There is something profoundly troubling about the case of Keith and Di Blessing, an elderly New South Wales couple whose nightmare began not in some dangerous city street but in their own home.
Keith Blessing was 75. His wife Di was 72. According to police, a 34-year-old man broke into their rural home at Torrington, about 65 kilometres south-west of Tenterfield, shortly after midnight on June 4. The couple were allegedly attacked with a knife. Di suffered a chest wound. Keith was wounded across the abdomen. Both were critically injured.
This was not an elderly couple confronting a hypothetical danger. They were being stabbed.
Police allege that the attacker left before attempting to enter the house again. Keith obtained his legally held firearm and shot the alleged intruder as he attempted to re-enter. The alleged intruder survived and has been charged with serious offences, including two counts of wounding with intent to murder. Keith Blessing has not been charged.
Di subsequently described her husband as her hero and said that without him she did not believe she would still be alive.
Yet Keith's firearms licence was suspended following the shooting, and according to his family it remains suspended. The family has specifically corrected reports claiming that it has already been revoked. It has not. According to Di Blessing, Keith contacted the Firearms Registry and was told that it could take a further 12 months for authorities to decide whether his licence will be restored or revoked.
That distinction matters. We should get the facts right. But getting the facts right does not make the underlying situation any less disturbing.
Here is a 75-year-old man who, according to the police account, was attacked with a knife in his own home. His 72-year-old wife was stabbed in the chest. He himself suffered serious abdominal wounds and subsequently required extensive hospital treatment. When the alleged attacker attempted to return, Keith used a firearm.
The criminal law recognises a right of self-defence, subject to legal requirements concerning the circumstances and the reasonableness of the response. Whether those requirements are satisfied in any particular case is ultimately a legal question, not something that should be decided by newspaper columnists.
But the Blessing case exposes a more fundamental problem that exists before lawyers begin parsing statutes. The law may give a 75-year-old the same formal right of self-defence as a 25-year-old. Biology does not give him the same means of exercising it.
That distinction becomes enormously important when discussing firearms and self-defence. Imagine telling an elderly man that he has every right to defend himself against a younger attacker armed with a knife. Very well. How? Should he wrestle him? Should his 72-year-old wife overpower him? Should Keith rely upon superior speed, strength and reflexes? The absurdity becomes apparent as soon as the abstraction of "self-defence" encounters the physical reality of ageing.
An elderly person, a disabled person, a small woman or anyone substantially weaker than an attacker may possess precisely the same legal rights as a young, strong man while possessing radically different physical capacities to exercise those rights.
A firearm changes that equation. That is precisely why firearms in the hands of law-abiding elderly people raise a self-defence question that cannot simply be answered by saying that guns are dangerous. Of course guns are dangerous. That is why societies regulate them. But knives wielded by violent intruders are also dangerous. The wounds suffered by Keith and Di Blessing demonstrate that with terrible clarity.
The important question is what happens when a physically vulnerable person confronts somebody who is stronger, younger and already inflicting potentially lethal violence.
Australia does not generally recognise firearm ownership for personal protection as Americans understand it. That is our existing legal framework. One need not demand wholesale transplantation of the American Second Amendment to recognise that the Blessing case presents a serious problem within the Australian system itself.
Indeed, the matter has now reached the New South Wales Parliament. In September the Legislative Council debated an amendment intended to ensure that lawful use of a licensed firearm in self-defence could not, by itself, establish that its owner was no longer a fit and proper person to possess firearms.
The debate specifically concerned Keith Blessing. Whatever one thinks of the proposed amendment, the principle behind the controversy deserves attention. If somebody lawfully possesses a firearm, experiences an extraordinary emergency and uses that firearm in legally justified self-defence, should the very act that saved him automatically count against his suitability to continue possessing it?
There is an obvious reason for temporarily securing firearms while police investigate a shooting. Nobody seriously disputes that police must establish what happened whenever somebody is shot.
The troubling part is what follows. An administrative process that leaves a 75-year-old man without his firearm for potentially another year after an incident in which he and his elderly wife were nearly killed raises a different question. Investigation is one thing. Prolonged deprivation after the essential facts have been established is another.
The irony is difficult to miss. Keith and Di now know, in a way most Australians fortunately never will, that violent people can enter their rural home, with a police response perhaps 30 minutes away. They know that calling Triple Zero does not instantaneously materialise a police officer in the living room. They know that age and physical vulnerability matter when an attacker has a knife.
And after surviving that experience, they may spend many months waiting for an administrative decision about whether Keith can again possess the firearm that potentially prevented an already horrific attack from becoming something worse.
This is particularly important in rural Australia. Police cannot be everywhere, and distances necessarily mean that response times can be longer than those experienced in metropolitan areas.
Self-defence must remain self-defence. Force must be judged according to the threat actually faced. Firearm owners must comply with licensing and storage laws. Police must investigate shootings.
But neither should the law create a situation in which the theoretical right to self-defence becomes practically meaningless for those physically least capable of defending themselves.
There is a deeper philosophical point here. Rights that cannot realistically be exercised can become strangely hollow. Tell an elderly couple that they possess a right to defend their lives, but remove every effective means by which they might overcome a younger and stronger violent attacker, and the right begins to look better on paper than it does at midnight when somebody comes through the door with a knife.
Keith Blessing's case asks a question that opponents and supporters of firearms alike should be willing to confront. What does the right of self-defence actually mean for the old, the frail and the physically weak?
The Blessings did not encounter that question in a university seminar. They encountered it in their bedroom, in the middle of the night, with blood being spilled. Whatever ultimately happens to Keith's firearms licence, that reality should not disappear beneath administrative procedure.
A society that recognises a right of self-defence must think seriously not merely about the right in the abstract, but about whether vulnerable people have any realistic means of exercising it when the police cannot arrive in time.
For a strong young man, physical strength may sometimes provide that means. For a 75-year-old facing a younger man with a knife, it may not. That is the Keith Blessing paradox: the people who may have the greatest need for an effective means of self-defence can be the people physically least capable of defending themselves without one.
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