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I'd have to look up how things are in the UK, but Europe is pretty staunchly against self defense, and I haven't heard anything that would indicate the UK is any different.
IIRC there are situations where self-defence is allowed, but as @FCfromSSC implied there's no functional right to self-defence; if you have a gun to hand when someone goes active shooter, I think you're allowed to return fire... but you 99.99% of the time don't have a gun to hand if you're following the law, because you're not allowed to take a gun (or a knife or armour) with you for the purposes of self-defence, which makes the point moot.
Forget guns, a lot of Europe has this idea of "proportional force" which requires you to make constant legal evaluations as you're fighting for your life, resulting in cases like this where people watch helplessly as an attacker scales a ladder to assault them in their own home (there's a more disturbing video version of this somewhere that I can't find now, because all searches suck now).
Is that because of the legal framework or because most modern people are very unfamiliar with violence and hesitant to engage in it? I heavily suspect the victim there was not worrying about the law.
My experience having had a bit of a rough and tumble upbringing is that a lot of middle class people whether in the UK or US shy away from violence even in self-defence, not because of legal worries, but because they have never really had to engage in it.
I'd default to believing that these things reinforce one another. If a legal framework demands constant checks when physically defending oneself, then a culture of just shying away from violence is a reasonable response. And if there's a culture of just shying away from violence, then structuring the law to punish the few outliers who choose not to disengage, since engaging causes more direct, immediate harm is a reasonable act. Perhaps one was the chicken and the other the egg, or perhaps both were birthed by some 3rd common factor, but ultimately, those don't matter; if there's a self-reinforcing cycle, then every part of the cycle is caused by every other part.
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Sorry, not sure how am I supposed to engage with this argument. My experience having had a bit of a rough and tumble upbringing is that just about the only thing that would make someone meekly submit to a knife attack in their own home is the threat of an even stronger punishment. How do you propose we resolve the disagreement?
Well my observation is that most people in a crisis situation are not making rational decisions, but acting out of instinct, (in)experience and fear.
Given the West for anyone in the middle class and above is much less violent than decades ago, most people are going to have much less experience with violence. They freeze, they plead, they try to de-escalate. They don't in my experience think a lot about the law.
If you and I have both had a rough and tumble start to life, then we have had more exposure directly to violence than many. I've been glassed, and I've been attacked with a barbed wire club, I've been threatened by a paramilitary leader. I grew up in a nation where we had bomb evacuation drills in school and had soldiers on the streets.
My observation is that many people without that, simply on some level do not believe that violence will be the outcome. This is a place where I think Hlynkacg was correct. They have internalized a world view where this is a rules based existence, because to them it has been.
That's why you often see people flipping their belief systems once they have been a victim of violence. Their worldview was upended.
In other words my feeling is you may be underestimating the aversion and unfamiliarity with violence by the average middle class Western person who may never have thrown a punch in anger in their life, let alone had a knife wielding maniac at their door. I think it is highly unlikely they are being concilitory and non confrontational because of the law, but simply because that is how the modern world has taught them to deal with violence. You don't punch your bully, you avoid them and tell the teacher.
Or to put it more simply, violence is scary to people who have not some experience with it. And many, many people in wealthy Western cultures nowadays grow up without any exposure to it. Which is generally good! But it has neutered their threat responses. (Obviously generalizing here, but overall i think my point is correct. Few people even know what their own nations self-defence laws are..because they very rarely have to know. )
I agree with all of this, from personal experience. I've seen an entire bus full of people stare helplessly at one guy who wants to ride without a ticket because he's physically refusing to step off and nobody is prepared to go and shove the guy one step backwards. It's not a legal problem, it's a helplessness problem.
Likewise, of the few times I've been close to a confrontation (ignoring schoolyard scuffles and things), my instinct has been to run and/or call the police. I'm not entirely happy about that, but it is what it is.
Did the people in the bus want to shove the guy off? In my country, I think it'd be more likely no one cared about a freerider as long as he didn't get in the way. It would probably even be seen as vaguely snitch-like to care about "the rules" in this case.
Yes. He got on the bus, refused to buy a ticket (or couldn’t) and the driver told him that if he didn’t have a ticket then he would have to get off the bus. He didn’t get off, and so we had to wait at the stop with everyone staring at him helplessly for 20 minutes until he finally gave up.
I remember being suddenly struck by the fact that certain problems become unsolvable if physical force is taboo.
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I still don't see much to engage with here. I too can write an essay, about how even to most meek coward lashes out when you corner him, and that you'll be hard-pressed to find a more central example of being cornered than a home invasion, but that too will just be an essay with no way to resolve the disagreement.
If you insist that Americans are afflicted with the same sort helplessness in the face of violence, but their legal framework is different, maybe you can give a few examples of a similar assault, in a state with strong self-defense laws, where the assailant makes himself absurdly vulnerable for several minutes in the process of preparing for an attack, and the victim chooses to do nothing. Maybe we can see who can find more of these stories, or who taps out first? Not a perfect process, but far more constructive than just-so stories based on lived experience.
That would be the argument I'm making. No one can make legal calculus as they fight for their life, so a good deal of people default to paralysis.
Go ahead! That is itself engagement! Not all arguments can be resolved by data. Some are just to explore the idea space and different points of view. Given we are both talking about internal subjective experiences, we almost certainly cannot prove anything with data here. I'm telling you my experiences and pov and you can tell me yours. We may never agree, and that is ok, arguing and discussion does not have to lead to someone winning.
I would say that very few people even think about the legal calculus at all, (though of course I am sure some do), merely that people react according to their experiences and when their experience with violence is extremely limited, that is the bigger factor in their actions or lack thereof.
I'd also say the same in other emergency situations, where say someone collapses on the street, most people don't freeze because they are making an evaluation of whether they may be sued for giving CPR incorrectly but rather because it is an unexpected event they do not have experience in or training for. Or where there is a fire, you can observe people freezing because they are unprepared for unexpected events. Even when there is no legal consideration for them to think about.
That people freeze and panic in stressful situations that have no legal consideration, is a good indication in my view that them freezing and panicking is the de facto response to crisis situations in general. That's why militaries and police and medical organizations drill and expose people to scenarios so that they can overcome those reactions and do something useful. And why fire drills are useful so that people don't have to think about where to go in an emergency.
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