Stand Your Stupid Ground

I think people who believe it is cool/necessary/smart to carry guns in public, concealed or otherwise, are idiots, living in some kind of imaginative, wild-west, individualistic free-for-all world. Perhaps they even have small cocks, as has been suggested. But that is all a matter for debate; perhaps I'm wrong. Perhaps the sun will come up in the west tomorrow too.

What should no longer be a matter of debate and what has nothing at all to do with the 2nd amendment is the fact that the so-called Stand Your Ground Laws are a disaster, based on the evidence of how they are working. 

The latest ridiculous example is a mistrial in the case of a white Jacksonville, Florida man who shot and killed an unarmed black teen in a parking lot in a dispute over loud music. He claimed in court that he saw the teenager point a shotgun at him, but police confirm there was no shotgun, or any other weapon. With SYG laws, all the man had to do is convince one member of the jury that he thought he saw a shotgun and felt threatened. It's hard to explain why he still felt threatened and had to keep shooting even as the car was pulling away, but I suppose that is quibbling. At least the killer faces 20-60 years of prison time for a series of lesser charges of which he was convicted, and we can hope he gets something close to the high end. And we can also hope that the prosecutor will retry the murder charge.

With SYG laws, all the killer has to do is convince a jury that he/she reasonably felt threatened, even if the threat was an imaginary shotgun. Sometimes all the killer has to do is convince the police and the DA, and the case never even makes it to a jury. The homeowner in Georgia who killed a 72 year-old alzheimer's victim who rang his doorbell at 4am might not face any charges at all because of SYG.

Then there was the homeowner in Florida who killed a black teenage who rang his doorbell at 2am seeking help when her car, or the car in which she was riding, broke down. Never mind that she was already moving away from the door and had her back to the killer when he felt so threatened he had to start shooting.

One wonders when the sound of ringing doorbells in the night became life threatening.

Or take the case of the Florida (I think) homeowner who shot and killed a young person who had been in his back yard. Again, never mind that the young man had already jumped the fence and left the yard before the homeowner felt his life was threatened and started blasting.

These are just the cases that come to mind on short notice. I know that the killers, in all of these cases, claimed SYG as a defense. How the cases are progressing through the justice system I do not know. I also have no evidence that SYG laws influenced any of these killers prior to their pulling the trigger. There have always been trigger-happy gun nuts after all. But there is no doubt that SYG laws have provided, at the very least, a convenient after-the-fact justification for the killer's bad judgment. And I think it is reasonable to believe that SYG laws have had an effect on the prevailing culture so that people with guns feel freer to use them. That, after all, was the stated intent of the legislators who passed the SYG laws in the first place.

One caveat that these self-styled vigilante saviors of the world should keep in mind before pulling the trigger: it is best to feel threatened by a young black man. The retired Florida cop who carried a gun into a movie theater presumably felt safer because of that gun. John Dillinger, Lee Harvey Oswald and the Aurora, Colorado mass killer all frequented movie theaters, and maybe this guy just believed in being prepared for the worst. Still I suspect he is going to have a difficult time convincing a jury that he felt reasonably threatened by popcorn thrown in his face (or not). But only because the alleged popcorn thrower was a nice respectable middle-class white family man. If it had been a black teen in a hoodie, the killer would have nothing to worry about.

Again, this is not a 2nd amendment issue, no matter how much the NRA might want its members to believe it is. This is not about the the right to own guns or the right to carry guns in public. It is a public safety issue about how you use those guns and the responsibility that comes with gun ownership.