I think it would be better, if I could protect my own house.
In my country, if you kill a criminal, who just broke into your hose while you were sleeping with your family, and you wake up, and beat the living soul out of him, you go to jail over it. (Let alone killing him.)
In my opinion I might kill him anyway, if I could, and I would go to jail, but I wouldn’t feel as a criminal myself.
My house is my castle, and if someone was mean enough to brake into my house, I just can’t trust him that much to leave him decide to hurt us, or not.
He’s not there because his a nice man, and who knows what else he’s got into his mind.
What would you do?
It’s really hard to predict how you’ll react in an extremely threatening situation until you actually find yourself in one.
Fear can induce people to do things that instinct tells them must not be avoided. Shock or fear can also result in someone simply freezing up and doing nothing at all. In either case, there simply is no self-control. Based on my own experience, I firmly believe there are some situations where self-control is simply not possible. At least not initially. Your reaction(s) may be a reflex similar to involuntarily throwing your hands in front of your face when something dangerous is headed straight for your eyes. How long can you stop yourself from breathing or from blinking your eyes? Sometimes reflex and instinct will and must win out over “self-control”.
I think self-control and/or how you react in a threatening situation is also dependent on whether you’ve ever been in a similar situation before and also on how immediate and extreme you perceive the danger to be.
Before I was attacked, I’d heard, read and learned about all the ways a woman can/should defend herself if attacked. Many, many times! But none of that information came into my head at the moment that I was attacked. “Automatic pilot” took over. My reaction was pure instinct for survival and none of the advice about what you should or shouldn’t do came into my head until my attacker was gone. I never dreamed I’d react in such a way (purely on instinct and no thinking involved at all) until it actually happened.
My attacker was not injured nor was he ever caught by the police. Unfortunately. He certainly had “earned” both. I wouldn’t be surprised if he’d already attacked other people and/or went on to attack more people. He may have even killed someone. On the other hand, maybe the guy was just some “wacko” who got his thrills out of scaring the living daylights out of women. Only one thing was clear at the time: a stranger had come up behind me, wrapped wire around my neck and was attempting to strangle me. Although logic might have “told” me the same thing, it was instinct and only instinct that “said” the guy was trying to kill me and it was instinct that “decided” how to react. Self-control and logic did not come into play for even a fraction of a second.
It would have been ideal if I’d been able to injure or disable my attacker in some way — at least long enough so that the police could have caught him then and there. Instead, I was the only one who got injured. I count myself as fortunate that my injuries weren’t more serious than they were. For all I know, that guy is still running around attacking people today. I’m not exactly sure what might have happened (from a legal point of view) if I had somehow killed the guy in self-defense. But no doubt the legal aspect would have been very difficult and unpleasant - despite what the guy had tried to do to me.
There was a test, they tested the reaction-time of a karate master.
They simulated an attack against him, and he reacted faster than the time of nervous need for taking information up to brains.
He would’ve beaten up his attacker before he actually had realized he’s been attacked.
Under bad circumtances he could kill someone,and he could win on the court,because he can’t be charged for something he doesn’t know about.
Spencer
Amy, if this happened in most US states, I think that if you killed the guy probably nothing would have happened to you, after the investigation was concluded. They’d probably be able to get out his file, get an ID of his picture from other victims, and you’d be off the hook. Other evidence found may also exonerate you, such as wire bruises on your neck and his fingerprints on the wires.
Spencer, in the US you usually don’t go to prison for shooting a break-in artist inside your home, if you had a good reason to think he was a threat – and usually the break-in is taken as reason to think there’s a threat.
However, the police paint this scenario when both the burglar and the homeowner are armed:
The criminal knows he’s not supposed to be in the house, so he doesn’t need time to think.
The homeowner might not be sure it’s a stranger in the house, so he needs time to identify the person and to think about whether to shoot.
Guess who shoots first!
On the other hand, knowledge that there may be guns in a house may, in fact, deter the break-in in the first place. Any criminal will tell you that he avoids robbing houses where he thinks the residents might be armed.
Then there’s the problem that in rare cases someone breaks into a house for some innocuous reason. A man I know heard someone break into his house one night, and when he got downstairs there was a completely unarmed man with a bag of groceries using the stove to cook a meal. He had food but nowhere to cook it, so he just broke into someone’s house and started frying.
