The Aftermath: Suicide by Homeowner

Unfortunately this is the society people voted for (or sat back and allowed happen).

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Pretty much all of them?
When I moved outside the city limits of Detroit my auto insurance went down by 30%. Same car, same driving record, same work address (inside the city limits), much greater daily/yearly mileage. The only difference was that the city was considered a by the insurer as a high-risk zone for theft, vandalism, and accidents.

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I was referring to this, which indicates your personal, individual rates will go up if your car window was broken and you used insurance to fix it

Which company does that?

I would also point out that fixing a car window is a lot more simple of a fix than defending yourself from agg assault/battery or homicide charges in court, or bailing yourself out of jail, or going to the ICU

If you live in a higher car insurance area, you arenā€™t going to change that by confronting a guy in this scenario

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It doesnā€™t matter whether your personal rates go up or the insurerā€™s general rates go upā€¦either way your wallet takes the hit. Thatā€™s what actuaries do, they assess patterns of risk (to the company) and assign values to the level of risk, typical monetary damages, and use that to determine rate structures.

Absolutely agree! In the scenario presented, I most likely would call 911 and, if possible, take video. Only when life becomes endangered would I consider direct intervention.

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I think thatā€™s a good answer, and depending on the circumstances there may be more than one right answer (at least until the Monday morning quarterbacks show up.) I just donā€™t know that I could watch a lunatic bent on destruction in my neighborhood, especially with the children who play outside and the retirees who take their walks. It would be best if the police contained the situation first, but if this crazy person is going to go after someone in my neighborhood, it might as well be me.

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What if you confronted the guy because you thought there was someone sitting in the car? Does it change anything? Do you still watch, record and be only a witness? :face_with_peeking_eye:

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What if itā€™s Tiger Woods in the car and itā€™s his wife smashing it with his golf clubs?

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For me it doesnā€™t change anything.
If somebodyā€™s life is in danger I must react.
Donā€™t doctor or nurse save lives of people they donā€™t like? Itā€™s the same, itā€™s called humanity.

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They still do that? For the most part, I havenā€™t seen kids in my neighborhood playing outdoors in about 15 years. :disappointed:

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What if the person in the car had just attacked the baseball bat guyā€™s kid? Itā€™s always a big risk to get involved in disputes when you canā€™t be sure who the good and bad guys are.

Iā€™m all for helping clearly innocent people out when I can. But even then you run the risk of no good deed going unpunished. So my first priority is making it home safe to my family at the end of the day.

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That is sad. When my brother and I got home from school we would be playing all over the neighborhood with the other kids until our parents called us in for dinner.

Fortunately the rural neighborhood I live in now has a fair number of kids running around though they donā€™t spend quite as much time doing it as we used to with all the screen time options available these days.

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:grinning:
What if the person who attacked the car and the person inside it, who attacked that personā€™s kids, few minutes earlier attacked grandma of the kid of the person in the car, so actually nobody knows what is going on and who started the problemā€¦ :grinning:
But actually it doesnā€™t matter. If Iā€™m going to ask question and instead of answer I receive aggression I donā€™t care what happened few minutes before.
Asking questions donā€™t make you aggressor, no matter what.

We are going nowhere with these assumptions.
Letā€™s just be humans and help others if they need help.
I personally wonā€™t stay and watch. Of course all the actions require pre-action thinking but in this particular case Iā€™m just the guy from the story.

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Politely asking questions should never make you the aggressor but the person you are asking may not agree with that reasonable assumption. On a couple of occasions I have offered homeless people in obvious rough shape some food or water. Their responses were not at all rational and actually quite threatening.

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Yeah, domestic disputes are some of the worst situations you can get involved in. The best you could do at that point is get your kids inside and guard the door.

I think this is a different scenario that the original ā€œbad guy smashing windowsā€ story that we started with, but thereā€™s always a risk that we donā€™t see the whole picture.

And this could go both ways, too. You might choose to stay inside and not get involved, only to have the perpetrator smash into your house anyway. Or perhaps that lone person with a baseball bat was just 1 of 3 people looking for trouble. Situational awareness is so important, but sometimes it is the most difficult part of a bad situation.

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But you didnā€™t shoot them. That was because you knew what to expect. You expected words, perhaps not those you heard, but Iā€™m guessing you didnā€™t expect homeless person to jump on you.

If you see somebody smashing the cars and you want to approach him to actually stop doing this, you ask question, but you are prepared to get either the answer or jab / kick. You are prepared to retreat.

Once you have retreated this part of whole situation is over. If the person is going after you, you are fully justified to defend yourself, even you spoke with that person few minutes / second ago.

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Maybe thatā€™s why I see this scenario differently than others. Iā€™m a fairly good runner, and Iā€™ve done a lot of drills focused around maintaining distance. Although a baseball bat can be deadly, it is not deadly from 15 yards away. And if the suspect closes in faster than I can retreat, then this is no longer a case of using force to stop a window smasher, itā€™s a clear case of self-defense. (Similar to how it became a self-defense case once the suspect smashed his way into an occupied home.)

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And thatā€™s the reason we agreed on everything we had posted on this thread :metal:

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ā€¦ for me was when the streetlights came on; particularly after dinner though.

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Kick the Can
Tackle Basketball
Street Base Ball
Bicycle Motocross
Bow hunting for carp
Things kids do when parents arenā€™t watching

Kids donā€™t do any of this stuff with the neighborhood kids anymore.

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Donā€™t forget pennies on the railroad track.

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