Stand Your Ground - Take Two

Parent Cafe
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<p>[Loud</a> music shooting: Argument over loud music led to fatal shooting of teen, investigators say - OrlandoSentinel.com](<a href=“http://www.orlandosentinel.com/news/local/breakingnews/os-teen-shot-dead-loud-music-20121126,0,4320738.story]Loud”>http://www.orlandosentinel.com/news/local/breakingnews/os-teen-shot-dead-loud-music-20121126,0,4320738.story)</p>

<p>The teenagers were unarmed, according to police. The murderer drove up next to teen’s sports utility vehicle. I guess he was having a ‘bad day’.</p>

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<p>Personally if they were playing loud music in a car the answer isn’t to shoot the kids, it is to have an EM pulse gun…would wipe out the stereo and most of the rest of the electronics in the car…many a time when I lived in a city neighborhood with the idiots with the boom box cars (the ones where they put in 500 amp alternators to handle the load) would I have loved to have one of them (there is a brilliant scene in the novel “Cryptonimicom” where some anarchist types unleash such a pulse gun to stop government types from being able to read the hard drives on systems they were taking out of a building…which also wipes out a lot of cars)…</p>

<p>But shooting them? A car can be replaced, a person cannot…</p>

<p>It doesn’t sound as written like it was self defense, the guy looked big enough to defend himself if the kid had done something, and if the kid was sitting in the car he doesn’t have a leg to stand on. It is one of the reasons I fear what some advocate, that everyone carry guns, while most people would be responsible people like this clown or those who get into ‘road rage’ and such would be too tempted to use it IMO. Not to mention, as with the case of Gabby Giffords in Arizona, where a good samaritan bystander nearly got shot by someone who was carrying, who mistook the good samaritan for the shooter.</p>

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<p>Gosh, if we all carried guns, we could all shoot whoever we wanted whenever we wanted. Sure sounds like law and order to me. :rolleyes:</p>

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<p>Is the suspect claiming that he was “standing his ground”, and, if so, does anyone (particularly the police, prosecutors, etc.) believe it?</p>

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<p>We can all carry guns in Vermont and we have one of the lowest crime rates in the nation.</p>

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<p>Sick. Just sickening. </p>

<p>First off, who goes up to a stranger and tells them to turn down their music at a convenience store? You’re going to be there for five minutes… so who cares? </p>

<p>Second, if you were at a convenience store, that means there are people around. In case things DID get heated, you walk back to the convenience store or your car. You don’t pull a gun. </p>

<p>I hope he rots for the rest of his life in jail. Needless waste of life.</p>

<p>And of course, the comments: </p>

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<p>People like that have guns. That’s what scares me.</p>

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<p>Unfortunately (at least in my view) from what I’ve read about the Florida version of the law, the shooter does not need to prove he was defending himself. According to the Florida law, he only needs to have felt threatened. It’s hard for the police to prove what he felt or didn’t feel, and therefore he has a pretty strong case in Florida courts. We’ll see.</p>

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<p>Of course he felt threatened. There was loud music.</p>

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<p>The interesting legal question, to me, becomes whether the law - which the prosecutors seem to hate - gets interpreted broadly or narrowly. The guy fled, which is bad for him. He claims there was a shotgun and none was found, which is bad for him. His lawyer says something dumb like “How hard would they have looked for it?” which makes little sense if we’re talking about something as obvious as a shotgun. So the facts are bad for self-defense in the traditional sense. But what if he can use the law to argue “so what if the guy wasn’t armed, so what if he was only listening to loud music and only rolled down his window, the important point is that I felt threatened and this was reasonable because there was loud music and some black kids and I am allowed to kill a person when I feel threatened.” If that becomes the standard, then God help us all. This would be a corruption of the ancient notion of reasonableness at law because that uses the outcome as a significant measure of what makes conduct reasonable. In other words, if you shoot and kill a person, that is a pretty unreasonable act so you need pretty darned strong justification to say that is a “reasonable” thing to do. (This ties in to the ancient idea of necessity as well; you can’t claim you committed a crime because you were hungry.) But if you take away the result so the act of killing is like going to the bathroom, then you change the concept of reasonable to make it much more subjective. </p>

<p>I hope I’m being clear. The point is that the law, if it’s interpreted this way, would make the use of deadly force more like any other thing that happens and so the definition of what is reasonable expands as well. That kind of expansion is not only against the traditions of law but I could argue it is more like the Klingon Empire than the United Federation of Planets and human society.</p>

<p>Remember, this wasn’t in the man’s home. I remember a case in LA where a man killed a person who came to his door in costume on Halloween. The guy got off, which I thought was terrible, but you can connect that result to the traditional notions of home and castle. The same is true of the horrible case in CO where a guy killed his neighbor as the man walked into the killer’s garage. The man could have stepped inside and closed his door but he was able under CO’s castle defense law to kill. But this new case is in public. If this stuff extends to public, we have a problem.</p>

