Shoot first law: What could possibly go wrong?

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simon_says
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08 Mar 2012, 2:42 pm

CoMF wrote:

I'm a bit late coming to this discussion, but the way I see it, if the person had the ability, opportunity, and intent to harm and/or kill you and you had no means of escape, the use of lethal force is perfectly justified. When any one of those elements are missing, using force tends to work against you. Also, punishing someone for protecting themselves makes no sense from a moral or philosphical perspective, especially when law enforcement may take an eternity to reach you.

More importantly, if you aren't comfortable with the thought of owning any kind of weapon, don't own one and don't deprive responsible individuals of their civil right to protect their lives and dignity.

The end.

But that's not what the thread is about. Stand your ground laws mean you don't have to retreat. In fact you can step into trouble, not retreat, and kill someone if you believe they were a threat. They don't need to have a weapon or even be particularly threatening. And if it's just the two of you, and you kill the other guy, you can say whatever you like.

It's certainly been abused in Florida as that link points out. There was talk of repealing it after it was used to justify a gang shootout in the street. lol. The previous governor even talked about it.

Quote:

One of the law's biggest critics is Willie Meggs, the state attorney for six counties in the Panhandle. He says he's a strong believer in gun rights but thinks the law is just another valuable tool for killers. The old law was working just fine, he says. He petitioned the Legislature to address the law last year. Nothing.

"Gangsters are using this law to have gunfights," he said. "That's exactly what this law breeds."

In 2008, two gangs in Tallahassee got into a shoot-out. A 15-year-old boy was killed. A judge dismissed charges against the shooters, citing "stand your ground."

"Before this law, we would have had a duty to avoid that," Meggs said. "I should not meet you in the street for a gunfight."

He says it devalues human life.

CoMF
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08 Mar 2012, 3:53 pm

simon_says wrote:

Really? Because I thought it had more to do with liability in self-defense scenarios rather than forcing someone to do something they may not necessarily be comfortable with. You can still flee under those laws, if you choose to do so.

As far as the "don't need to have a weapon or even be particularly threatening" aspect, I don't see how the criminal justice system would have its hands tied behind its back in that it can no longer determine whether a shooting was "justified" or was a potential murder due to suspicious circumstances, unless of course the law itself had a specific flaw which prevented it. Should that be the case, I'd prefer that attention be drawn to the actual text of the law in question rather than political rhetoric.

Incidentally, unless you can prove that there was a "disparity of force," you're going to have a difficult time convincing a judge and jury that shooting an unarmed attacker was "justified."

simon_says wrote:

It's certainly been abused in Florida as that link points out.

There was talk of repealing it after it was used to justify a gang shootout in the street. lol. The previous governor even talked about it.

Again, which part of the law(s) in question prevent these shootings from being classified as "suspicious" or potential murders? On their face, I would have challeneged these rulings and appealed to higher courts.

simon_says
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08 Mar 2012, 4:08 pm

You can read the article as well as I can. They just need to establish that they felt threatened. If the police and DA believe that you honestly felt a threat, they may not even file a charge. Real threat doesnt need to be proven. So most of the cases in the article never reached a jury or judge. These were people killing their neighbors based on a perception of threat.

If the cases in the article don't trouble you, well....

CoMF
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08 Mar 2012, 4:33 pm

simon_says wrote:

Real threat doesnt need to be proven. So most of the cases in the article never reached a jury or judge. These were people killing their neighbors based on a perception of threat.

If the cases in the article don't trouble you, well....

They trouble me in that, as a matter of public policy, I don't see what good can come from the use of deadly force under suspicious circumstances. I sincerely doubt this was the intent of the framers of this legislation, but once again, this requires a closer look at the actual laws and the reasoning behind the DA's/judge's decisions, not political rhetoric. From there, we can challenge things accordingly.

simon_says
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08 Mar 2012, 5:27 pm

CoMF wrote:

simon_says wrote:

Here's another one from the same article. Even the law's co sponsor thought it was ridiculous.

