Leave your rights outside, please.
If someone breaks into your house and tries to steal your property, what can you do? The answer certainly should be anything within reason to protect yourself your family, and property. They have, after all, chosen to break in. But do they “leave their human rights outside“?
In many ways, yes.
By commiting a crime, they have broken the social nexus. They have made a conscious decision to break the law. So why should it protect them very far?
The only right they keep intact is their right to life, which can never be taken away. No-one has a right to kill another person, no matter what. Even the State. But they give up or severly curtail every other right.
Householders who confront an invader onto their property have the right to get them off their property; they have the right to do everything within reason to accomplish this. Anything less than disproportionate force or that causes unnecessary or excessive harm.
They have given up much of their rights by breaking and entering. Why should the law protect them when they won’t abide by it?
I disagree with only one small point of your post.
No-one has a right to kill another person, no matter what.
Thankfully, it’s hypothetical for most of us. But if someone comes through your door, uninvited, neither you nor anyone else is going to care about ‘within reason’ – it will simply be a matter of using any and all means necessary to neutralise the threat to yourself and your family.
And if that means using whatever weapon comes to hand, then the responsibility for the consequences of that are not yours – they are the responsibility of the person who broke in.
If Mr Burglar breaks into my house, I don’t care about his rights. Any of them. And that includes his right-to-life – only the safety and security of my family matters. If Mr Burglar has failed to consider the possible outcomes of that, then it’s his lookout.
D
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