The "Stand Your Ground" act is extending the "Castle Doctrine" that made it easier to kill baddies in your home, place of business, or car. Now the legislature (94-20 in the House / 39-0 in the Senate) is removing the last impediments to killing wherever you feel threatened.
Outside the home, however, courts have ruled that most victims must at least attempt to escape before using deadly force, a provision gun advocates say puts victims at greater risk. The proposal removes that requirement if a person has a reasonable fear of death or great bodily harm.
Critics say the measure could lead to racially motivated killings and promote deadly escalations of arguments.
"All this bill will do is sell more guns and possibly turn Florida into the OK Corral," said Democratic state Rep. Irv Slosberg of Boca Raton.
Shakespeare's Sister asked" Who in his right mind prefers to go on the offensive and take someone else’s life on the chance that the other person means to take his?" While her "right mind" proviso may have excused him from competition, the obvious answer is George Dobeliou Bush (and his friends -- I passed a quote from Condi somewhere today about the danger of "under-reacting" to insufficient intelligence). Killing pre-emptively is a national foreign policy that will now be extended domestically -- with the inevitable stroke of Dubya's little brother's pen -- to the streets of Miami, Orlando, and The Magic Kingdom.
And while Jeb and the other "Culture of Lifers" thought it was wrong to kill Terri Schiavo by removing her feeding tube, I guess it would have been OK to shoot her if you mistook an involuntary twitch for a threat. After all, no one is ever held responsible for bad intelligence in today's modern America.
Let's stand OUR ground. Spread the word about this latest legislative atrocity in your own way, and please think twice before planning a vacation in Florida.
Is there an Activist Judge in the house?
True Blue Liberal
2 comments:
Are you seriously saying that an honest citizen, when threatened with grievous bodily harm or death by a criminal, is just supposed to run away and hope for the best? Given the spate of horrible child murders in Florida, what other remedy would you suggest to help make citizens safe from criminal predators? The police can't be everywhere, and I'm sure that nobody would really want them to be, anyway.
There have been dire predictions that our streets would become modern-day Dodge Cities if various gun control laws were repealed or allowed to lapse or if concealed carry laws were passed. These predictions have not proved true, and I suspect that it will be the same with the "Stand Your Ground" law. Indeed, statistics show that states with concealed carry laws, which were also supposed to cause routine gunfights on city streets, have lower crime rates than states without such laws. (The interested reader is referred to "Confirming 'More Guns, Less Crime'" by Florenz Plassmann & John Whitley, Stanford Law Review 55, pp. 1313 - 1369.
(http://johnrlott.tripod.com/Plassmann_Whitley.pdf)
We've come to an interesting pass in human history when we have to ask the government to give us the right to defend our own lives.
I agree. I don't understand why "liberals" have such a hard time with someone protecting his or her family from an intruder.
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