Quote:

One of those numbers: Michael Frazzini, 35, Cape Coral, father of two, decorated Army helicopter pilot who served five tours of duty. Now dead. Frazzini's elderly mother thought a 22-year-old neighbor was disturbing her property. One night in 2006, Frazzini stopped by to check things out. The neighbor later told authorities that he encountered Frazzini wearing a camouflage mask and wielding what looked like a pipe. The neighbor pulled a knife. The neighbor's father came out next and, thinking the masked man might attack his son, fired one shot from his .357 revolver into Frazzini's chest.

Frazzini died in his mother's back yard. The pipe turned out to be a 14-inch baseball bat.

The shooter walked away uncharged. A prosecutor said nobody involved in the decision felt good about it. Neither did one of the law's co-sponsors.

"The intent is that you can only use the same amount of force as you believe will be used against you," Lt. Gov. Jeff Kottkamp, then a state representative, said at the time. "It certainly wasn't that you can shoot and kill somebody wielding a souvenir baseball bat."

Maybe so. But there is no provision specifically barring someone with a permit from bringing a gun to a knife fight, let alone to a brawl that starts with fists.

People that should be catching Manslaughter charges are walking away with a "whoops".

Dox47
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08 Mar 2012, 5:39 pm

So, any stats beyond a few newspaper anecdotes? Self defense gone awry shooting do happen, but are rare enough to be deemed newsworthy when they happen given the media antipathy towards firearms (successful self defense rarely makes the paper), which can inflate the apparent number of them. In any case, what's not cut and dried is whether a different legal standard would have actually prevented any of the mentioned shootings or simply led to people being charged after the fact. IMHO most people don't think too hard about the law in a self defense situation.

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CoMF
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08 Mar 2012, 5:49 pm

simon_says wrote:

Here's another one from the same article. Even the law's co sponsor thought it was ridiculous.

From reading that article, I derive the following conclusions:

1) I find it suspicious that a military veteran was lurking around someone's back yard at night donning a camoflauge mask and holding a baseball bat.

2) The article is strangely silent on whether or not Frazzini was brandishing the bat and/or using it in a threatening manner, just as it is silent on whether or not his speech of behavior indicated he intended to harm the neighbor or his father.

In other words, the writer isn't telling the whole story, and is possibly doing so with the intent to manipulate the reader into making knee-jerk judgments. Statements such as "there is no provision specifically barring someone with a permit from bringing a gun to a knife fight, let alone to a brawl that starts with fists" allow us to ascertain the personal views of the writer quite readily, further proving that this was not responsible journalism by any stretch of the imagination.

We need to look at the law itself, see how it's being applied to individual situations by prosecuting DAs and judges, and correct any deficiencies accordingly. Anything else is just engaging in political rhetoric without getting to the root of the problem, if in fact one exists (which seems more likely than not, IMO).

simon_says wrote:

People that should be catching Manslaughter charges are walking away with a "whoops".

See what I stated above in my final paragraph. I'm not interested in your personal feelings regarding the use of firearms in self defense, nor anyone else's for that matter. What I am interested in is whether or not this is a bad law and if it's being applied inappropriately.

simon_says
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08 Mar 2012, 6:03 pm

CoMF wrote:

simon_says wrote:

Here's another one from the same article. Even the law's co sponsor thought it was ridiculous.

From reading that article, I derive the following conclusions:

1) I find it suspicious that a military veteran was lurking around someone's back yard at night donning a camoflauge mask and holding a baseball bat.

2) The article is strangely silent on whether or not Frazzini was brandishing the bat and/or using it in a threatening manner, just as it is silent on whether or not his speech of behavior indicated he intended to harm the neighbor or his father.

In other words, the writer isn't telling the whole story, and is possibly doing so with the intent to manipulate the reader into making knee-jerk judgments. Statements such as "there is no provision specifically barring someone with a permit from bringing a gun to a knife fight, let alone to a brawl that starts with fists" allow us to ascertain the personal views of the writer quite readily, further proving that this was not responsible journalism by any stretch of the imagination.

