Quote Originally Posted by Crotalus View Post
... I am always shocked when I hear of someone in England going to jail for defending his family with a gun against a home invasion attack.

How can the British people let their courts do this without a riot?
I got into an internet discussion with a bunch of people about this a few months ago (many of the participants were Brits, and one was in law enforcement). Apparently it's not so illegal in the UK as the sensationalist press makes it out to be. It is legal to defend oneself with a legally owned firearm in the case of a home robbery. They don't have a clear-cut "castle doctrine" there, so there's some ambiguity there. Of course, ambiguity in the law always puts the citizen at the mercy of the state, which undermines a free society. Also, the right to keep and bear arms is given very short shrift in jolly olde England, which by itself is the real problem. And the ACTUAL reason for that right being limited was to keep the commoners from killing the Royals. But hey, that's always been the real motive behind gun control. It started here in the states right after the Civil War. Them uppity blacks were shooting back at the Klansmen and not getting lynched the way they were supposed to. Based on my experience, every liberal gun-grabber is really just a closet racist.

But, I think the case you may be referring to involved the homeowner shooting at a fleeing perpetrator, though I'm not certain. The actual facts in the more famous and sensationalized cases have been groomed to maximize public outrage. The ones I've looked into haven't been such outrageous miscarriages of justice, as the tabloids painted them.