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Man Burgled After Being Banned From Using Giant Ballista
A man who had a 30ft dung-firing ballista on his land to deter intruders has been burgled after police told him that it would be illegal for him to use it. Joe Weston-Webb, a former traveling showman who also owns a human cannon and an "exploding coffin," decided to use the siege weapon to scare off intruders after a series of break-ins and an arson attack last year. He fixed the old ballista and equipped it to fire bags of chicken droppings at intruders if an alarm was triggered. Nottinghamshire Police put an end to his defense plan when they told him that using the giant catapult would be illegal as it did not constitute "reasonable force." Burglars broke into his workshop this week and stole or damaged £10,000 worth of goods and equipment. "It is ridiculous that we are in this situation now in which we can't defend ourselves," Joe said. I don't want to live in a world where an honest, hard-working man can't use a classical Roman weapon of mass destruction to defend himself.
Say my car breaks down on the side of a road, next to farmer's field. I see a farmhouse on the other side of that field, maybe half a mile away, so I decide to cross the field by foot in order to reach the house, so I can ask the owner if I can call a towtruck.
If the right to property were paramount and sacred, then the farmer would, at that point, be perfectly within his rights to kill me at a distance with a high-powered rifle. But this would be completely unreasonable. Any property owner who did this would be guilty of cold-blooded murder.
We live in a society. With other people. You have to consider your rights in relation to theirs.
Furthermore, the law is not a piece of software, and you can't determine whether something is right or wrong by evaluating a simple boolean expression like (ON_MY_PROPERTY)&&(NOT_ME).