I'm just going to stand here on my Rational Thinking soapbox and piss into the wind a little more now...
Speaking as someone who had things stolen, went about it the legal way... Found the items on craigslist. Set up a buy and made an attempt to get my stuff back. The police only fucked things up. Basically the guy claimed the stuff wasn't stolen, etc... and the cops were there and told me there was nothing I could do if there wasn't blood or semen on my stereo equipment to identify it. Had I just been there without the cops I would have come away with my belongings. Because I did it the right way and the cops were there, I got fucked.
That sounds simple enough. But the ability for your preferred scenario to go sideways is great.
Personally, I'm
always armed when I meet strangers off the internet, and if the item is high dollar enough, I always have an armed buddy as well waiting in my vehicle.
And contrary to all daydreams, confrontations rarely go the way you think that will.
For those of you who think bringing the entire
Big Dick Booger club into the fray to back you up will help - you're outnumbering someone gives them even more solid legal grounds to defend themselves with violent and lethal force. The fun and games and intimidation for justice goes out the window when people start bleeding out from sucking chest wounds because you wanted to handle it with your posse. Explain that to their kids. "Well gee, sorry your pa died, but someone stole one of my material possessions, and it was important enough to put all of us at risk and well... he took the first bullet."
Then, legally speaking, the other side of that coin is this:
Someone lists an item for sale.
I claim it is was stolen from me with no evidence or proof supporting my claim.
Cops force them to give it to me because I said so.
Then they claim, "The system is broken."
Our legal system is set up on the belief that you are innocent until proven guilty beyond reasonable doubt.
Sometimes that bites us, but the 'guilty until proven innocent' is the sort of Brett Kavanaugh garbage that makes it easy to ruin or destroy with nothing but hearsay. That's the stuff of absolute legalistic anarchism and no one has any sort of protection against ruination from anyone else.
Our system is flawed, it ain't perfect, there are gaps in laws, gaps in judges abilities and decisions, differences in the arresting officers, attorneys, chain of evidence, all sorts of stuff. Even laws that protect one group of people better than another.
But most of it is good and exists for a reason to protect YOU from OTHERS. Your misgivings on the legal system aren't entirely incorrect, but your decisions of taking the law into your own hands is.
The juice ain't worth the squeeze.
Anyways, I'm beating a dead horse into a gooey pulp at this point.
By the way, you all stole beer from me. I demand you return it. It's Rolling Rock, in glass bottles.
Chilled.