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this post was submitted on 31 Aug 2023
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Under those circumstances, I don't blame the homeowner for using a gun to defend himself and the other female resident. This guy was literally breaking into their home. If it had been me, I would have been terrified and very thankful to have a gun on hand for defense. I'm sure a lot of people here will protest to the shooting, but I would urge them to really think about what they would have done in such a situation. I don't know what Donofrio's reasons were for trying to break into the home, but they hardly matter; the fact is, he did try, and the residents of the home had every reason to think they were in danger. If we had multi-shot stun guns that could reliably incapacitate an intruder, I'd say he should have used that rather than a lethal weapon, but current stun guns aren't that reliable and only fire once before needing to be reloaded. That a life was lost is sad, but I agree that no criminal charges should be filed in this instance. However, I'm not saying that I entirely agree with the Castle doctrine on which this is based, as I'm not intimately familiar with it, but the general notion of being able to use lethal force to defend oneself against a home intruder I do agree with on principle.
I do not agree with the castle doctrine. It's too easily used to justify lethal force when retreat is an option, however self-defense is a valid justification and from the description given I think that's completely plausible. An unknown person breaking the glass and potentially armed could be a threat. It sucks that a guy who possibly did nothing wrong has to defend himself in an investigation, but we should have a high bar on lethal actions for civilians and cops (the standard should be higher for cops).
That's a valid statement.
It also demonstrates a wider problem: gun proliferation is so incredibly high that the default assumption is always going to be "that person might have a gun," and this will always prompt a much lowered threshold to use one's own gun in return.
Exactly this. I am from Central Europe and if someone tried to break into my home, I wouldnt assume by ~~Renault~~ default that they have a weapon. Because burglars here aren't armed.
Do Renaults often figure into your thinking? ;)
Oh shit
And are your rapists armed?
According to most stories in the newspapers, no.
Then an unarmed intruder can still be a serious threat.
No disagreement. I'm a commie pinko by American standards, which is to say slightly left by European standards. I support gun regulation but it won't solve the proliferation until we face up to this weird fetishization of guns we have.
It doesn't really matter if they have a gun or not from the perspective of someone who's home is being broken into. Any physical violence is dangerous and can result in death. People breaking into homes aren't getting shot because they "might have a gun". They're getting shot because it's unreasonable to expect a victim to accept any further risk by trying to talk the aggressor down or subdue them some other way once they've broken in.
You know that guns aren't the only way to hurt people, right? People can be killed quite easily
No, I did not know that.
That's amazing.
I can’t tell, did they announce at all or just fired the moment he broke the window??
Surely this could have been avoided by asking questions first…. What the fuck
Idk man, I'm liberal as hell and even I have problems with that line of logic. Man's smashing up their house, putting myself in the invadees shoes I'd be worried about warning the home invader(s) and making them use their weapons.
I'm not saying I think everything is fine and dandy in this situation, mfs are using guns way to much in America. But since the occupants had a gun for self defense AND their home was being broken into, I find it hard to blame them for defending themselves.
Same, progressive who believes people have the right to defend their house once someone is clearly trying to force their way in.
I'm uncomfortable with that loophole only because of you'll recall, several years back a black lady knocked on a stranger's for because her car broke down in front of that house and got ventilated without discussion.
That's wack as shit, and I have to wonder how police would determine a frame-up if that particular trashbag had broken the window to make it seem like the lady was breaking in.
Only solution that comes to mind is a ring-like device which only records to local storage.
Absolutely, I think there should be certain objective things that have to happen before "fearing for your life" is a valid defence.
Someone breaking your window after trying to enter forcefully through your door is where I start thinking it's okay to use a deadly weapon to defend yourself.
Someone knocking on your door (regardless of the time of day) is not a reasonable situation to fear for your life, at least to the extent where you attack the person.
Could have been avoided? Maybe. But at some point the onus is on the person breaking into your house to...idk, not do that? Like there's a spectrum between what you can do, what you should do and what you have to do and asking some questions first is certainly something you can do. Maybe even something you should do, but protecting your family from someone who is breaking into your house is something you have to do. This isn't Ralph Yarl who got popped twice for standing on the porch, or those girls who were still in the car and backing out of someone's driveway when they got clipped. Dude tried to break into the house by kicking the door in, that didn't work, so he tried a different way of breaking into the house which would have worked had he been left to it.
I'm usually pretty firmly against preemptive violence as self defense but this seems rather cut and dry to me. I would have done the exact same thing the homeowner did here, and I think that it's doubly good that the homeowner wasn't charged.
I mean I'm not in the camp of thinking the homeowners were necessarily in the wrong, but have you seriously never heard of someone breaking their own window to get back into their own property when they were locked out? Also, yea it is possible to communicate with a blackout drunk person, or at least try to warn them.
I dont know the whole situation, but if they didn't make any effort to communicate or warn the guy before they shot him, I do think that's cold hearted. If they did try to communicate and were ignored, then I think they didn't do anything wrong.
Legally speaking they are obviously in the clear. I just dont know if this was acceptable from a moral perspective to me without knowing the full details yet.
I'm upvoting you simply because I think you're debating in good faith and even though I don't agree with you, I think you're adding something real to the conversation.
