Christine Jardine: Reasonable force may lead to unreasonable risk

I understand the desire to protect your family and property, but empowering potential crime victims is a dangerous path to go down, writes Christine Jardine.

There’s a memory that has haunted me this week. I’m standing on the steps of a courthouse in Houston, Texas, with the mother of a young Scot who had been shot and killed by a householder who thought the oilman might be trying to break into his house.

He wasn’t. But that didn’t matter. The Supreme Court in Texas ruled that the householder was within his rights to shoot Andrew de Vries, because he might be.

It’s almost 20 years since BBC Reporting Scotland sent me to the USA to cover the story of how a young, good-looking, high-achieving graduate in his 20s had died at the end of a night out when, perhaps silly on drink or scared and looking for help, he began knocking doors in a Houston suburb and was shot.

A victim of Texan law’s version of reasonable force.

It’s a long way from that gun-friendly US state where the right to bear arms is enshrined in the constitution, to our society where guns are illegal and a zero tolerance policy means a minimum five-year sentence for carrying a weapon.

However, the current Conservative proposals to change the law in England in Wales to allow victims of burglary to use “reasonable force” raises the serious prospect of moving a little closer to a US style attitude, and the dangers that go with it.

I fully understand and sympathise with all the arguments about the right to protect your family and property. Especially your family.

I have been the victim of theft and know what it is to have someone you love left scarred for life by a violent crime.

And I cannot imagine how it might feel or how I might react to finding someone in my home and feel that my child’s safety could be at risk.

But I have a bigger fear. And that is prompted by what the implications might be of those Conservative plans to, shall we say, “empower” victims to deal with burglars or intruders.

For example, if someone breaks into my house tonight they know that I am unlikely to have any kind of weapon, certainly not a gun.

And while the legal system protects me with its threat of punishment for their actions, it also protects them from the prospect of me deciding to take the law into my own hands.

In the current situation they probably wouldn’t see the need to take the risk of carrying anything that could land them with that minimum five-year sentence if they are caught. Now imagine that same scenario, but this time the burglar knows that if I do have a cricket bat I am protected by the law if I use it to beat them up. Or what if I pick up a knife from the kitchen?

That same burglar might think they’d be better to carry a knife in case I have a go at them, or maybe even try to get their hands on a gun to make sure they are safe.

Suddenly the scenario becomes much more dangerous. For me and for my family.

So do we then step up our security and make sure we have something to protect ourselves – just in case?

And what then if we feel we have to use that weapon, get it wrong, and someone dies?

Conservative Justice Minister Chris Grayling has that possibility covered when he says: “If the tragic situation arises where there is a death, I think even then the householder should know that the law is on their side.”

Suddenly I am back in Texas.

There the law was weighted so much in favour of the householder that even when the threat to their safety was not a real one, they were protected.

Over the years I have also thought about that Texan householder who, late at night, and fearful for his own family’s safety, possibly panicked and over-reacted.

He knew when he picked up that gun that he was within his rights. In the instant when he decided whether to pull the trigger it probably never occurred to him that anyone would challenge that right.

Certainly over the week that I spent in Houston there was no shortage of people keen to explain to me, even before the Supreme Court judgment, that he had done nothing wrong. He was only protecting his family.

I met that Texan once. He seemed a reasonable, middle-class, law abiding family man. Not all that dissimilar to the Scots family on the other side of that tragedy.

But differentiated from them by a huge gulf of understanding.

The part of that memory which haunts me most is the face of the young Scot’s parents when, still coping with the fresh grief of their son’s death, they learned that the law in Texas had offered him no protection.

In the period since I have often pointed to that experience in Texas as an example of why I value living in a society where the police are not routinely armed, we do not regard firearms as an everyday possession and our laws protect us from violence rather than protecting our right to use it.

I am not suggesting for a minute that the current proposals would lead directly to a situation where any of us could attack with impunity any random stranger we felt was posing a threat to our property, whether real or imagined.

But it could begin to eat away at the principle that we are all entitled to the protection of the law.

And while it might seem like a long way from where we are now to creating a society something akin to Texas, do we really want to risk going down that path?