[Ti] OT: House burglary tonight

[Phillip McGree]

>Well they would have probably shot him dead if the gun laws in Australia were anything like that in the US.

Actually, here in Oz it's nothing like the US.  If you physically harm an intruder then you are up for assault charges!

Someone here in Western Australia did some jail time a few years ago for shooting someone that broke into his house.  The intruder wasn't badly injured, but the victim was a successful family businessman in his 50s (with no criminal record) who was later convicted of something stupidly serious and sentenced to quite a lengthy jail term.  All for protecting his own property!

Crimes committed by Aboriginal juveniles are a massive problem in Australia.  If we were allowed to shoot them, then yeah, I'd reckon that quite a lot of them would be getting picked off regularly.

Someone else replied:

>Well Phil, looks like you shoulda had a gun like we do here in the US.
>The state can't protect you from everyone.

Which is true, if I had a gun next to me bed that I would have been quite delighted to shoot them.  But on the other hand, I was able to give chase without worrying about them shooting me first.  I'm actually quite a gun fan, but the harsh reality is that bad guys use them all the time, and good guys don't always have the experience to use them and tend to create a worse situation than what they were originally in.  And considering that these people were actually in my bedroom, there would have been a good chance that one of them would have found the gun before I woke up.  The fact that they had already taken my wallet from my shorts indicates that they had a pretty good look around.  All the drawers in my office were left half open as well.

But they should at least bring back public floggings.  Seriously.

Now, somebody give me a web site project to do so that I can afford to go buy a new camera!  :-)



Phil
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