I have never heard of an individual "right to self-defence" in any legal context.
it has to be in there. one can argue against a charge of murder, for example, by arguing self-defense. I did some googling but found no source I knew you would approve of. Wikipedia came up, for example. But following my intuition I think it must be included in all sorts of laws that judges refer to when determining if justifiable defense took place.
I do not like the idea of giving people a right to commit violent acts. I think there is a very good reason why the law does not recognise self-defence as a "right".
I think it does actually and rather hysterically broadly in the US, unfortunately. There may be no single self-defense law, but I think it must be included in a variety of legal contexts. Otherwise courts would not be able to make determinations of self-defense, which go all the way up to capital crimes. In other words judges and juries decide regularly whether or not someone killed someone else justifiably.
Legitimate individual self-defence is always a reaction against a violent threat. If somebody comes at you with a knife, you can fight him off with a knife, and the law will not prosecute you. But that doesn't mean you had a right to own and use your knife against him. What it means is that if somebody brought a prosecution against you for hurting him, you would have a legal defence to the charges. Your violence is legitimised as an act of self-defence in that specific case.
But as part of a general rule, implicit at the very least, aand again I assume actually written out in words somewhere. And you can certainly shoot someone who comes at you with a knife in many places, even if the gun is not legally in your possession. You might get nailed for that crime, but the act might very well be approved of. Judges, DAs and juries must be working from something in the laws.
To frame self-defence of this type as a right risks leading to some kind of implication that it is acceptable to carry a weapon around with you and use it against other people.
But that is the case. 1) it is certainly the case with police. 2) it is legal to carry firearms if you have the right permit, etc. Carrying guns can certainly include the implicit right to threaten someone as self-defense but must include shooting also. (I say 'must' not meaning these are my morals, but that it must be in the law.)
I know that battered women and abused children are given rights of defence above adn beyond what other defenders are allow. There is also the 'castle exception' as in home is your castle, which also means you have less pressure to use retreat as an option. Sometime self-defense defenses fail because courts can show you had a good out in running away. If you hang out in a bar for an hour after someone threated to kill you and then shoot them your case is weak. But in your own home you are under less obligation to run away. I don't know how much is written in the law or is precedent based, but in the US there is a definite legal right to self-defense and lawyers make a case for it all the time. They are not told their clients have no right to self-defense unless the court determines the situation indicates it is a bad defense: the defendant was the aggressor, he should have run away, there was no real threat, the defendant upped the ante too far, and so on.
Any civil society ought to be very wary of broadening the circumstances under which an individual may raise self-defence as a justification for harming another person. It is very easy to claim that something was done in "self-defence" when it was really an attack, and very hard to prove.
I agree. But we have done that very clearly in relation to certain groups and in the home.
The culture of fear prevalent in the USA probably means that many people there think that they ought to have a "right" to "protect themselves" against all the vague imagined threats they think the world has in store for them. Thankfully, the law is mostly very clear on the circumstances that count as "self-defence".
But James!!!!!! if it is very clear about those circumstances, then it is clear there are circumstances. I don't think madanthony is saying that one has the right to defence oneself with any sort of violence in any situation where one perceives there is a threat. And I am certainly not doing that. It seems like here you are acknowledging that it is in the law.
In summary, self-defence is a legal defence or justification in certain well-defined circumstances. It is not a general right, and certainly not a fundamental human right
No, you cannot delineate those circumstances and the law very flexibly interprets varieties of threat. They do not have to rewrite the law each time a new kind of weapon is made, for example. I think it is a general concept and a rigorous look at abstract qualities such as levels of force, clearness of threat, other options are looked at by the court and a general idea of appropriate self-defense is referred to.
madanthony may have a false impression of how liberal this is, but if I am attacked anywhere in the US with physical violence, for example, I feel very confident I can respond with violence if I cannot get away. This does not mean I will win in court. But that is a whole other issue. One can never be sure of that. I do know that the law is behind me there. I also know that anyone gesturing at me with a weapon in my house is pretty much 'in season'. I mean the japanese guy who knocked on someone's door and did not respond to requests to go away from some guys doorstep - because he did not understand - got killed. The guy who shot him got off. Of course this is wrong. But I know pretty damn well what I can do to people inside my house with weapons.
