Tommy Gunn
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What's wrong with shooting burglars?
By PETER HITCHENS, Mail on Sunday
August 3, 2003
You and your wife are alone in your house late at night. You are woken by footsteps and banging downstairs. What do you do?
If you have any sense at all, you will do nothing and hope the intruder goes away quickly. If he bursts into your bedroom, you would be wise to submit to him and not to look at him too carefully in case he gets the idea that you might be able to identify him later.
You know that if you ring the police they will probably take too long and may not come at all. And if you resist the thief, attack or injure him, you are likely to find yourself in a shared cell watching trash TV and eating prison slop with plastic cutlery as you do your time.
You are even more likely to be sued shamelessly and successfully in the courts by the man who has robbed you. If you kill him, which at least means he cannot sue you or intimidate you or come back for more, then the law will probably treat you as a murderer, making no legal distinction between you and Harold Shipman.
In the unlikely event that the thief is caught and prosecuted, he and his friends will be free to terrorise you into withdrawing your evidence, and the jury that hears the case into acquitting him, since a feeble police force rarely, if ever, acts to stop such things and often does not bother to patrol court buildings any more.
If by any chance he is convicted, he will swiftly be released under one of 'tough' David Blunkett's many schemes for letting prisoners out as rapidly as possible. He might even come back to steal whatever he left behind the first time.
Countless citizens, especially women living alone, now sleep with some sort of weapon or blunt instrument by their beds in case they are disturbed by thieves in the night. Others, especially those living in the countryside where the police have vanished, look thoughtfully at their legal firearms and wonder if they dare use them, even as a deterrent.
This is the disgusting, pitiful state of the law of Britain in 2003. Unless it is changed, it is only a matter of time before the prosperous suburbs of Britain are laid waste and plundered by armies of thieves, rightly confident that nobody can or will stop them and that they will not be punished.
It is only the surviving illusion, on both sides that we still live in a policed and law-governed country that stops this happening today.
Tony Martin, a strange and muttering loner, has won the sympathy of millions not because he is a good example or because he behaved well when he shot a burglar dead.
His popularity is the result of frustration and rage among the law-abiding who feel that they could easily have acted as Martin did. They probably won't because they are more worldly and have more sense.
On the one occasion I spoke to Martin, shortly before his trial, I told him he was very likely to be convicted. He was astonished. He still thought he lived in an older Britain of stout-hearted juries and robust judges where his action would be excused if not applauded.
That country died some time in the past ten years. As recently as 1993, Judge Daniel Rodwell awarded Malcolm Hammond £300 for shooting two armed robbers who raided his home, saying: 'He showed great gallantry in tackling these dangerous men and protecting his pregnant wife from further harm.'
But the shadows of political correctness were already deepening, though few realised it at the time. Six months later Mr Hammond was brought back to the same court and fined more than £2,000 because the pistol he had used was illegally held. Mr Hammond always denied this and said he had wrestled the gun from one of his assailants.
Once upon a time, nobody would have cared all that much, but in John Major's semi-Socialist Britain it was slowly becoming clear that the law was now neutral between 'offender' and 'victim'.
By the time Martin came to court it was even worse. The system wanted to make it clear that it disapproved much more of Martin for killing a burglar than it did of the fact that he was burgled in the first place. Huge pressure was placed on Martin to recant and show remorse for his action. He was kept in prison far longer because he wouldn't.
No parallel effort was made to make burglar Brendan Fearon do the same, though he was almost as responsible for the death of Fred Barras as was Martin. In fact, the prison system couldn't spit him out fast enough and - despite Mr Blunkett's bluster and demands for explanations - the Home Secretary knew perfectly well that this was the case.
Until recently, Britons were allowed to defend their homes and to keep weapons, just as many Americans still do.
Partly because the US is still much more rural than we are, and proper policing is impossible, the old British idea that a burglar loses his rights when he breaks into someone's home is still very much in force. That is why 'hot' burglary, where the homeowner is in his house, is so much rarer there than here.
In Britain now we have the worst of both worlds - police who can't or won't protect us, and no right to protect ourselves. How did this happen?
Some think it was the abolition of the old Common Law rules by the Criminal Law Act in 1967. But actually this wasn't so. In the hands of old-fashioned judges and juries, the 1967 defence of 'reasonable force' would excuse almost any action.
What changed - as in all the other great pillars of British life - were the people and the ideas that drove them. The police chiefs stopped being old military men and were replaced by social science graduates.
Guardian-reading Crown Prosecutors supplanted battle-hardened police prosecution officers. Respectable, middle- aged property-owning jurors in three-piece suits disappeared to make way for slumped, unemployed teenagers in shell suits.
The judges stopped being gnarled, disillusioned veterans of the criminal courts and made way for Sixties idealists who think criminals need help. The law became a favourite profession for people whose views were so wildly Left-wing that they could never win an election, but who wanted political power anyway.
It was a clever move. At least until the Blair victory in 1997, elite liberal lawyers and judges, radical Home Office civil servants progressive' prison governors and Left - wing police chiefs were the most powerful radicals in the country.
Piece by piece, they took control of the law so that it defied common sense and instead served their crackpot, guilt-driven ideas of social justice.
Martin had to be punished severely because he had tried to impose the old conservative law, which has now been abolished. Anyone who was thinking of doing the same thing had to be warned that on this, at least, the law would come down hard.
There was something very symbolic about the way Martin, once convicted, was then seen being led away handcuffed to a female guard, about as politically correct a message as you could send. Was it perhaps deliberate?
And it was only when he claimed to have been sexually abused as a child, the standard liberal excuse for all kinds of misdeeds, that his conviction was reduced from murder to manslaughter.
Interestingly, police officers who shoot suspects rashly or by mistake tend to get let off. It wasn't because he had killed someone that Martin was being punished, but because he had challenged the new liberal monopoly of force.
All that would be bad enough. But what makes it unbearable, and what brought it to boiling point for Martin, is that the police have vanished at the same time.
As police have been withdrawn from foot patrol, police houses and stations in the countryside have been shut down in great numbers.
The combination of weak law and absent constables has hit isolated country dwellers first. They know that if they call for help, none will come in time, whereas the rest of us just suspect that this is so. Rural people and those who rob them have realised - as the rest of the country is just beginning to do --that we are now halfway back to the Dark Ages.
The ridiculous temporary police station now sitting next to Martin's farm does nothing to overcome this since it will sooner or later have to be dismantled, and then where will Martin be?
And it is because Martin is a rather batty and quick-tempered eccentric that he has been the first property holder to discover the real nature of the new law. A more normal, reasonable person would have submitted, or moved away, or simply got rid of any valuable property so he had nothing to steal.
Many of us already adapt and change our lives in this defeatist way. Lots of police forces will give you a printed label to say that there is nothing valuable in your car, for instance.
But as we make these little surrenders, we know in our hearts that we are running away from a foe we really ought to confront, and leaving our children a legacy of lawlessness and chaos.
It may be wise to give in, but it is also shameful. And that is why so many of us are pleased when we see someone fighting back, however foolish it may be for him to do so.
