HOW FAR CAN YOU GO TO PROTECT YOUR PROPERTY?                                                        

There is a common expression that your home is your castle and if anyone invades your castle, you can take all necessary steps to thwart the invasion of your castle. Does that mean that you can kill the invader?

 A home invasion is an illegal and usually a forceful entry to an occupied, private dwelling with the intent to commit a violent crime against the occupants, such as robbery, assault, rape, murder, or kidnapping. If you are convinced that the people who forcefully enter your home, even if you don’t know what their motives are, you are justified in shooting them and if they die, that is too bad for those who forcefully entered your home. You on the other hand have not committed a crime.

Plain clothed police officers often force their way into private dwellings but they also shout very loudly, “POLICE!”  If they don’t do this and you suspect that you and your family are going to be harmed, you are justified to take deadly force to stop them.

Of course, you better be absolutely sure in your mind that the entry to your home is a home invasion before you take deadly action.

A man was shot and killed after mistaking SWAT officers as home intruders who were serving a search warrant for his grandson, as stated by Philadelphia Police Commissioner Richard Ross who revealed the details of the shooting during a press conference.

If they yelled, “POLICE” then the shooting of the man was justified if the homeowner had a gun pointed at them.  The officer who shot the homeowner was legally justified in using deadly force since he was in fear of being killed by the homeowner and in those circumstance, no criminal charges were warranted against the police officer.     

Two Maryland police officers made a mistake and entered the wrong apartment while serving a drug-related search warrant in Prince George County. The resident of the apartment, however, understandably thought the officers were burglars.

As a result, he promptly shot both of them with a shotgun shortly after they entered in an apparent attempt to defend his home from the intruders. Upon realizing that they were law enforcement officials, however, he immediately surrendered and proceeded to ask about their well-being, which many would agree is a stunning response considering the fact that if he hadn’t been armed, he could’ve likely been the one who was shot in the confusion.

He did not know that they were police officers attempting to enter his apartment, and for that reason that individual acted to protect himself and his daughter from what he believed to be a threat of home invasion.”

The officers weren’t killed and only wounded in one of the officer’s shoulder and in the hand of the other officer.

When asked if there were any plans to charge the man for injuring the two officers, a police official made it clear that “it would be inappropriate to hold this gentleman criminally responsible for his actions.”

I have to assume that the police officers didn’t warn of the wo thugs the homeowner that they were police officers before they smashed his apartment door and entered the apartment. If they had done this, then the homeowner would have been in the wrong for shooting the two officers.

In a city in Arizona, the resident of the home got a knock at his door after 9 p.m. When he answered the door, two men, one wearing a brownish tan hoodie and the other wearing a black hoodie, held a gun in his face with the intent to rob him.

The homeowner later told the police that he ran to his bedroom to get his handgun and when he noticed his bedroom door opening behind him, he fired off several shots in the direction of the thugs since he suspected the two men were coming into his bedroom with their guns drawn.  

The suspects then ran off. Officers say they do not know if the suspects were hit, but the 9-year-old boy in the next room caught one of the bullets in his finger after one of the homeowner’s bullets fired from his gun went through the wall. 

Persons with guns in their hands should not fire  a shot in which an innocent person, let alone a child, could be hurt. However, at the same time, there was clearly a strong imperative for this man to defend his home and himself. There’s no question in my mind that shots were going to be fired by the two men once they got into the man’s bedroom and saw the gun in the homeowner’s hand.   

That leaves us with two issues to consider. (1) Since one of the homeowner’s bullets went through the wall instead at the thugs coming through the door, should he be charged with negligence causing harm to the child? (2) If the child died, should the homeowner be charged with manslaughter?

I will ask another question. If a cop accidentally kills an innocent bystander during a shootout, will he be held responsible? If the shooting was justified and a civilian is caught in the crossfire, no prosecutor I know of would elect to prosecute. Now if for some reason, the officer acted against protocol, then the prosecutor would most likely then file manslaguter charges again the officer.

But did the homeowner who accidentally shot the child in the other room  commit a crime?  I don’t think so because when the homeowner saw the two thugs trying to enter his room with their guns drawn, he was in fear of his life. 

What happens if an innocent is killed when someone tries to kill a mass shooter?

If someone stops a mass shooter by shooting him, I can't imagine it being politically beneficial to prosecute that person, even if someone else was shot by accident.  Not only did the man who fired his gun at the mass shooter and kill him avert a major tragedy but it's easy to argue that the bystander was no worse off than if the mass shooter had been allowed to continue shooting at other people and also shoot the bystander quite intentionally.

Boushie, age 22, was fatally shot on August 9^th, 2016 om a farmer’s farm near Biggar, Saskatchewan. He and four other people in a vehicle drove onto the property with the purpose of stealing the farmer’s pickup truck. hey had just previously drove onto another farm looking for a car to steal.

The farmer, Mr. Stanley didn’t go looking for trouble on a day that started with everyone working on the ranch until he faced the four intruders in their car. This was not really a murder case at all since this was actually a case about what can go terribly wrong when you are faced with a situation which is really in a nature of a home invasion.

Sheldon Stanley, the farmer’s son said that he was inside the home when he heard three shots being fired and saw his father holding a gun and a magazine. He testified that his father looked like he was going to be sick and said “I don’t know what happened. It just went off. I just wanted to scare them.”

“I thought I’m going to make some noise and hopefully they’re going to run out of the yard,” he told court. “I just raised the gun in the air and fired straight up.” Stanley said he popped out the cartridge “to make sure it was disarmed.”

He also said to his son, “As far as I was concerned, it was empty and I had fired my last shot.” He testified that he went up to the SUV because he worried it had run over his wife and he tried to reach for the keys in the ignition.

“I was reaching in and across the steering wheel to turn the key off and – boom – this thing just went off,” Stanley testified at

At his trial for manslaughter, his lawyer asked him I his trigger was on the trigger. He denied that it was on the trigger.

I have to assume that he actually had his finger on the trigger and the gun was partially cocked. That was stupidity on his part. The slightest juggling on his hand could have resulted in the gun being fired.

This kind of case comes down to the question, “When you’re in a situation when you have intruders on your property and you don’t have the luxury of being able to wait for police assistance –what is reasonable in that circumstance?

The farmer’s lawyer said to the jury, “Is a self-defence a factor and is that part of it reasonableness and what you can do to protect yourself in those circumstances?

The question was rhetorical because a trial jury can’t answer that question during the trial but they can ask themselves those questions during their deliberations.

They would have to ask themselves as to whether or not if it is  reasonable to fire warning shots when intruders have tried to steal, your truck and the thieves  tried to take a run at you with their vehicle, crashed into your other vehicle intentionally and  almost run over your wife? 

The lawyer for the farmer said the case comes down to a freak accident that occurred during a scary situation for the Stanley family.

The young thieves were vandalizing the farmer’s car but they didn’t really think they were threatening anybody but when you start doing that stuff by crashing into someone else’s car, whether the crash was intentional or not, it creates fear in the mind of the victim especially if  a loved one is in danger. That kind of situation creates a situation where it’s reasonable to fire a warning shot in the air.

After deliberating for 13 hours, the all-white jury in Battleford, Saskatchewan found 56-year-old Gerald Stanley not guilty of second-degree murder in the 2016 death of Colten Boushie of the Red Pheasant First Nation.

Several years ago, a home owner shot a teenage boy dead when he was trick or treating on Halloween. The homeowner was convicted of manslaughter and sentenced to prison and rightly so.