Anthony, a small adult man, who works the graveyard shift and resides in Baltimore County, was unwinding on his night off, enjoying a night ‘away from the grind’. Anthony is a low income guy who owns a new motor scooter which he rides to work, and to play on the pool league he competes in. Anthony looks a lot like comedian Bob Newhart did in the 1970s.

“My neighbor comes home, knocks on my door, and says that kids are messing with my scooter. I go look outside and there are these four punks—fourteen, fifteen I’d say—pushing, and pulling and tugging at my scooter. I keep it chained to the pole in the lot out back. They don’t have bolt cutters so they’re trying to use the scooter as a lever to break the chain—and the mirror, the plastic body, is all getting busted up.

“I ran to the phone and got nine-one-one. The dispatcher said they were five minutes out. I said that in five minutes there would be nothing left of my scooter and that I was going to run them off. The dispatcher told me not to go outside, to let the ‘responding officer’ handle it.

“I hung up, got my bat, and ran outside. The three smart ones ran off into the woods behind Pulaski Highway. The dummy ran up the alley so I lit out after him. By the time I ran him to the end of the alley a cop pulled up—really it was like four minutes—and took him down.

“He gave me a verbal warning for having the bat and taking things into my own hands. Said there was a better way. He said it was a bad idea, that they could have gotten all of them if I had waited. Two other cops showed up too. He told the kid that he was either ratting out his friends or taking it all himself. He gave me a call back number so I could call in the estimate from the bike shop.

“A friend told me I should not have called, should just have gone out there and cracked some heads. You write about this violence stuff. Do you think that would have been the right thing to do? Could I have gotten away with it?”

“Well, I’ve read the Annotated Code of Maryland a few times and its real murky on lot of stuff. It is clear on the fact that you can only use force to protect yourself or others from harm, and then only just enough force, and only when you have no other reasonable option. Nowhere is there a provision for avenging damage to you property, or even using force to protect your property. Also, keep in mind that you would never lay that bat on all four dudes, probably not even two. So then you have two or three witnesses telling the cops that you snuck up on their buddy and clocked him. Hospitals charge more for repairing humans than bike shops do for repairing scooters. Even if it just went civil, which is unlikely, you would have come up short there too.”

“Yeah, that’s pretty much what the cop said, that violence should not be the first answer. But it just gets to you after a while that you have to take all of this shit from people. The cops were on it—did their job last night.”

I am currently reading opinions by the Maryland Court of Special Appeals, as the code itself is obviously a rough guide for legal arguments, not a precise set of behavioral rules like we have in sports or table top war gaming. I’ll be doing a piece on this before summer is out.