Step 1: Violate Rule 4 and shoot through the door.
I was in my house in North Carolina. It was fall. I heard someone walking on the leaves. And somebody actually turned the knob. So I said, “Stand four feet back because I’m going to shoot now!” Boom! Boom!
Step 2: Lie to the cops about it.
The police came by and said, “Ms. Angelou, the shots came from inside the house.” I said, “Well, I don’t know how that happened.”
Marginally more felonious than Joe Biden’s “shoot into the air” strategy for home defense.
Before Castle passed in North Carolina, the law said that you could use deadly force to stop a person attempting to forcibly and unlawfully enter your occupied property. Castle says you can also use deadly force to stop a person who has already entered your property.
It is, was, and will remain perfectly legal in North Carolina to shoot through your door at a person forcibly and unlawfully attempting to enter your occupied property.
I recommend that you be a little more sure of your target than that, but the fact remains that North Carolina does not require you to wait until your intruder gets the door open before you give him what he is so obviously asking for.
For real? Man, your state is so odd.
If she’d gone outside and someone saw her with the shotgun, could she have been charged with that going armed to the terror of the public thing you guys have?
Dude, no! ATT is an ancient common law crime. It requires you to do a couple of things. First, you have to be armed with a dangerous and unusual weapon. Guns count, but I don’t think that the Supreme Court would agree. Second, and this is critical, you have to be openly carrying that dangerous and unusual weapon for the purpose of terrifying the public.
Carrying a gun isn’t an offense. Marching through a black neighborhood wearing a Klan hood and waving a scythe is. It’s not the weapon, it’s the intent to terrorize.
And what’s odd about shooting through the door? Do you really demand that the criminal get the door open before you cap him? What’s good about that? Once they’ve signaled their intent to enter your occupied property, they’re fair game. Now you can shoot them anywhere on your “curtilage,” which basically means any part of your property around your home. That’s all the way to the sidewalk. You just have to be able to show, by the preponderance of the evidence, that they were engaged in an attempt to forcibly and unlawfully enter your occupied property.