ADF         Calling all burglars     Tweaked on 20/10/08

 It appears that the law allows a householder to use REASONABLE FORCE in confronting an intruder.  The government has been pressed to define "reasonable force" but has resisted this call.  I tend to agree.  Perhaps they had in mind what I would consider to be reasonable in my circumstances.

 I am  turned 82 and have two injured feet.  This means that I would be no match for the average burglar.  Further to this, I do not own a gun.  But I do own a garden fork!  It is one of those light-weight “ladies” ones.  The tines are thin circular pieces of metal, a bit like the ‘pig-sticker’ bayonet used in WW2.   If I were to find a person (generally a young man) in my house in circumstances that gave me the impression that he was  intent on burglary, I would be prepared to use a garden fork on him.  A hard, heavy, thrust to the throat, would, I am quite sure, incapacitate him.  I, myself am not afraid of death, but many of the ways of dying frighten me, and one of these ways would to be impaled by the tine of a garden fork through my windpipe.  "Blood on the carpet" is a term regularly used in a figurative manner, meaning that a political casualty has lost his job.  To use the word literally, would be far more messy, but I am prepared to risk that.  We have a red carpet.

 I think it likely that I would face a Court of Law after carrying out my civic duty of despatching one of the pieces of scum that infests our society.  I would, of course, plead "reasonable force", as I only have three options if I met a burglar in my house. 
Option one would be to call the police, but as experience shows, that is pointless  exercise,  for two reasons:
(1) in places like Nottingham there is just insufficient manpower to go round and I would be offered a Crime Number instead.
(2) by the time the police had arrived (probably the next day) everything would be all over.
Option two would be to let the lout carry on looting the premises.
Option three would be to confront him with the garden fork, and if he showed any sort of fight, to use the implement as I have described above.

 If, at the end of the day, the judge persuaded the jury that I had acted with excessive force, five years bed and board at taxpayer's expense would allow me to catch up on my reading.  And I would have the satisfaction of knowing I had performed my civic duty of ridding society of at least one parasite.  And I might even get my name in the papers!

As regards prison sentences, they are becoming a farce.  Judges are restricted in law to what sentence they can impose, and when they impose a sentence of a number of years, it is almost certain that some anonymous civil servant has the power to reduce it significantly.  My assumption is that they look at the prison budget and see that it is becoming strained by all the comforts that prisoners get these days.  And one way of reducing expenditure is to let some of the louts out early, supposedly on license.  But as the probation service is also cash-strapped, 'license' means they are free to roam as they wish.

 I am a child of the 1930s and remember those days well.  I am a bit unhappy with capital punishment, but it certainly reduced the number of murders to a figure much less than today.  In those days, if a group of villains were contemplating 'a job', an elder members of the gang would frisk the youngsters to see that they weren't carrying “a shooter”.  The principle was that if one of the young fools pulled a pistol and someone got killed, the whole gang would swing as the law treated everyone as a group in any criminal activity.  There is a name for that principle, but I cannot remember it  But it certainly worked.