The people crusading against Florida’s Stand Your Ground (SYG) law readily admit that SYG had nothing to do with the Zimmerman or Michael Dunn cases – and then blame SYG for Trayvon Martin’s and Jordan Davis’ death.
Commentator Dennis Trainor Jr. [in the video above] does the SYG two-step with the best of them: “They’re also angry at the ALEC-written Stand Your Ground laws that – while it played no direct role in your not guilty verdict – played a very direct role in the culture that empowers you to cruise around packing heat in the first place.”
So even if the law’s right, it’s wrong. Over to you, Al Sharpton . . .
“To have laws that tell people that they can shoot first and then ask questions later is a violation of our civil rights. I believe that law is inherently wrong,” Sharpton said before the march began. “The law in effect says based on your imagination — if you imagine I’m a threat — you have the right to kill me.”
Sharpton’s misrepresentation of the facts was so blatant that ABC News felt obliged to sum up the actual law in their otherwise obsequious report on the march.
“Florida law says people who are not involved in illegal activity have the right to stand their ground and meet force with force, including deadly force, if they reasonably believe it’s necessary to avoid death or great bodily harm.”
The bit that the protestors always seem to miss: it’s up to the police, prosecution, judge and perhaps jury to decide what constitutes a “reasonable belief.” Truth be told, SYG is a logical, indeed relatively minor extension of “common sense” laws regarding the use of lethal force. It simply removes the obligation to retreat from a lethal threat and protects victims from civil lawsuits after a successful adjudication.
Which make one wonder what exactly the anti-SYG protestors are protesting about. Oh wait. Racism.
“What the law is actually saying is this country doesn’t value the life of black and brown kids. We want our kids to understand their lives are equal value of anybody else life,” the elder Martin said.
Quick question: what was the point of the Civil Rights movement? I thought it was a crusade by African-Americans to claim the economic, political and personal freedoms enshrined in the United States Constitution. To my mind those “civil rights” include the Second Amendment-protected right to keep and bear arms.
At what point did that noble crusade turn into a mindless jihad against a law that protects all Floridians from violent assault, regardless of their race, creed or color?
The way I see it, the SYG march was a cynical attempt to paint African-Americans as victims. In some ways, it was successful. Which made it a miserable failure.