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  #41  
Old 10-03-2005, 09:44 AM
etgryphon etgryphon is offline
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Default Re: A Fine Use Of A Firearm

Here is the Texas statute:

SUBCHAPTER D. PROTECTION OF PROPERTY



§ 9.41. PROTECTION OF ONE'S OWN PROPERTY. (a) A person
in lawful possession of land or tangible, movable property is
justified in using force against another when and to the degree the
actor reasonably believes the force is immediately necessary to
prevent or terminate the other's trespass on the land or unlawful
interference with the property.
(b) A person unlawfully dispossessed of land or tangible,
movable property by another is justified in using force against the
other when and to the degree the actor reasonably believes the force
is immediately necessary to reenter the land or recover the
property if the actor uses the force immediately or in fresh pursuit
after the dispossession and:
(1) the actor reasonably believes the other had no
claim of right when he dispossessed the actor; or
(2) the other accomplished the dispossession by using
force, threat, or fraud against the actor.

Acts 1973, 63rd Leg., p. 883, ch. 399, § 1, eff. Jan. 1, 1974.
Amended by Acts 1993, 73rd Leg., ch. 900, § 1.01, eff. Sept. 1,
1994.


§ 9.42. DEADLY FORCE TO PROTECT PROPERTY. A person is
justified in using deadly force against another to protect land or
tangible, movable property:
(1) if he would be justified in using force against the
other under Section 9.41; and
(2) when and to the degree he reasonably believes the
deadly force is immediately necessary:
(A) to prevent the other's imminent commission of
arson, burglary, robbery, aggravated robbery, theft during the
nighttime, or criminal mischief during the nighttime; or
(B) to prevent the other who is fleeing
immediately after committing burglary, robbery, aggravated
robbery, or theft during the nighttime from escaping with the
property; and
(3) he reasonably believes that:
(A) the land or property cannot be protected or
recovered by any other means; or
(B) the use of force other than deadly force to
protect or recover the land or property would expose the actor or
another to a substantial risk of death or serious bodily injury.

Acts 1973, 63rd Leg., p. 883, ch. 399, § 1, eff. Jan. 1, 1974.
Amended by Acts 1993, 73rd Leg., ch. 900, § 1.01, eff. Sept. 1,
1994.

So it appears that Danny Boy was within his rights to my reading of the law. Even by going back to the garage. A gun-control jury might see it another way. It appears that he wasn't charged so I think he was in good shape. He showed restraint by not killing the perp.

Pragmatically, I think it was stupid and he should have had a better gun than a .22 rifle.

-Gryph
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  #42  
Old 10-03-2005, 01:17 PM
benfranklin benfranklin is offline
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Posts: 155
Default Re: A Fine Use Of A Firearm

Don't mess with Texas [img]/images/graemlins/grin.gif[/img]

You gotta love a place where you can kill someone to prevent

[ QUOTE ]
criminal mischief during the nighttime

[/ QUOTE ]

Does that include loud stereos and bickering neighbors [img]/images/graemlins/confused.gif[/img]
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  #43  
Old 10-03-2005, 01:32 PM
tolbiny tolbiny is offline
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Posts: 52
Default Re: A Fine Use Of A Firearm

I'm a goddamn bleeding heart liberal gun control dumb [censored] - nad if some guy comes at me with a knife and i have a gun i am killing his ass. No shots to the leg/arm. That dude is as dead as i can make him.

I pretty much agree with benfranklin's post. If you are going to use a gun in home defense- use an appropriate one. Don't go after people, but shoot to kill if it comes down to that.
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  #44  
Old 10-03-2005, 02:47 PM
adios adios is offline
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Posts: 2,298
Default Re: A Fine Use Of A Firearm

Actually crime rates in the U.S. have fallen and it is correlated to the increased number of incarcerations.

Allow me to quote from a recent op ed piece in the WSJ regarding the underclass in the U.S.

The underclass has been growing. The crime rate has been dropping for 13 years. But the proportion of young men who grow up unsocialized and who, given the opportunity, commit crimes, has not.

A rough operational measure of criminality is the percentage of the population under correctional supervision. This is less sensitive to changes in correctional fashion than imprisonment rates, since people convicted of a crime get some sort of correctional supervision regardless of the political climate. When Ronald Reagan took office, 0.9% of the population was under correctional supervision. That figure has continued to rise. When crime began to fall in 1992, it stood at 1.9%. In 2003 it was 2.4%. Crime has dropped, but criminality has continued to rise.

This doesn't matter to the middle and upper classes, because we figured out how to deal with it. Partly we created enclaves where criminals have a harder time getting at us, and instead must be content with preying on their own neighbors. But mainly we locked 'em up, a radical change from the 1960s and 1970s. Consider this statistic: The ratio of prisoners to crimes that prevailed when Ronald Reagan took office, applied to the number of crimes reported in 2003, corresponds to a prison population of 490,000. The actual prison population in 2003 was 2,086,000, a difference of 1.6 million. If you doubt that criminality has increased, imagine the crime rate tomorrow if today we released 1.6 million people from our jails and prisons.