We need to look at the law itself, see how it's being applied to individual situations by prosecuting DA's and judges, and correct any deficiencies accordingly. Anything else is just engaging in political rhetoric without getting to the root of the problem, if in fact one exists (which seems more likely than not, IMO).

Well, it's a news article, not a court report. But there are enough interesting cases there.

When a 6'1, 250lb armed adult shoots a drunken 23 year old 5'7, 165lb unarmed neighborhood kid on his front porch I have to think he has a very low IQ. He could have just had the cops take him to the drunk tank. And that's the problem. People can be very stupid. Making them into defacto law enforcement officers is a little nutty. Afterwards he's crying that he could have just given him a light? Boo hoo. He's just dumb. We've empowered dumb people to shoot others.

Quote:

I'm not actually in the legislature or on the Florida bench. I'm commenting on an article from a Florida newspaper on an internet forum.

CoMF
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08 Mar 2012, 6:30 pm

simon_says wrote:

Well, it's a news article, not a court report. But there are enough interesting cases there.

Sorry, but I don't think very highly of hack journalists with a penchant for spin doctoring.

simon_says wrote:

When a 6'1, 250lb armed adult shoots a drunken 23 year old 5'7, 165lb unarmed neighborhood kid on his front porch I have to think he has a very low IQ.

Once again, the article seems to be taking a bit of liberty with the facts. It doesn't tell us whether or not Bill Kuch Jr's attempts to enter Stewart's home could've been reasonably construed to be "forceful," nor does it tell us whether he actually set foot in Stewart's home when he took three steps or if they were in a manner one could interpret as "threatening."

Taken on its face, I'd say Stewart made a bad judgment call rather than resort to insulting his intelligence.

I see no reason to discuss this matter any further, honestly. I already told you what needs to be done, and yet you can't seem to help allowing your personal feelings to obfuscate things.

simon_says
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08 Mar 2012, 6:38 pm

Oh, you told me. Well thanks for telling me.

I agree with you that it should be reviewed.

Raptor
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09 Mar 2012, 2:05 am

simon_says wrote:

Quote:

There was a sales spike in 2009, probably driven by the financial crisis and possibly the crazed apocalyptic rhetoric of the NRA about what Obama was going to do. They are still saying crazy things about what he would do in a second term. They seem to exist to scare people into buying more guns.

That sales spike was long term; pretty much all of ’09 and well in to ’10. Even reloading components were being rationed.
We have the NRA and the antis have The Brady Campaign (formerly known as HCI) spreading fear and paranoia.

Quote:

But I havent found a survey showing gun ownership at an all time high. Ive found one where it's down 20 points per household since 1980 and a Gallup survey that has it down 7 since 1993 or so. It's true that there are fewer hunters today so if the surveys are accurate it's possible to imagine that a narrowing pool of rifle owners is masking a growth in handgun owners. But you'd still have more guns in fewer hands.

Rifles are for more than just deer hunting. The in thing in recent years has been AR-15’s, especially the carbine (M4) version. Also the AK types are a big item for the less well to do. The gun shops couldn’t keep AR’s or AK’s on the shelves for long in ’09 before they’d get grabbed up. Lots and lots of handguns sold as soon as they hit the stores, too, and ammo by the case. According to your logic and that of a few others here the result had to be apocalyptic. I must have missed all the death and destruction, though. :roll:

techstepgenr8tion wrote:

Quote:

The thing I was hearing from people was adding a component to ammunition to give it an expiration date, which in turn caused people apparently to run out and buy a lot of it.

Nope.

CoMF wrote:

Quote:

I find it suspicious that a military veteran was lurking around someone's back yard at night donning a camouflage mask and holding a baseball bat.

No kidding!

CrazyCatLord and simon_says continue to lose their pathetic argument and are still falling back on the same “gunz-r-bad” thingy.

Is it just me or has anyone else noticed that each time they get their “common sense gun control” and it doesn’t work (it never does) they use that as rationale to screech for even more “common sense gun control” which of course fails if they get it, etc….?

