Do you know that San Francisco is the only city in the country that was taken over by Vigilantes.

The government was so corrupt that all the business men got together and ousted them from city hall.

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Walt Whitman
"I say that democracy can never prove itself beyond cavil, until it founds and luxuriantly grows its own forms of art, poems, schools, theology, displacing all that exists, or that has been produced anywhere in the past, under opposite influences."

The way I see it, the trouble with self-appointed vigilantes is that they have no clue where that line is, or that there's even a line they shouldn't cross.

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January 20, 2009 - The end of an error.

True. Most people are ignorant of the finer points of the laws, as well.

Tackling a burglar may end up with an assult charge.

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There is no sig. There never was a sig. The sig is a lie.

As rule-of-law is one of the basic tenets of a liberal society, I would also have to choose the ghost "almost never" answer.

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"Have you no decency, sir? At long last, have you left no sense of decency?"
-Joseph Welch

Well, that's the burglar's own fault.

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"I find no black men appealing, they look like giant monkeys." -LilithIshtar (some member of another forum I used to be part of)

Sometimes the law is inadequate or too corrupt to handle injustice. It's hard to draw the line, but suffice it to say that if anybody harmed my wife or other family members, we wouldn't have to worry about jury selection.

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"Bring me that horizon".

In theory, but juries/laywers/judges may see it differently, if a countersuit was filed. Maybe I tackled him none too gently, or treated him too roughly. Maybe I only thought he robbed the old lady....

Once something like that gets to a court, anything can happen. I've heard of weirder.

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There is no sig. There never was a sig. The sig is a lie.

Or what if you are so ready for a 'burglar' that someone comes to your door in the middle of the night because their car broke down and instead of helping them, you pummel them? Do you think you would be allowed to walk away just because you got broken into before and were planning on "getting them" this time?

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Let me give an example:

Earlier this month in Baltimore, some guy tried to rob a store with the owner of the store in it, and he held the owner at knifepoint. When the owner got a chance he pulled a gun on the robber and shot him but didn't kill him, and the thing is that same guy has reportedly been robbing other places in that area for some time.

And in big cities sometimes people get robbed and killed in their own homes and the criminal doesn't get caught right away, sometimes in a week, 2 weeks, a month, maybe they might not get caught at all. Especially in this city where even cameras aren't enough, someone else needs to step up when the police aren't gonna get there in time.

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"I find no black men appealing, they look like giant monkeys." -LilithIshtar (some member of another forum I used to be part of)

I would only go as far as the arresting process into my own hands. I couldn't take the judge, jury, and executioner into my own hands.

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Set your destination with your heart, get there with your mind.

"The wisest men follow their own direction." - Euripides