America isn’t a perfect country, but it’s far better than other first world nations across the pond. Namely, ones that have odd speech laws and backwards views about self defense.

Recently, the UK sentenced a man to prison for making a mild Nazi dog joke, and now they’ve arrested another for defending his own home with lethal force.

According to the Daily Mail, Richard Osborn-Brooks is a 78-year-old man who was woken up by two burglars in his south-east London home while he was sleeping next to his wife. One of the burglars forced Brooks into his kitchen, wielding a screwdriver as a weapon.

The near-octogenarian attacked one of the burglars, a 38-year-old male, and reportedly stabbed him repeatedly with his own screwdriver.

The second burglar apparently fled the scene, and the stabbed burglar was found dead in the street after he too had attempted to escape.

According to the Daily Mail, witnesses described the escape attempt, which ended in the stabbed burglar being abandoned by his cohorts:

Gordon Williams, 44, saw the man on the ground with a stab wound to the chest before another man tried, unsuccessfully, to get him into a white van. The van then drove off before police and paramedics then arrived at the scene.

Mr Williams said: ‘He was a white bloke about my age. I had just gone to to bed and I heard moaning and groaning. I thought it was someone drunk but I looked out of the window.

‘There was a black guy in a white van. I thought he was trying to drag him into the van, but then he drove off down the road.’

Gordon said he then went out of the house to the injured man and added: ‘I just tried to reassure him. His t-shirt was covered in blood.’

It should have been a case of “all’s well that ends well,” but the UK’s backward system of laws wasn’t going to just chalk one up for the good guys. According to the Daily Mail, Brooks was arrested on suspicion of murder:

The homeowner was initially detained on suspicion of causing grievous bodily harm but was later arrested on suspicion of murder. The case has been compared to that of Tony Martin, who was jailed for killing an intruder at his home in 1999.

By all accounts given by his neighbors, Brooks is a good and friendly man. What’s more, they all seem confused about his arrest.

As well they should be. Whatever system of laws punishes a person from defending his or her home, loved ones, and livelihood from danger is a backward one and should be disposed of and replaced immediately. If someone can’t defend themselves from danger, with lethal force if need be, then that society is not a free society.

There are fundamental rights and freedoms of man, as part of nature and a child of Creation, that once taken make that man no longer free. If you cannot defend your life, you have no life that is yours. If you cannot fight for your freedom to live, then you are not free.

If the United Kingdom has devolved so far into fearful nanny statism, if it has fallen into a state that denies a man the authority and dominion over his over his very existence, then it is no longer a free society.

Where a normal citizen can take whatever measure, even lethal, when that measure is rightfully and fairly called for, there is a society in which those who would participate in evil will be forced to weigh their life against their deed. If there is no consequence to deter evil, then what deters it?

The sovereign safety of an individual human being springs from the societal understanding that each person has that authority, and that when used justly, that person will applauded. Not arrested.

What Britain is telling its citizens is that defending oneself is off the table. What it’s telling its criminals is that the society is theirs for the taking.

Let it be a wake-up call, if any is even needed, to every American who can see the same freedom to defend under attack here at home. The U.K. is our canary in the coal mine. And that canary is getting mugged, invaded upon, and arrested.

Take note.