I'll have to agree with what Managarmr said on this one. One way or another, you'd still be ending someone's life over a material possession. That's the situation: Jerk tries to steal TV, you shoot jerk. No matter how you reason it, that sentence is exactly how it happens. You'd be ending someone's life because of their determination to steal some damn object.
I can understand the thing about home invasion, but if you react like that, you're letting emotion, and ONLY emotion, control you rather than logic and reasoning. I mean, really. There's a reason why the penalty for burglary isnt automatic death penalty here.
It's not just theft. There's the aspect of intrusion, the incalculable risk to the safety of anyone within the house, and the necessity of ensuring negative consequences for this act of home invasion. There's plenty of more-logical-than-emotional reasons for not just hiding and letting oneself be robbed:
- The house may not contain any useful hiding space
- The burglar might find you yet, and react violently
- The burglar might in fact not be a thief but a rapist/serial killer/crazy person
- Maybe you can't afford to be robbed
- If he gets away, he will rob and possibly endanger others
- If he gets away, it will - broadly speaking - incentivize further break-ins by others
- Maybe you just personally do not tolerate such violations of your home.
- Maybe you don't trust the police/insurance company/society/the state to clean up the mess for you.
On the other hand, maybe the matter of "Home" as a personal and safe space does not matter as much to you as it does to others. Which is fine.
At least understand though that not everyone sees home invasion the way you do. I know my own family well enough to know that they would think the way I do on this; the only chance any criminal would die upon entering THIS house is if it was a kill-or-be-killed situation. But for a simple burglar as is being discussed here? Ye gods, no. Let them take the stupid TV if they want it that badly. As with the braindead moron that broke into my car, they'd get caught sooner or later, and before long, we'd be seeing them rotting in jail for awhile. Seems a fitting punishment to me; they want to break into a home so much? How about putting them in a home they cant break OUT of for awhile? Possibly a LONG while.
As long as it's just a clean theft with no encounter, nothing of personal value was stolen, the insurance company pays up, and the police gets the perp, sure - then all went according to plan. You trust that plan more than I do, it seems, and if that works out for you then I have no problem with it. But you also understand that others have a different view on the issue, yes? Do you deny us all legitimacy in our way of thinking?
And even if they did get away with it... it's just a damn TV (or whatever). And then, either way, we'd be able to examine what is, in the end, partly OUR mistake: our house should have been more secure to begin with, to simply prevent that from happening. In the future, it would be.
Learning from one's mistakes is always appropriate, but burglar-proofing a house is pretty difficult.
Ah, you misjudge me though.
I trust basically.... nothing. I expect screwups and general idiocy from most people (this should be apparent by now), and this includes those in charge. Or those in any type of company anywhere. So... I tend to come up with my own solutions. Combined with general paranoia, these solutions tend to be unusual. For example, considering the possibility of someone actually breaking in to steal things...
My credit card, for instance? Something that'd be very bad to have stolen? I dont keep it anywhere NORMAL. Keeping a very important object like that in a place that a burglar would actually look in seems damn silly to me. They tend to look inside of drawers, cabinets, for example. People keep things inside of furniture. Or on furniture. I'd put it in the damn fuse box in the basement before I'd put it in one of those, but even then... that's still not enough. Back at my mom's house, which is a very old place, I used to take things like that and stick them IN THE WALLS. Being an old, old house, there were spots, typically in awkward locations, where holes like that would be (as a result, tend to get alot of insects and things in there... ah, those huge centipedes in particular...). What kind of burglar focuses on looking for tiny random holes in walls (which, typically, are behind things, due to a rather silly amount of furniture in that house). And those are just examples that come to mind as I type this. Other things are in other very bizarre locations, while other objects, much less important to me (like TVs or whatever) tempt from obvious locations. I kept some stuff inside a very obviously broken modem, once. Or there was the time I kept money inside what I always refer to as the "cord ball". A gigantic mass of random cables in the shape of a ball (seroiusly, it's ENORMOUS; there's an entire keyboard completely wedged inside it so you cant even see it.... among other things; no, I dont know how it formed. I'm pretty sure there's an entire Power Glove assemblage inside it too). The thing is very heavy and very obviously formed entirely of useless stuff (which is impossible to extract without silly amounts of time being spent). With a bit of effort, I could get my arm into it.... so I kept things in there.
That type of thinking can make it VERY difficult for anyone to find important objects, but UNIMPORTANT objects that are yet theoretically worth something (but also almost always heavy) tempt from other places. Dont get me wrong, it'd suck to lose a TV or maybe the iPad or whatever; in my case I can just go get another one without trouble, but if I didn't have the money for it... oh well. It's not THAT damn important. Hardly important enough to kill someone over. I'd just do without for awhile and save up for a new one. And the cops would either catch the guy, or not.
That other people dont think to do things like this is... certainly not my problem. But my point is, there's always additional things that can be done.... if you can think them up. Gotta really get CREATIVE to truly accomplish things like that. And I can get alot more creative (and alot more weird) than those ideas above. Were my living situation different than it is... I'd still be coming up with stuff like that, but it'd be accomplished differently.
In addition, not much money is actually kept in the house. Even if someone were to come and manage to actually find all of what's here... they'd get maybe $60, which I dont care about one bit (and before someone says "well if you were poor maybe 60 would be alot", I'd say "if we were poor, we'd just keep way less in here, and I'd get even more bizarre about hiding it"). Perhaps more if they wanted to take the ridiculous amount of time to gather the random change that's scattered around my room (I hate dealing with coins like pennies and such so they just end up everywhere).
And again, that's just the start. There's.... way more that can be done. Those are just examples.
Rather than just thinking "OMG GUN" and going BANG. If it ever came down to doing THAT to protect my stuff... it'd only mean that I've run out of ideas. Not how others would view it of course, but I have my own unique (and often odd) standards that I set for myself. I used to use this same sort of thinking to deal with bullies back in highschool (and they were VERY numerous; damn stupid school, that). By senior year, none of them were dumb enough to get in my way... but I *never* used violence or broke any rules. Why do that, when I could get creative instead? That's alot more fun anyway.
