Can the American gun-rights movement ever go too far, politically?

[kpete]

March 23, 2012
EMMETT TILL IN SANFORD
Posted by William Finnegan


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Openly racist, all-white juries made certain that the confessed killers of Emmett Till (who was fourteen) walked free in Mississippi in 1955. In Florida today, the Stand Your Ground law may yet block the workings of justice. The law extends the traditional Castle Doctrine, under which the use of force is permitted to defend one’s home, to the highways and beaches and bars, affording legal immunity to someone who uses “deadly force if he or she reasonably believes it is necessary to do so to prevent death or great bodily harm to himself or herself or another or to prevent the commission of a forcible felony.” Note the freewheeling vigilantism invited by the last phrase, “or to prevent the commission of a forcible felony.” This is a true “shoot first” law. It even bars civil suits by the family of the deceased. Its passage was strongly backed and loudly celebrated by the National Rifle Association, whose leaders vowed to replicate Stand Your Ground in other states. To date, with the help of the American Legislative Exchange Council, which is a secretive, corporate-funded, right-wing pressure group, the N.R.A. has succeeded in getting Stand Your Ground laws passed in some twenty states.


Can the American gun-rights movement ever go too far, politically? In Florida, prosecutors and police associations opposed Stand Your Ground, to no effect. Since the law was passed, the number of “justifiable homicides” has tripled. Last year, according to the Tampa Bay Times, “twice a week, on average, someone’s killing was considered warranted.” This week, the state attorney in Tallahassee, Willie Meggs, told the Times, “The consequences of the law have been devastating around the state. It’s almost insane what we are having to deal with.” Gang members, drug dealers, and road-rage killers are, according to Meggs, all successfully invoking Stand Your Ground. “The person who is alive always says, ‘I was in fear that he was going to hurt me.’ … And the other person would say, ‘I wasn’t going to hurt anyone.’ But he is dead. That is the problem they are wrestling with in Sanford.”

That is one of the problems they are wrestling with in Sanford.


Read more http://www.newyorker.com/online/blogs/comment/2012/03/trayvon-martin-sanford-florida.html#ixzz1pxqkSPGK

[liberal N proud]

1. Not in their own eyes

[enough]

2. I have often wondered if there was anything at all that could limit the claim of gun-rights.

It sometimes seems that, seen through a certain lens, gun rights supersede all other rights, and the rights of all others.