[117674] in Cypherpunks
Fwd: TO CATCH A THIEF, HERE AND ABROAD
daemon@ATHENA.MIT.EDU (Jean-Francois Avon)
Wed Sep 8 18:23:24 1999
Message-Id: <199909082144.RAA29925@cti06.citenet.net>
From: "Jean-Francois Avon" <jf_avon@citenet.net>
To: "QuackGrass.com" <qgrass@quackgrass.com>,
"Paul Richards' - Offshore Haven Newsletter" <office@offshorehaven.nu>,
"Patriot on Guard" <kyburz@telusplanet.net>,
"N. King at Standup New-Zealand" <standupnz@clear.net.nz>,
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"eZola@LFCity.com" <eZola@LFCity.com>,
"Canada Protest Page" <tpg@witty.com>,
"Sporting Shooters Association of Australia" <Sporting.Shooters.Association@adelaide.on.net>,
"Cypherpunks" <cypherpunks@toad.com>
Date: Wed, 08 Sep 1999 17:45:09 -0400
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Reply-To: "Jean-Francois Avon" <jf_avon@citenet.net>
Enjoy this jalapeno-peppered post.
Ciao
jfa
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>From: "Breitkreuz, Garry - Assistant 1" <Breitkreuz.G@parl.gc.ca>
>Subject: TO CATCH A THIEF, HERE AND ABROAD
>Date: Wed, 8 Sep 1999 15:58:20 -0400
> Check this :
>
>
> Page URL:
> http://www.nationalpost.com/commentary.asp?s2=columnists&s3=steyn
>
>
> Monday, September 06, 1999
>
> To catch a thief, here and abroad
>
> Mark Steyn
> National Post
>
> George MacFarlane, the Fredericton shopkeeper who discharged his shotgun at
> departing thieves, should count himself lucky. Found guilty of careless
> use of a firearm, he's been ordered to take an "anger-management" course
> (though, in truth, he seems to manage his anger with an impressively cool
> efficiency). In England, by contrast, a Norfolk farmer who did exactly as
> Mr. MacFarlane did in exactly the same circumstances (he'd suffered
> repeated
> break-ins) now finds himself charged with murder. His victim, a teenage
> burglar from Nottingham who practised his profession assiduously
> throughout the English Midlands and East Anglia, was described by his
> tearful mum as a "lovable rogue" with many redeeming qualities: for
> example,
> "he would never steal from the family."
>
> Though different in degree, both prosecutions reflect the long-held
> principle that the Crown should have a monopoly on law enforcement: Relax,
> goes
> the argument; the Mounties always they get their man -- i.e., leave it to
> the professionals. But in practice, in both Canada and Britain, the
> professionals
> find it easier to get you instead.
>
> As someone who divides his time (as the book jackets say) between Canada,
> Britain and the United States, I'm naturally struck by the striking
> philosophical difference in this area between Commonwealth countries and
> the great loonytoon republic to our south. Let's take a hypothetical
> situation:
> I'm up late working on a National Post column at my place in New
> Hampshire.
> I hear a noise downstairs and cautiously investigate. It's a fellow I've
> never seen before, hunched over my stereo. What do I do? I take my gun and
> try to hit his shoulder, disabling his own firing arm. Unfortunately, I'm
> not that good a shot and I blow his head off. I instantly regret it,
> knowing I'm now going to have to repaint the room.
>
> Next, I call the chief of my town's one-man police department -- his home
> number's listed in the book -- and invite him round to collect the body.
> Al's
> also irked, at having his slumbers disturbed, but he takes a short
> statement and congratulates me on a job well done. He takes the view that
> burglary is a
> potentially life-threatening crime and that it's not for him to
> second-guess the homeowner's judgment in the heat of the moment. After
> all,
> I had a split
> second to decide whether the stranger in front of me was intending to rape
> my wife and kill my children or whether he was merely -- for the sake of
> argument -- a lovable rogue on vacation from, say, Nottingham or
> Fredericton with a profound philosophical commitment to a more socially
> equitable
> distribution of my CD collection.
>
> But, even in the latter case, my duty is to prevent him accomplishing his
> task: I am more emotionally attached to my spouse than to my albums (well,
> most of them), but I have a moral obligation to defend my property. For
> property, as anarchists have always recognized, is the foundation of civil
> society. Needless to say, New Brunswick Judge Hazen Strange disagrees with
> this view: Sentencing Mr. MacFarlane, the judge told him, "200 years
> ago, children were hanged for stealing bread. I'd hate to think on the
> verge of a new millennium that we'd take the chance of executing someone
> we
> don't know for breaking a window or trying to steal cigarettes." Thus,
> Canada on the verge of a new millennium: a land where it's anti-social to
> smoke
> cigarettes but not to steal them.