Is it just me or does it seem strange that they are concerned (obsessed) with the rights of the assailant but not for the rights of the victim?

Is it just me or has anyone else noticed that they seem more apt to go after the gun collector, legally armed citizen, and sport shooter but disregard the probably illegally obtained armaments of the criminal element?
Just curious….

Tadzio
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09 Mar 2012, 4:38 am

Dox47 wrote:

Hi Dox47,

I see that when you get stats, you then want examples, but with examples, you then want stats.

Any Self defense shootings going right is what is extremely rare, as the wrong results (and ass. excuses) are very frequent. Court cases reveal that most murderers think and plan contingency plans for claiming bogus self defense if their sinister machinations go awry (for simple concise example, the recent mother-in-law calling 911 claiming attack from son-in-law while she was trying to gun him down while he only had his cell phone (which had video contradicting her claimed attempted justifiable homicide), of course, by DGU, recording people against their will is liable to result in DGU too).

Dox47 wrote:

simon_says wrote:

What's funny is that all sorts of crime has been dropping across the US for 15+ years. Including in places with strong gun laws. Americans are safer today than they've been in many years and criminologists aren't entirely sure why. It's likely related to the fact that we lock criminals up for a long time but there are probably many factors.

But the perception people have is that they are less safe. Maybe it's tv. Maybe internet news. Maybe 9/11 + the financial crisis.

You know what else is funny? Gun ownership is up, way up, and right to carry laws have never been stronger. I'm on my mobile so I don't have the patience to dig up the stats, but I believe that though crime is down across the board including in some anti-gun areas, it's even further down in places with far more widespread ownership and carry. I'm not arguing that the guns caused the crime drop, but I'm sure as hell pointing out that record gun sales coincided with record low crime rates.

To address another poster's point, raw statistics do not tell the full tale when it comes to defensive gun use as the vast majority of incidents do not result in shots fired and go unreported. Again hobbled by my mobile, I can't link the studies right now, but statistical analysis has been done on the issue and IIRC the lowball figure is around 100,000 DGUs per year, not too shabby.

Your "unreported" logic is no more sensible than claims that faith is most successful at preventing everything dire , since counter claims ignore the "unreported" tremendous number of non-occurrences of "non-success" success nonsense (the old joke from the 1950's was that a shrunken head hanging from a rear-view mirror offered protection from the Purple-People Eater, since a PPE was never reported as being seen close to a shrunken head).

Why go with your "lowball figure" when a "highball figure" gives easier ratios: http://www.gunsandcrime.org/dgufreq.html

The "2.5 million DGUs per year" gives a good reason for the large number of gun accidents, as "shoots" of the gunner in the gunner's own foot one out of ten times. The weights explain Freud's theory of substitution for all the instances of problems of DGU's going off half-cocked in correlations from private to public.

Your, and Raptor's, abuse of logic matches Big Tobacco's decades of polemics involving "alleged" health dangers, and for sure, like second-hand smoke, second-hand bullets flying everywhere from DGU are another danger, even if all the DGUs could be restricted to their own trigger-happy ranges.

Tadzio

Raptor
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09 Mar 2012, 10:23 am

A few examples.......

[youtube]http://www.youtube.com/watch?v=U1evT61Qp_Q[/youtube]

[youtube]http://www.youtube.com/watch?v=Blq_a_lqDBs&feature=related[/youtube]

[youtube]http://www.youtube.com/watch?v=_But23A9A0k&feature=related[/youtube]

[youtube]http://www.youtube.com/watch?v=P6pYEJhIFxQ&feature=related[/youtube]

[youtube]http://www.youtube.com/watch?v=GGOmtyTJ2f0&feature=related[/youtube]

But hey, it's probably all staged by the NRA.......... :roll:

CoMF
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09 Mar 2012, 11:24 am

simon_says wrote:

Oh, you told me. Well thanks for telling me.

I agree with you that it should be reviewed.