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<p>The actual law is here:
[Text</a> of Statute for Florida’s Stand Your Ground Law](<a href=“http://www.husseinandwebber.com/florida-stand-your-ground-statute.html]Text”>http://www.husseinandwebber.com/florida-stand-your-ground-statute.html)</p>

<p>Discussion:
[Florida's</a> Stand Your Ground Law : Use of Deadly Force in Self-Defense](<a href=“http://www.husseinandwebber.com/stand_your_ground.html]Florida’s”>http://www.husseinandwebber.com/stand_your_ground.html)</p>

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<p>Here we go again. When are Florida leaders going to be embarrassed enough to fix this nonsense? Oh wait, they’re still working on the election results for Bush-Gore and for Alan West three weeks ago.</p>

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<p>LakeWashington: Even THIS is somehow related to George W? It was 2000. That’s TWELVE years ago for Pete’s sake!</p>

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<p>There are too many guns in Florida, and too many gun-related deaths and serious injuries.</p>

<p>[Stand</a> your ground law, Trayvon Martin and a shocking legacy | Tampa Bay Times](<a href=“http://www.tampabay.com/stand-your-ground-law/]Stand”>http://www.tampabay.com/stand-your-ground-law/)</p>

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<p>As I noted, the statute makes liberal use of the word “reasonably”. The question at law is fairly subtle: what defines “reasonable”? As I noted, historically when the consequence was a fatality caused by deadly force and specifically when the consequence wasn’t in some way accidental - like a shove knocking a person over - then reasonable was interpreted narrowly. The issue FL now faces is whether reasonable is more completely personal and no longer depends on the extent of the harm or the consequence of the action.</p>

<p>I find this possibility disheartening because it removes the traditional role of society in defining conduct. If life is like you choose to see it then why are we any better than Lamech? To explain, Lamech was the descendant of Cain who boasted of killing people who bothered him, including young men who only touched him, meaning young people who didn’t know better and couldn’t control themselves but who inflicted no material harm on Lamech. It is clear in the Bible that Lamech is a terrible person. And are we to become that?</p>

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<p>There is an issue people have been edging towards, and it is one of the problems with stand your ground laws, that of reasonableness. </p>

<p>Cops and law enforcement people who carry guns, swat team members, all are trained in deciding when to use deadly force, they have rules, they train in simulators to keep them from shooting the wrong person, and shootings still happen where they kill someone who was no threat to them (In the Amadou Dialo case in NYC, street crimes cops were behind a car, the guy was in the vestibule of his building, the guy reached for his wallet (he was unarmed), someone panicked, and they took 47 shots at him and killed him)…and these are trained people.</p>

<p>The problem with the stand your ground laws is there is no real standard for stand your ground, all the person has to say is they felt threatened…but what does that mean? Someone startles you and you turn around and shoot them? You feel threatened because they are black and you feel they are an instant threat? What constitutes legitimately feeling scared and what doesn’t? And what kind of cover does that give, two guys are in a bar, one insults the other, other guy takes offense, pulls out his gun and kills the other one, claiming the guy was threatening him…the way the law had been written, the idea was that if you could, you walk away, the stand your ground rules say that burden isn’t on you…so you can claim after getting into a bar fight the other guy was a menace and kill him using deadly force…</p>

<p>I am not arguing for or against laws, what I am saying is assuming that people will behave reasonably when it comes to carrying a weapon with them, legally giving them to use a gun, not as a last resort, but as a threat, is problematic. </p>

<p>Yeah, it is great to cite Vermon, how everyone has guns (same with the Dakotas and Montana, for example), but that also isn’t a good argument. Most of Vermont is not densely populated, it is rural for the most part, and even its ‘cities’ are pretty smalll, same with those other states. Texas and Florida, that both have dense population centers and loose gun carry laws, are up there in crime stats, Texas is top 5 in murders and violent crime and Florida is up there. </p>

<p>Like I said,I am not arguing for or against guns, what I am saying is with gun policy if there is going to be a law like stand your ground, they need to define things better. Just saying “I felt threatened” is going to result in a lot of deaths, where some person decides some kid is a threat, or as may have happened in this case, gets *<strong><em>ed that the kid told him to go *</em></strong> himself, went into a rage, and popped him (I said may because I don’t know)… we have road rage, where people are taking a 3000 pound car moving at 60 mph and use it as a weapon because someone cut them off…</p>

<p>A law like the stand your ground as written gives so much leeway that people can use it in a moment of rage, or anger, of hate, and kill someone and then claim the person threatened them, and unless it is a 80 year old man who gets shot, who is to say? Dead person can’t say anything… the law assumes people are trained enough, have enough control of their emotions, not to use it unless absolutely feeling threatened, but the way it is written you can excuse murder and pretty easily beat the rap, because the law only says ‘reasonable feels they are in danger’. The old law said if you had any chance to walk away and didn’t, you could be held responsible, big difference.</p>

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<p>The problem isn’t the law; the problem is that a teenager was shot and killed for playing loud music when a murderer drove up. </p>

<p>No gun, no murder.</p>