>
> Judge Strange's choice of words is revealing: The property owner is
> apparently the one "taking the chance," rather than the criminal, who
> should be
> allowed to go about his business without any unpleasant surprises. All Mr.
> MacFarlane seems to be asking for is that the element of chance should
> exist
> for the criminal, too: There's an excellent chance that you'll get away
> with the VCR and the CD player scot-free, but there's a teensy-weensy
> possibility
> you'll have your left buttock blown off. And restoring an element of risk
> strikes some of us as in the best interests of society.
>
> And that's the best thing about my hypothetical American example: It's
> 99.99% certain to stay just that -- hypothetical. The New Hampshire 2nd
> District
> is statistically the most heavily-armed Congressional district in the
> United States. And yet there's less crime than almost anywhere on Earth:
> The murder
> rate is much lower than Britain's or Canada's and property crime is
> virtually insignificant. Anyone want to make a connection? Villains are
> expert
> calculators of risk, and the likelihood of walking away uninjured with an
> $80 TV set is too remote. In theory, New Hampshire ought not to be so very
> different from Norfolk. But tonight, Granite Staters will go to bed with
> their doors unlocked, and their vehicles unlocked, and all kinds of
> valuables
> lying around the yard and the barn, and Norfolk villagers will go to bed
> walled up behind their laser alarms and window locks. Who would you say
> feels more secure? In New Hampshire, a citizen's right to defend himself
> deters crime; in Britain and Canada, the state-inflicted impotence of the
> homeowner actively encourages it. In any society, criminals prey on the
> weak and vulnerable. It's the peculiar genius of government policy to have
> ensured that in British society everyone is weak and vulnerable -- from
> Norfolk farmers to the swelling ranks of celebrity victims, from TV
> hostess
> Anthea Turner, attacked in her car while it was stuck in traffic, to the
> 94-year old mother of Alien director Ridley Scott, beaten and robbed in
> her
> own
> home.
>
> Between 1973 and 1992, burglary rates in the U.S. fell by half. In
> Britain,
> not even the Home Office's disreputable reporting methods (if a burglar
> steals from 15 different apartments in one building, it counts as a single
> crime) can conceal the remorseless rise: Britons are now more than twice
> as
> likely as Americans to be mugged; two-thirds will have their property
> broken into at some time in their lives. Even more revealing is the
> divergent
> character between Canadian, British and U.S. property crime: In America,
> just over 10% of all burglaries are "hot burglaries" -- committed while
> the
> owners are present; in Canada and Britain, it's 50%. Because of
> insurance-required alarm systems, the average thief increasingly concludes
> that it's
> easier to break in while you're on the premises. Your home-security system
> may conceivably make your home more safe, but it makes you less so.
>
> What can be done about this? Well, for a start, we could stop talking
> about
> fellows who "take the law into their own hands." In a responsible
> participatory democracy, the law ought to be in our hands. But, in Canada
> and Britain, criminals, police and judges are united in regarding any
> resistance by the victim as bad form. The most they'll tolerate is
> "proportionate response," which, from a beleaguered property owner's point
> of view,
> is a bit like a courtly duel where the rules are set by one side. "Ah,"
> says the victim of a late-night break-in discovering a lovable rogue in
> his
> bedroom,
> "I see you have brought a blunt instrument. Forgive me for unsheathing my
> bread knife. My mistake, old boy. Would you mind giving me a sporting
> chance to retrieve my cricket bat from under the bed before clubbing me to
> a pulp, there's a good chap."
>
> An Englishman's home is no longer his castle, but an American's is still
> his stockade. And Canada, in this as in much else, still inclines more to
> its
> British roots than to the rawer democracy of our immediate neighbour. But
> the presence of four Commonwealth countries and one colony -- Dominica,
> St. Kitts and Nevis, New Zealand, Gibraltar and Canada -- among the
> civilized world's 10 highest crime rates (these figures are from the
> mid-'90s)
> suggests that British-derived law, with its emphasis on police-maintained
> public order rather than individual rights, is especially unsuited to the
> depredations of modern life. You have no need to defend yourself, says the
> Crown, because we'll defend you instead. Mr. MacFarlane understood that
> the Fredericton Police had failed to honour their half of the contract and
> acted accordingly.
>
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