I think speculation as to the circumstances in this particular case are ill-advised at this stage as some questions spring to mind without the full facts. Why did the police arrest the whole family? Did all three of them stab one person? Is there some other story here? Anyway – enough ill-advised speculation.

As a general point, the last I heard was that we do not have capital punishment for burglary and actually murdering someone would almost certainly be more than “reasonable force”.
As Misha says, where is the line drawn. Someone is in your house – is it OK to kill them? Say they are in your garden or on your drive – is it still OK? What about threatening your family or property in a public place? Is that OK as well?

None of us know what we would do in similar circumstances which is maybe just as well. It is easy to be brave behind a keyboard but maybe not so easy if it happens for real.

What about one of the Canaries? Should be able to get a decent deal for October.

Watched Transporter 2 on Film 4 last night – not as good as the first film but still pretty good.
After that on Film 4 was a thing called “A Town Called Panic” an animated Belgian film – one of the funniest things I’ve seen in ages. Animation like the Cravendale adverts with cows and cyclists. Worth catching if it’s on Film4 again this week.

How about Florida? Beaches, weather, cities and pretty cheap as well.

I’m not sure I understand the problem. If there are those who repeatedly post off-thread nonsense and fail to keep to the rules, why aren’t they given a little rest from the forum for a week or two? Closing GD would seem to me to be a classic case of punishing everyone for the sake of a few miscreants.

Fair play to Merlin3945 who keeps trying to post on-topic stuff while all around him talk about the forum in general.

If GD is closed, I’ll be sorry to see it go but it’s no big deal. It’s an internet forum – that’s all. I’ll go elsewhere (as I do already anyway). Years ago airliners.net had similar problems with their off-topic forum and it was closed for a while. It returned but only after some fairly strict rules about posting were introduced. It is still around today.

But why does the statement about the future of GD come across like punishment or a threat?

The last thread was locked because of appalling thread drift and some posters that failed to obey simple rules. It had the makings of a decent discussion but rather than prune the thread of irrelevance, it was locked. It’s the main reason I haven’t bothered with this one. It is likely to go the same way – probably with the same culprits as well.

Perhaps it was closed because it had degenerated into nonsense – as so many threads seem to.

Merlin3945, I don’t think it was you that caused the thread closure.