If kids are driving through the neighborhood, busting down mailboxes with a baseball bat, then am I in the right for filling up my mailbox with cement and mount it in place for the next time?

Morally or legally?

Actually, it’s complex either way.

If you fill the thing with cement, then it’s clear that you’re doing it for no purpose other than harming the people who are knocking the mailbox down. You can’t say that you were worried about your mailbox being destroyed, because you effectively destroyed it yourself. It’s clear that your intent was to ‘teach a lesson’ by hurting the people who were knocking them over.

That may be satisfying, and a lot of people would brush it off as the kids getting what was coming to them, but if the consequences were worse than you expected (and it is possible for someone to get killed as a result), then you could potentially face legal consequences.

On the other hand, if you simply reinforced the mailbox so it couldn’t be easily broken, your case would be much stronger. This could be done with something like steel pipe, but could still be done with cement.

In that case, I suspect you’d be less likely to get in legal trouble. There’s no law against making a mailbox too strong, and you have a real argument that you were simply building your own property so it was hard to break, which shouldn’t be illegal in any logical sense.

Morally, I’d still say it depends on your intent. I genuinely understand the urge to see those punks break an arm or something, and hopefully stop doing that crap. At the same time, I couldn’t morally justify trying to make that happen. Reinforcing your box is fine, but trying to camouflage it in hopes that they’ll try something, so you can take joy in their pain, strikes me as over the line. Taking it upon yourself to hurt people who do bad things, or even trick them into hurting themselves, strikes me as a very dark path to start down.

How much you could get away with depends on where you live, and probably how sympathetic the cops and prosecutors in your area are. I’m all for defending your property, but hoping that dumb kids doing dumb kid stuff get grievously injured feels more than a little uncharitable.

EDIT: I’m disabling comments because this keeps getting variations on the same two or three comments and nothing else. Check through the thread, odds are someone has already left effectively the comment you want to add.