While I do think the situation would likely have ended better if the homeowner had tried to engage the invader in reasonable conversation before pulling the trigger, I don't think he should be legally required to do so. Remember: it was the home invader's actions that caused this whole situation. People keep winging about the homeowner's responsibility to take action to *protect *the invader of his home, but no one is acknowledging that the invader could have prevented all of this by simply not invading the home. People who behave this way have problems, but they're virtually always not the people they are harming with their actions. They need help, surely, but they also need to be isolated from the general population and punished for the harm they do to others.
And for those who chime in to object to the fact that I said people should be punished for their crimes, just know that I'm all for prison reforms that make prisons safer and help people begin new lives after they've served their time, but that I ABSOLUTELY FUCKING DEMAND they serve their fucking time. I have no use for people that can't wrap their pathetic brains around the notion that crime and punishment are inextricably linked. It's not about vengeance. The entire reason we have a justice system is so that we can punish criminals in a more objective, humane way than victims can with their tendency towards revenge rather than justice.
I completely agree with you that there should be no legal requirement to warn an intruder before utilizing self defense. I just feel that its nuanced, and in this particular case, if I was the homeowner I would be screaming my head off warning the intruder that they are about to die in not such a polite way. I just would feel morally obligated to do everything I could to divert the situation, and I would hope most others would do the same before making the decision to end a life.
The guy at the door was not an immediate threat to life or limb, save his own. Firing a gun was not justified without threat, IMO. But I guess in the USA you can murder people to save your property (not your life).
How much more "immediate" do you need? A complete stranger is trying to break into your home to do god knows what is the epitome of a clear and immediate danger to me.
What would you have done? Opened the door and welcomed them in?
So declare your firearm and say fuck off or I will shoot, don’t just shoot. As a gun owner myself I would NEVER fire without trying to give verbal commands. I couldn’t see anywhere in the article any reference to discussion between the door window breaking and firing.
What the hell??
Easy enough to say when you're not in that situation with your nerves running high.
Opening the door may have saved everyone in this case.
Did they try to communicate with the person? Look through the widow to see whether the person is armed? Flee? Get a non lethal weapon like a bat, knife, pepper spray? Hide? There was time for the home owner to go get a gun before the window broke. I assume, since this is USA, that it was already loaded (😂) so I'm sure it didn't take too long, but did they try ANY of those things? Unlikely, and that's unfortunate.
Wow you're telling me the tidal wave of liberal shitposting on Reddit was wrong about this and they should have waited for the actual facts? I don't believe it!!
I agree with you, I do. It should be legal to protect your property. The problem is when you have a gun, everything looks like a shooting. If you didn't have a gun, how would you handle the situation? You could leave. You could lock yourself in an interior room and wait for the cops. You could fight them Kevin style. All of those options, at the end of the day, would give you a better chance of not killing somebody.
It's not about protection of property to me. I don't care about that. I care about people having the right to use all reasonable options for defending themselves against violent attackers. And to your point, might this person's death have been avoided if the occupants of the home had fled or hid somewhere? Certainly. But should they be legally required to do so? No, not in my opinion. Reason being, I don't think the impetus should be on victims to take their attackers' well-being into account when it's the attackers that are creating the problem in the first place. Telling a person who is scared for their life that they need to fight the impulse coming from their amygdala to fight back against a violent attacker is totally unreasonable. If a person is coming at me with their fists and I have a gun, I don't think I should have to refrain from firing my weapon and take the hits my attacker is throwing, just to make sure he doesn't die. What if I die? What if I lose an eye or get my face scarred up? What if he takes my gun and shoots me? No. No, fuck that, if someone is attacking me, they've given me permission to defend myself in whatever way seems reasonable to me, and I'm not risking my own life or even just serious injury because someone else has anger management problems. They're the problem; they're the threat to society; if they die, yeah that sucks, but it's their fucking fault, not mine for defending myself against their violent behavior.
I'm so sick of people having all this empathy for violent criminals, and way too little for their victims. You want to tell other people to react in a calm, collected, pacifist manner when they're being attacked, to risk their own lives and wellbeing for the sake of their attacker's? Tell you what, you get yourself attacked somehow when you're not expecting it and demonstrate how cool, calm, and pacifist you are under fire; you show the rest of us how easy that is. You do that, and maybe I'll consider what you have to say, but until then, you're just a hand-wringing, pearl-clutching bystander who has their priorities messed up and doesn't know what the fuck they're talking about.
Devil's advocate: if you have a lethal weapon, you should have training to control your fear impulses.
That's fine but where's the line. If someone pulls up in your driveway, is it OK to shoot them? If they knock on your door? What if you have an argument and they throw popcorn at you? The last one was deemed reasonable in Florida. If you have a legitimate conflict with someone, is it just a matter of who kills who first? If someone breaks into your home, this case, he broke the glass and was trying to open the door. Can you shoot them? Do you need to warn them first? What if they were just outside walking around creepily. Is it OK to kill them? Can i provoke someone then when thry come at me, can i kill them? Where's the line? This is a real question because right now the rules don't make sense.
Violence is the line.
Does that include popcorn?
Of course not.
That's good to hear. Unfortunately, the courts make the issue confusing.