Why won’t they shoot burglars?

At about 04:40 this morning a man popped the lock on our front door and entered our home. As fortune would have it, my partner, who is 50% beautiful human female and 50% untamed wild vicious Rottweiler, was awake and heard him start to come upstairs.

We are not sure exactly how it happened, but the intruder somehow walked into the path of a rapidly swinging baseball bat as he was climbing up the stairs. The baseball bat hit him directly in the mouth, obviously causing him some damage to his teeth and gums.

The shock of accidentally walking into the baseball bat must have affected his footing on the stairs because he fell backwards, tumbling very awkwardly and landing at the bottom where he remained motionless for a few moments.

Being as my partner and I tend to sleep naked, we were scrambling to find clothing to rush on in order to descend the stairs with a bit of modesty, to investigate why there was now a motionless gentleman at the foot of our stairs.

By the time we were decent, and ready for descent, to our horror, he had moved. We rushed downstairs and out of the open front door. In the middle distance we could see him hobbling along as fast as he could.  He looked like he might have had some broken bones or something quite badly wrong with his legs or feet.

My Rottweiler, er, I mean, partner, started hurling Liverpudlian abuse after him which was shrill and unnerving.  It scared me, and I was not the intended recipient.

We considered following him, in our fetching dressing gowns, which we never normally wear, but found on the back of a rack in the bedroom. However we were wary of the fact that an injured animal is a dangerous animal when cornered, and we would be out of our comfort zone since we don’t own any shotguns.  This is fortunate for his family because I would have had no qualms about shooting him dead.  Instead, we retreated and called the police.

People slag off the police at every opportunity, but we can’t fault the lady on the phone initially, the two gentlemen officers who came within 10 minutes and bagged up the tooth that must have fallen out, or the lady with the white powder that arrived the next day who photographed and took samples of blood that our intruder had left behind.

It just seems to me that an Englishman or Englishwoman’s home is his or her castle.  Of all the crimes, petty crimes, cruel crimes, robbing people’s homes just before Christmas seems the nastiest.  We were very lucky. Others less so.  Typically just one robber will have a hundred or so victims before he is caught. And as soon as he is caught he’s let out as quickly as possible to continue his reign of terror.

He wouldn’t be able to do that if we were allowed to shoot him dead.