Self-Defense Not Allowed Here

I've published a few posts lately (here and here) chronicling how innocent victims of home invasions defended themselves using deadly force. In all three cases the victims had no choice, being outmuscled, outnumbered, outgunned, or all three, by their attackers. Thankfully, those incidents didn't take place in the People's Republic of Massachusetts.

If you defend your family and property from a knife-wielding druggie in Massachusetts, you’d better be prepared to also defend yourself from the justice system, too.

(Anthony) McKay is the young father who, seeing a local druggie breaking into his truck and stealing the tools he uses to pay the bills, confronted him, subdued him and held him for the police. When the police arrived, they found the bad guy had a knife, a billy club and — thanks to the unarmed McKay — a broken jaw.

What a bad ass! Most reasonable people would say "Good for McKay," bare-handedly defeating a thug armed with a knife and club. But we're not talking about reasonable people here. We're talking about the bozos who keep electing various members of a wealthy elite arrogant liberal family Kennedys to public office.

Instead of thanking McKay for helping get an armed criminal off the streets, Swampscott officials charged him with a felony.

Yes, you read that right. The good guy stops some criminal lowlife from breaking into his truck and stealing his property - and remember, the perp is armed and the 'victim' isn't - and the good guy gets booked for a felony.

As a Swampscott police spokesman said at the time, “We don’t urge anybody to fight back. We want them to call us.”

I literally cannot think of anything to say in response to such lunacy. I guess MA cops want you to roll over and expose your belly in a show of submission.

Thanks to pressure from readers of the Boston Herald and others, McKay will not be prosecuted. But the Essex County District Attorney’s office has made it clear that they are not supporting your right to self defense ... the Essex DA insists the decision to decline to prosecute the case does not mean they think the police were wrong in arresting McKay...

In other words, McKay is lucky that the media made an issue out of this outrageous prosecution. Otherwise he could have spent five years in prison instead of working and paying the bills for his three young children.

Who can possibly think this is the right way to run a state? Well, Martha Coakley once said, “In Massachusetts we try and discourage ... self-help.”

Martha Coakley is the Attorney General of Massachusetts. She also ran for the U.S. Senate in 2010 to fill the seat formerly held by the drunk murdering rapist Massachusetts icon Ted Kennedy. In a rare moment of sanity, MA voters actually elected the less liberal of two candidates - Scott Brown. Still, they elected the Coakley nincompoop to be the top law enforcement person in that state. Go figure.

If Essex DA Jon Blodgett had dropped the charges and acknowledged McKay had done nothing wrong, that would send the message to future crooks that the law is on the good guy’s side.

Instead, Blodgett refused take sides. He and his spokesman have also refused repeated requests to answer questions about this case. All of which leaves us wondering:

If I see someone breaking into my car or garage, or stealing my property right out of my yard, am I supposed to call the police and just watch them steal my stuff?

I put that question to three local attorneys and got three different answers:

Wendy Murphy told me, “The standard in Massachusetts is you cannot defend yourself unless you’re going to die.”

Joe Flaherty told me, “You have the right to confront them and stop them ... but you don’t have the right to use force.” When I asked what I could do under Massachusetts law, he said, “You could scream and yell at them.”

Yeah, that’ll work.

Meanwhile, former Governor’s Council candidate Bob Jubinville said, “If it’s me, I grab a baseball bat and head out. But if a client asked me what to do, I’d say ‘Call the cops and hope they show up fast.”

So, I asked him, if I’m a crime victim trying to protect my property in Massachusetts, is the state on my side?

“Absolutely not.”

Anthony McKay, you’re a lucky man.

And I'm a lucky man for living in the Great State of Texas, where the right to self-defense is not only tolerated, but celebrated.

But I can't help but wonder what on earth has happened to the home of Concord and Lexington, where the first shots were fired in our War of Independence.

Those original patriots must be spinning their graves...