I think the article makes an interesting point about the distinction between criminality and crime rates. The number of criminals is rising in the U.S. according to the author even though the crime rate is falling. The U.S. is simply locking up more criminals so that they don't have the opportunity to commit more crimes. The old liberal argument regarding promoting rehabilitation and not incarceration seems to fit here. Also you've made the point about changing the distribution of incomes such that it the top earners redistribute more of their income to the lower wage earners leads to fewer criminals more or less. Not sure what the breakdown is regarding the U.S. prison population as to what crimes they commit is though. I'll see what I can do to find out.

If interested the entire article:

The Hallmark of the Underclass

By CHARLES MURRAY
September 29, 2005; Page A18

Watching the courage of ordinary low-income people as they deal with the aftermath of Katrina and Rita, it is hard to decide which politicians are more contemptible -- Democrats who are rediscovering poverty and blaming it on George W. Bush, or Republicans who are rediscovering poverty and claiming that the government can fix it. Both sides are unwilling to face reality: We haven't rediscovered poverty, we have rediscovered the underclass; the underclass has been growing during all the years that people were ignoring it, including the Clinton years; and the programs politicians tout as solutions are a mismatch for the people who constitute the problem.

* * *
We have rediscovered the underclass. Newspapers and television understandably prefer to feature low-income people who are trying hard -- the middle-aged man working two jobs, the mother worrying about how to get her children into school in a strange city. These people are rightly the objects of an outpouring of help from around the country, but their troubles are relatively easy to resolve. Tell the man where a job is, and he will take it. Tell the mother where a school is, and she will get her children into it. Other images show us the face of the hard problem: those of the looters and thugs, and those of inert women doing nothing to help themselves or their children. They are the underclass.

We in the better parts of town haven't had to deal with the underclass for many years, having successfully erected screens that keep them from troubling us. We no longer have to send our children to school with their children. Except in the most progressive cities, the homeless have been taken off the streets. And most importantly, we have dealt with crime. This has led to a curious paradox: falling crime and a growing underclass.

The underclass has been growing. The crime rate has been dropping for 13 years. But the proportion of young men who grow up unsocialized and who, given the opportunity, commit crimes, has not.

A rough operational measure of criminality is the percentage of the population under correctional supervision. This is less sensitive to changes in correctional fashion than imprisonment rates, since people convicted of a crime get some sort of correctional supervision regardless of the political climate. When Ronald Reagan took office, 0.9% of the population was under correctional supervision. That figure has continued to rise. When crime began to fall in 1992, it stood at 1.9%. In 2003 it was 2.4%. Crime has dropped, but criminality has continued to rise.

This doesn't matter to the middle and upper classes, because we figured out how to deal with it. Partly we created enclaves where criminals have a harder time getting at us, and instead must be content with preying on their own neighbors. But mainly we locked 'em up, a radical change from the 1960s and 1970s. Consider this statistic: The ratio of prisoners to crimes that prevailed when Ronald Reagan took office, applied to the number of crimes reported in 2003, corresponds to a prison population of 490,000. The actual prison population in 2003 was 2,086,000, a difference of 1.6 million. If you doubt that criminality has increased, imagine the crime rate tomorrow if today we released 1.6 million people from our jails and prisons.

* * *
Criminality is the most extreme manifestation of the unsocialized young male. Another is the proportion of young males who choose not to work. Among black males ages 20-24, for example, the percentage who were not working or looking for work when the first numbers were gathered in 1954 was 9%. That figure grew during the 1960s and 1970s, stabilizing at around 20% during the 1980s. The proportion rose again, reaching 30% in 1999, a year when employers were frantically seeking workers for every level of job. The dropout rate among young white males is lower, but has been increasing faster than among blacks.

These increases are not explained by changes in college enrollment or any other benign cause. Large numbers of healthy young men, at ages when labor force participation used to be close to universal, have dropped out. Remember that these numbers ignore young males already in prison. Include them in the calculation, and the evidence of the deteriorating socialization of young males, concentrated in low income groups, is overwhelming.

Why has the proportion of unsocialized young males risen so relentlessly? In large part, I would argue, because the proportion of young males who have grown up without fathers has also risen relentlessly. The indicator here is the illegitimacy ratio -- the percentage of live births that occur to single women. It was a minuscule 4% in the early 1950s, and it has risen substantially in every subsequent decade. The ratio reached the 25% milestone in 1988 and the 33% milestone in 1999. As of 2003, the figure was 35% -- of all births, including whites. The black illegitimacy ratio in 2003 was 68%. By way of comparison: The illegitimacy ratio that caused Daniel Patrick Moynihan to proclaim the breakdown of the black family in the early 1960s was 24%.

