NickBallard
member
- Joined
- Jun 20, 2006
- Messages
- 83
What's a legal way to protect your property? As you know, force can only be used in immediate self-defense, but not to protect property. So what do you do if someone's robbing your house and you're required to retreat into a different room because of a law? Is there no legal way to protect your property. No one has any right or business breaking into someone's home and stealing. If they're doing it in front of you and the law requires you to leave that room (in your own house), that just encourages them. Some may say let the police take care of it. Usually when someone's burglarized or robbed, the police only fill out reports, but they almost never catch the person. If you look at any state statistics of dollar amount of property stolen and returned to owner, hardly any is returned to owner. The use of force in defending property even goes for the use of non-lethal weapons, such as pepper spray (although a few rare states say that you can use pepper spray to protect property), which doesn't leave any permanent damage. I read from http://www.useofforce.us/ that there's the usual ability, opportunity, and jeapordy (since they can't prove intent, but can say the person was following established, external standards of jeopardy behavior), but that there's also the "preclusion" factor that's never talked about, but always is a factor in criminal and civil liabilities when self-defense is used. Preclusion means that all other means that wouldn't have put the victim in danger were exhausted before using force. It said on this website that if someone says to you, "Give me your money or I'll hurt you", that means you have to give them your money so that you can exhaust all means. It said that often in that situation if you punch the robber, you'll be charged legally (because life and limb is more important than property). So imagine if you have a kid and a bully always steals really important belongings from him. Then one day your kid learns karate and then uses it twart the robbery from the bully. Then the bully's parents sue you because even though their worthless kid was not hurt, but because the law said they could sue you. I am not married nor have kids, but that wouldn't seem ethically right. So how can you legally protect your property? One time a teenager stole a bike in my neighborhood and one of the neighbors saw it happen, then chased the teenager through a forest and a ditch until he caught the teenager and held him to the ground until the police arrived. The police didn't do anything to this neighbor but arrested the teenager.