Good. I'm glad we've found some common ground.

Tadzio
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10 Mar 2012, 5:57 am

Tadzio wrote:

Hi Raptar, Dox47, AceOfSpades,

"In the U.S. for 2006, there were 30,896 deaths from firearms, distributed as follows by mode of death:

Suicide 16,883;
Homicide 12,791;
Accident 642;
Legal Intervention 360;
Undetermined 220.

This makes firearms injuries one of the top ten causes of death in the U.S."

"The number of non-fatal injuries is considerable--over 200,000 per year in the U.S."

The justifiable homicide by weapon weilding private citizens against felons in 2006 was 238, of which 192 "defended" themselves with firearms.

The "16,100%-against-ONE" odds make expanding the notions of any increased defense of availability, through firearms, of "justifiable homicide by firearm weilding private citizen" being promoted as something completely sound, and the better use of logic, seem like nonsense propagated through the blatherings of individuals who are very inept, and dangerous to themselves and the public in general, with their faulty logic decisions, to take any action involving weighted judgments in actually utilizing firearms.

Tadzio

http://library.med.utah.edu/WebPath/TUT ... NSTAT.html

http://www2.fbi.gov/ucr/cius2009/offens ... le_15.html

Raptor wrote:

A few examples.......

http://www.youtube.com/watch?v=U1evT61Qp_Q

http://www.youtube.com/watch?v=Blq_a_lq ... re=related

http://www.youtube.com/watch?v=_But23A9 ... re=related

http://www.youtube.com/watch?v=P6pYEJhI ... re=related

http://www.youtube.com/watch?v=GGOmtyTJ ... re=related

But hey, it's probably all staged by the NRA.......... :roll:

Hi Raptor,

Only 5 examples???? Dox47 will not be pleased with such an insignificant stat.

By the FBI report for 2009, only 215 justifiable homicides by firearm occurred in the USA, with more than 200,000 firearm "accidents" in the same year, with pro-DGU armed civilians claiming 2.5 MILLION yearly "incidents of DGU". I'm sure Dox47 desires all the potential 2.5 million videos listed here for a more solid base for stats.

With only 0.0086% chance of the dead victim being the felon in the felonious gunfights, DGU doesn't sound nice, even by exceptional "nice" rare examples.

http://www.youtube.com/watch?v=MLKhDhYcwBA Warning: Strong Language
[youtube]http://www.youtube.com/watch?v=MLKhDhYcwBA[/youtube]

The details of this DGU claim is included in another video at:
http://foxnewsinsider.com/2011/12/12/ca ... dy-battle/

Videos for the other 99.9914% of the 2.5 million DGU's not necessarily justified, compared to the potential max of 215 justifiably deadly videos, makes the odds of winning the SuperLotto sound much more sensible with the odds for any sensible DGU.

Do you repeat your phrase "streets red with blood" so often because the wildly DGU claimed 2.5 million yearly incidents of DGU makes the USA streets possibly sound about as bad as the reportedly current deadly streets in Syria???

http://www.youtube.com/watch?v=5W_5JoF3 ... creen&NR=1
[youtube]http://www.youtube.com/watch?v=5W_5JoF38X8&feature=endscreen&NR=1[/youtube]

http://www.youtube.com/watch?v=xcb2oJ5ELvo Warning: Graphic Material
[youtube]http://www.youtube.com/watch?v=xcb2oJ5ELvo[/youtube]

Raptor
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10 Mar 2012, 6:56 am

:roll:

Quote:

Only 5 examples????

I can post Youtube and other examples all day but I'm not going to take up all that space demonstrating the obvious.
I didn't bother to watch yours but I noticed one was in Syria which is WAY outside the scope of our debate. Anther is a police shooting which is also outside the scope of our debate, and probably what could be called a domestic violence case.
Hey whatever dude; Me and those on my side of this have stated our case quite well as always while you and you're kind have only grasped at straws as always.
There will, no doubt, be other discussions on this and I can safely say that we've already won those, too.

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