Man Burgled After Being Banned From Using Giant Ballista 12
A man who had a 30ft dung-firing ballista on his land to deter intruders has been burgled after police told him that it would be illegal for him to use it. Joe Weston-Webb, a former traveling showman who also owns a human cannon and an "exploding coffin," decided to use the siege weapon to scare off intruders after a series of break-ins and an arson attack last year. He fixed the old ballista and equipped it to fire bags of chicken droppings at intruders if an alarm was triggered. Nottinghamshire Police put an end to his defense plan when they told him that using the giant catapult would be illegal as it did not constitute "reasonable force." Burglars broke into his workshop this week and stole or damaged £10,000 worth of goods and equipment. "It is ridiculous that we are in this situation now in which we can't defend ourselves," Joe said. I don't want to live in a world where an honest, hard-working man can't use a classical Roman weapon of mass destruction to defend himself.
I'm all for defending one's property, but... (Score:1)
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Actually, using a booby trap to capture the next door neighbour's punk ass 12 year old kid from stealing my stuff sounds like a real good idea. Now where did I put that bear trap?
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Sure you do. It will hit someone who has no right to be on your property. Punk kid, rapist, burglar all the same. On my property without my permission, there will be trouble.
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She'll be covered in chicken shit, what rapist would want to fool with that? He would be doing a pubic service.
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Say my car breaks down on the side of a road, next to farmer's field. I see a farmhouse on the other side of that field, maybe half a mile away, so I decide to cross the field by foot in order to reach the house, so I can ask the owner if I can call a towtruck.
If the right to property were paramount and sacred, then the farmer would, at that point, be perfectly within his rights to kill me at a distance with a high-powered rifle. But this would be completely unreasonable. Any property owner who did this
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Stay on the road and follow the driveway if you want to approach my abode. In many states the situation you described is completely legal. You have no right to be on my property, if I decide to permit you then it is under the terms I choose. One of those terms is that you don't try to sneak up by the back door. I don't care the situation, if it really is that much of an emergency then you should be running across screaming your head off. That changes the situation quite a bit.
An Man? (Score:2)