A Christchurch man has been jailed for two years after using an unregistered shotgun in self-defense. The gun actually belonged to the man’s friend, but when he heard three intruders breaking into a house where a grandmother, mother and a baby were sleeping, he didn’t think twice before grabbing the weapon and firing it at the burglars.
Morgan had taken up the shotgun to protect the occupants of the house – a baby, a mother, and a grandmother … he fired the shotgun down a hallway, without hitting anyone, after three intruders smashed their way into the Linwood house.
Instead of congratulating him for defending his home against intruders, the police arrested him for possession of an illegal firearm (the shotgun was sawn-off, which is illegal in New Zealand) – even though the gun belonged to his friend.
A man takes up a weapon to defend a home from three intruders – and gets jailed for two years? This is outrageous. Compare this to the man who consistently called in sick to go fishing, was caught lying about it, and subsequently fired. He was awarded $5000 and six weeks pay.
What a pathetic country we live in. As PC asks,
Have some of us completely lost the ability to discriminate between good and bad?
UPDATE:
A relevant comparison might be made with a similar Christchurch case where a man faced three armed assailants on private property who were intent on committing a crime. He shot at one of them with a short-range hand-held projectile weapon. The weapon in question was a crossbow. The man who was shot died. The shooter was proclaimed to have acted in self-defence and was acquitted of all charges.
By all accounts, the shooter in the crossbow case aggravated the situation and was no angel.
Yet in the sawn-off shotgun case, the shooter was similarly acting to defend himself on private property against three intruders intent on committing a crime. He apparently did not cause or aggravate the situation, and used a similar short-range hand-held projectile weapon. The difference is, modified shotguns are “illegal”, so he gets to go to jail for two years, and the man who actually shot and killed someone (in self-defence) gets no jail time.
