re: Should you be allowed to booby trap your home?

Normally, I'm all for doing whatever the frick you want to do as long as it's on your property and it doesn't affect me.

But I'll be damned if I'm gonna booby trap my property. If someone dies on my property, it's going to be because I made the conscious choice to pull a trigger, not because an indiscriminate trap went off. That sort of thing is irrevocable and requires a decision at the moment.

That said, when someone wants to talk to me at 7 am to find out if I've accepted Jesus Christ as my personal lord and savior, I wish I'd mined the front yard. I'm conflicted.

One of my colleagues had a patient that had a meth lab in an abandoned house. My colleague claims that the guy had the bright idea to borrow a page from the Viet Cong. He built a trap ledge above the doors and put rattlesnakes in the aquarium. He rigged it so that if someone did not know to pull the rope and undo the knot before opening the door all the way or if the police tried to knock the door in, the rope would turn the aquarium over on top of whomever was coming in the door. Of course the reason why my colleague had him as a pt was because he knocked the aquarium off while setting the trap and he got bit by his own booby trap.