The main outrage
About Tony Martin wasn't so much that he was defending his home (there's a huge difference between warning shots/self defence and shooting someone in the back who's running away) but that he wasn't able to rely on his psychiatric illness in court.

Basically if you're a little old lady being accosted by two large chavs, your comparative physicality (or lack thereof) allows you to do pretty much whatever in self-defence, which is a complete defence. However if you have a paranoid personality disorder (as Martin did) you can only use it as a partial defence for diminished responsibility, which hardly seems fair.

As far as 2) goes it's not really up to the police what counts as 'reasonable'. They have to follow up any complaint like that regardless. It's then up to the CPS whether it should go to court and then it's a question of fact and is entirely a matter for the jury.
(Milo Minderbinder, Wed 11 May 2011, 10:43, 2 replies)

My point was about story 1
Not about the defence of the property thing, it was the ironic way the cop basically said to my father "Oh point your 12 bore at the sods and let fly!" I was talking to a plain clothes cop one day ( I forget what rank he was ) just after the Tony Martin thing. I asked him what he thought of the situation. He said "Well, do you want the honest truth? this is OFF the record OK? we honestly wished he had killed both the buggers, they were low life scum!
(Mackeson_drinker, Wed 11 May 2011, 12:06, closed)

Whilst accepting that a single person living in isolation & plagued by burglars may feel measures that would seem excessive in other circumstances are reasonable,
there is the question of why someone with a paranoid personality disorder is allowed to own a shotgun.
(sarcastic fringehead feet of clay, buns of steel, head of lettuce, Wed 11 May 2011, 13:27, closed)