But illegitimacy is now common throughout the population, right? No, it is heavily concentrated in low-income groups. Perhaps illegitimacy isn't as bad as we used to think it was? No, during the last decade the evidence about the problems caused by illegitimacy has grown stronger. What about all the good news about falling teenage births? About plunging welfare rolls? Both trends are welcome, but neither has anything to do with the proportion of children being born and raised without fathers, and that proportion is the indicator that predicts the size of the underclass in the next generation.

The government hasn't a clue. Versions of every program being proposed in the aftermath of Katrina have been tried before and evaluated. We already know that the programs are mismatched with the characteristics of the underclass. Job training? Unemployment in the underclass is not caused by lack of jobs or of job skills, but by the inability to get up every morning and go to work. A homesteading act? The lack of home ownership is not caused by the inability to save money from meager earnings, but because the concept of thrift is alien. You name it, we've tried it. It doesn't work with the underclass.

Perhaps the programs now being proposed by the administration will help ordinary poor people whose socialization is just fine and need nothing more than a chance. It is comforting to think so, but past experience with similar programs does not give reason for optimism -- it is hard to exaggerate how ineffectually they have been administered. In any case, poor people who are not part of the underclass seldom need help to get out of poverty. Despite the exceptions that get the newspaper ink, the statistical reality is that people who get into the American job market and stay there seldom remain poor unless they do something self-destructive. And behaving self-destructively is the hallmark of the underclass.

* * *
Hurricane Katrina temporarily blew away the screens that we have erected to keep the underclass out of sight and out of mind. We are now to be treated to a flurry of government efforts from politicians who are shocked, shocked, by what they saw. What comes next is depressingly predictable. Five years from now, the official evaluations will report that there were no statistically significant differences between the subsequent lives of people who got the government help and the lives of people in a control group. Newspapers will not carry that story, because no one will be interested any longer. No one will be interested because we will have long since replaced the screens, and long since forgotten.

Mr. Murray, W.H. Brady Scholar at the American Enterprise Institute, is the author, most recently, of "Human Accomplishment" (HarperCollins, 2003).
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  #45  
Old 10-03-2005, 03:02 PM
etgryphon etgryphon is offline
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Join Date: Mar 2004
Posts: 0
Default Re: A Fine Use Of A Firearm

[ QUOTE ]
Don't mess with Texas [img]/images/graemlins/grin.gif[/img]

You gotta love a place where you can kill someone to prevent

[ QUOTE ]
criminal mischief during the nighttime

[/ QUOTE ]

Does that include loud stereos and bickering neighbors [img]/images/graemlins/confused.gif[/img]

[/ QUOTE ]

On your property? ... hmmmmm.....

[img]/images/graemlins/grin.gif[/img]

-Gryph
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  #46  
Old 10-04-2005, 07:21 PM
Ray Zee Ray Zee is offline
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Location: montana usa
Posts: 2,043
Default Re: A Fine Use Of A Firearm

when you are being attacked in your own home you cant always stop and make the most rational decision on how to proceed. you may end up doing just what this guy did and that was to finish off the attack once he had the upper hand. who knows if he stayed in the house the guy would come in with a gun and he may lose the battle. it is his house and why should he have to risk getting killed by waiting inside while someone that previously attacked him is in the garage.
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  #47  
Old 10-04-2005, 11:12 PM
renodoc renodoc is offline
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Default Re: A Fine Use Of A Firearm

I think I prefer the Benelli, but the Mossberg is a fine choice.

Previous thread
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  #48  
Old 10-05-2005, 10:10 AM
jaxmike jaxmike is offline
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Posts: 636
Default Re: A Fine Use Of A Firearm

[ QUOTE ]
[ QUOTE ]
[ QUOTE ]

Of course, the US system of incarcerating by far the highest proportion of people in the developed world has certainly kept crime levels low.


[/ QUOTE ]

See, you understand the problem(s) so well. To me, that can only mean you'd be so much better at doing what needs to be done. Have you made that phone call yet? C'mon, fella. Time's a-wastin'.

[img]/images/graemlins/grin.gif[/img]

[/ QUOTE ]


So you have no response to the point that (ridiculously) high US incarceration rates have not led to low levels of crime? Figures.

[/ QUOTE ]


Last I checked crime levels are the lowest in 30 years.
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  #49  
Old 10-05-2005, 12:24 PM
adios adios is offline
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Default Re: A Fine Use Of A Firearm

Yep crime rates are down but are there less criminals per capita? Crime rates and the rates of detention are inversely correlated i.e. as the crime rate has fallen incarcerations have increased. The problem with this is that if the number of criminals continues to rise then more and more people will be incarcerated and I presume there's some limit on how many we can incarcerate. If you haven't done so please read my post in response to nicky, you might find it interesting in that it discusses criminality rates versus crime rates with the underclass.
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