The insanity of British self-defense laws

The folks at Powerline invited historian and professor Joyce Lee Malcolm to offer some thoughts on the recent riots in England. She responded with a fascinating column detailing the evolution of Britain’s laws in the matter of self-defense, and showing some of the positively absurd outcomes. Try this one on for size:

On June 23 around midnight a masked gang broke down the back door of a home in Salford, in northwestern England. The householder, 59, his son and the son’s girl friend called the police and tried to defend the home and themselves. They managed to stab one of the gang who died of his wounds. When the police arrived they arrested the householder, his son and the son’s girlfriend on suspicion of attempted murder.

So, in England, when you’re startled by armed intruders in your very home, you’ve got to add the possible legal penalties of self-defense to all the other things that you’re trying to sort out in your mind, in a matter of seconds, under intense pressure. Whatever happened to that wise observation written down by Sir Edward Coke in his Institutes of the Laws of England: “A man’s house is his castle and fortress, et domus sua cuique tutissimum refugium”[and each man’s home is his safest refuge]? By shifting the burden of defense from the citizen to the police, all that is really assured is that someone will eventually draw a chalk line around your corpse if you are killed, and make a reasonable effort (one assumes) to try and discover your murderer.

What is also maddening is the notion – no doubt born of the hostility toward private property that goes hand in hand with socialism and its variants – that it’s better to suffer any amount of damage to homes and businesses and livelihoods, to tolerate the incineration of entire blocks, in fact, rather than run the risk that a single hair on the head of a thug be harmed. Why? Why is the life of the criminal sacrosanct, and the life – or liberty – of the homeowner negotiable? Could it be that the pseudo-intellectuals who are making excuses for the rioters, if not out and out defending them, believe that the barbarians are engaged in some form of revolutionary justice against the “exploiters”?

Britain cannot permanently serve as the host for a growing, parasitic, destructive underclass. There is little incentive for anyone to obey the law if those who violate it can do so with a reasonable expectation of impunity. And there is no incentive to work hard and build wealth if producers can be deprived of the fruit of their labor by uncontrollable mobs (or by the taxman acting on their behalf). Britain will either undergo a sea change in its attitude toward the proper relationship between the state and the individual, or it will continue its long death spiral, ultimately becoming a kind of sovereign Detroit.

It is a mercy that the choice is so stark; the high definition of the alternatives may yet permit people of courage and wisdom to find a way to save their country.