Quote:
Originally Posted by Abysmal
bump.
If you think the castle doctrine is ******ed per se, there's not much point having a discussion with you about it, which is why I didn't respond. But since you asked so nicely, I'll indulge with one more post.
The idea of the castle doctrine is that shooter doesn't know whether the person he thinks is an intruder is armed or not, and establishes a presumption on that basis. Whether or not you like it, it's the law in somewhere around half the states IIRC. That law aside, my own personal conduct (to the extent it is either interesting or relevant) is that I shouldn't be pulling the trigger unless I can ascertain positively that the intruder is hostile. That's a judgment of my own apart from what the law says I may be entitled to do if I live in Texas or other CD states. As I noted, I'd have a fair degree of trust in my daughter to get this one right, but she knows very well that I'm not the sort of hypercontrolling parent who can't imagine his precious snowflake ever having a boyfriend, which goes to the point of consequence I raised earlier. Is her answer enough to be positively sure of the intruder's hostile intent?
Maybe, maybe not. It's ridiculously situation-dependent, so I'm in no way wedded to the questions I suggested earlier or any other particular method; just by way of example, I'd think that my daughter would be screaming at the top of her lungs if there were a hostile intruder -- so if she's not screaming, I'd be more likely to include the intruder is friendly. But that may not be so if he has her under threat at the time, etc. etc. etc.
If I believe there's an intruder in my home, I have no trouble putting whoever it is under gunpoint in order to determine the situation -- assuming for discussion only, of course, that I have a gun in my house. Understand also the utter seriousness of this observation: shooting my daughter's boyfriend would cause permanent fractures almost regardless of other circumstance, and so the consequence of a mistake reverberate in all kinds of other awful directions. It's not the sort of macho asserting-my-rights-just-because-I-can mentality that so many gun control advocates seem to think gun owners have.
Does that address your question, or am I going to get more conclusory sanctimony?