Culture Corner: Is it true that you can shoot and kill and intruder in the United States?

In this episode of The A to Z English Podcast, Xochitl and Jack discuss whether or not it is legal to shoot and kill an intruder in the United States. Transcript: 00:00:01 Jack Welcome to the A to Z English podcast. My name is Jack and I'm here with my co-host social. And today we are in the culture corner. And so so we've got a really weird question today from students. But I mean, it makes sense. Like, if you watch the news in America, I kind of understand why they would. 00:00:21 Jack Be interested in this topic and so I think you and I can do our best. We're not law enforcement experts or anything like that. We're just going based on our understanding of our own. 00:00:32 Jack Culture. But the question is, is it true that in the United States, if an intruder comes into your home, you are allowed to kill the person and you won't have to face any charges, so you won't go to jail for killing that person? 00:00:54 Xochitl I think in general it's true, but I do want to like, say, a caveat that it really depends like state by state states have stronger like standard ground laws and like gun laws and stuff like ones that you in the right more so, but other ones are like a little more strict because the US doesn't have a central government. 00:01:15 Xochitl Like, it's not like the federal government dictates. 00:01:18 Xochitl Things for every state across the board, the states kind of make their own legislation and a lot of the federal laws are just like guidelines. So. 00:01:28 Jack And it's a federation of states since and, which means that each state can experiment with with laws that are a little bit different than other states, but they're still federal law, which is the the which is is the law for everybody. So it's kind of weird. Some laws apply to every every state and some laws. 00:01:44 Xochitl Right, that's. 00:01:48 Jack Are just in one state or another state. 00:01:52 Xochitl Right, right. And so there are certain things that are like federal crimes, obviously doesn't matter what state you're in, but there are other ones that it does vary by state and gun laws and standard ground laws and things like that and self-defense laws do vary by state. So that makes it a little complicated. But on the whole, I would say. 00:02:16 Xochitl You're probably more likely to get away with claiming self-defense by shooting an intruder that entered your home. Then you would be in many other countries. 00:02:28 Jack Yeah. Now I agree with everything you just said. I think it's great then and there's a couple of other things that I want to add to this too. Statistically, if you have a gun in your house, you are much more likely to instead of killing an intruder, you are much more likely to kill a member of your family or yourself. 00:02:48 Jack Like statistically, uh, you know. 00:02:52 Jack You hear some sound in your in your kitchen. You grab your gun. 00:02:57 Jack You walk in there, you see a shadowy figure. You shoot that person. Ohh, no, that's not your that's not your an intruder. It's your your husband or wife making a midnight snack. You know. I mean, how many times has that happened? I think this is like a real problem. 00:03:17 Jack With, with with the guns in America, the, the, the way we think about guns. 00:03:24 Jack As a good guy, shooting a bad guy. Yeah, it's it's easy in the movies, it's very clean and simple. But in real life, it's very dangerous and and often it doesn't work out the way we think it will. 00:03:39 Xochitl Yeah, there are tons of super sad stories. Like there's some that I've read. For example, there was one where a girl was hiding in a closet to prank. I think her friend who was like in the house, who was cleaning his gun and they were. I want to say like they were. 00:03:58 Xochitl Teenagers, I think. 00:04:00 Xochitl And he was cleaning a gun in the household and she jumped out of the closet and scared him, and he shot her and killed her. 00:04:09 Jack Yeah, this happens all the time in America