is probably why the slang for carrying a pistol is “strapped.”
But as soon as I, a Naval officer, could move up from the S&W M60 J-frame to a 1911 I did. Somewhere around here I have my firearm ID card that allowed me to carry my Colt Combat Elite onboard NASNI. Back in the Kelso days, I do believe.
That didn’t last long. Too Bad. If I was stationed at Fort Hood I would have put a stop to that business. But just about everyone who has put on a uniform can say the same. No personal weapons on base. Damned shame.
I have nothing against the J-frame. As soon as Smith evolved it into a .357 I bought one.
Handy little gun. I’m sure Chelsea Handler wouldn’t know one from Adam.
I used to think juror null was a bad idea.
They do not have a written constitution or bill of rights like ours but they do have lots of lawyers, politicians, and judges. So our living and breathing constitution just hasn’t evolved to the utopia of their legal system.
I am reluctantly reaching the conclusion that the only thing that can now save the UK is another Cromwell. The Left has reduced Western Europe to the desperation of the South American ‘solution’: i.e. a military coup… Perhaps a Colonel from the SAS will do what has become necessary.
If not, one of the two growing totalitarian ideologies currently at play will be their future; either Islam’s Sharia Law or Orwell’s 1984.
“Londonistan: 423 New Mosques; 500 Closed Churches”
“Twitter Transgender Critic ‘Questioned by Police and Banned from Leaving UK’”
“Northumbria police officers to receive LGBT training in fight against hate crime”
Geoffrey Britain–Maybe we aren’t getting the news about all sorts of indications that the native British population is seething, and about to erupt into violent rebellion against both the established order and against the Muslim invaders who have been parading around their streets, proclaiming how they and Islam are going to take over the country, but I doubt it.
Thus, I think the conclusion that you have reached about what is likely to happen is, very unfortunately, probably pretty much on target.
Cromwell’s dismissal of the Parliament is a classic.
http://www.emersonkent.com/speeches/dismissal_of_the_rump_parliament.htm
Brexit. Never happened, eh?
Most English-speaking politicians are lawyers, and most lawyers are wordsmiths. Anti-common sense laws are the result.
“To such depths have the sons of Alfred the Great fallen.” – LtCol John Dean “Jeff” Cooper, USMC (deceased)
The thing is, anyone can see where this ends, and it’s not a good end.
So, why wouldn’t anyone and everyone try, in every way they could, to avoid that bad result?
I think that, as others have speculated, it’s because the British, like the other people in Western Europe–who are reacting/behaving in similar ways–believe that they somehow deserve what is coming.
It’s crazy, and I wouldn’t buy this idea, but that’s apparently the idea that they have bought.
I remember looking at Northumbria on a map. It used to be a Dukedom. Maybe still is.
Before historical simulations, most of Britain was just a foreign name zone.
Snow on Pine Says:
April 6th, 2018 at 9:01 am
The powers that be keep the livestock under check. Expecting slaves to rebel under this advanced control scheme superior to totalitarian iron fists in North Korea, is perhaps overestimating people.
The slave lords of the US made giving arms and literacy to black slaves a crime punishable by death for a reason.
The powers that be that rules the US and other goyim nations are quite beyond most mortal comprehension.
For Steve 57, the rules on personal firearms on base have changed after the Chattanooga Recruiting Center/Naval Reserve Center shootings. You can now carry concealed when off duty on base if your Field Grade commander approves. Not that anyone in the Ft Hood building was likely to have been off duty, but some would likely have had a POW in their auto.
Steve, all my ID authorized me was to bring a pistol on base, and if the range wasn’t in use I could use it. So if there was a Fort Hood maybe if I could race to my car I might be able to stop it.
https://www.washingtontimes.com/news/2018/feb/25/david-hogg-defends-scot-peterson-officer-who-faile/
Do you believe this? I wouldn’t have hesitated. I couldn’t have shown my face to my father or mother. Or in otherwise decent company.
“Come back with your shield, or on it.”
Since when has that has stopped being the standard?
Looks like even the Met have decided this one is a bit silly:
https://twitter.com/BBCNews/status/982363066816974850
Still want to know why he’s drinking two pints of Guinness at once though…
From ace.mu.nu
An Englishman’s response to the arrest of the 78 yr. old pensioner who defended his home.
https://youtube/x6xRnZ6WOYM
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