“This bill creates a wild, wild west out there,” said Rep. Eleanor Sobel, D-Hollywood.
Bush, who has championed tougher penalties for people convicted of using guns in crimes, said he believed the measure was a good idea.
“I’m comfortable that the bill is a bill that relates to self defense,” Bush said. “It’s a good, commonsense, anti-crime issue.”
The bill says that person has “the right to stand his or her ground and meet force with force, including 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.” link
Florida is an excellent choice for this pilot project. It is ethnically diverse, with a large rich-poor gap, and not even the warlords in Washington can predict whether hostilites will fall more along ethnic or economic lines.
There will undoubtedly be some overlap, as “ethnic minorities” are dramatically over-represented in the low income population.
It is already legal to kill Arabs in the US.
In Arizona, US “volunteer” gunmen have already begun operations that will inevitably lead to a “shooting war.”
On the hearts and minds side, no one has done more to make ethnic hatred and xenophobia respectable than America’s own Huntington, Mr. Lou Dobbs. A man with a mission, is Lou, and he has garnered quite the coterie of latte-swilling devotees.
So, just a heads up. (OK, bad choice of words, under the circumstances.) If you notice in the coming weeks and months that some of the pressing domestic issues you see discussed here and on other message boards seem to drop off the radar screen a bit, don’t be discouraged.
It’s not that your countrymen are not concerned about health care, Social Security or Wal-Mart. It’s just that they’re busy with “scattered skirmishes.”
It’s been very successful in the Majority World, as the impressive profit figures of “defense” industry corporations will attest.
Why should they be deprived of such a lucrative revenue stream at home?
Loved your comments.
The bill is not about self defence or any of the other things mentioned in the quoted article. This seems to be the money line:
So in fact this bill makes it legal to shoot someone when it is NOT necessary to do so in self defence because you could have just left the area of danger. It’s a sort of “my dick is bigger than yours” law. The only real difference this law makes — despite all the crap about saving people from being raped or whatever — is where there’s just no good reason for you to shoot someone at all because you could just quietly and safely turn around and walk away.
Obviously, if someone attempts or achieves forcible entry into your home or your vehicle, you have a reasonable fear of imminent peril.
However, this law makes it possible for me to claim a reasonable fear of imminent peril if you insult me during a heated conversation in a bar. I can then shoot you, and your family can press charges, and we can all go in front of a jury where I can claim that you said you were armed, threatened me, whatever, and even if you survive my attack, we are just in a did! did not! did too! which will, in accordance with American values, be decided in favor of which one of us is whitest and richest, and since Florida bars are quite popular, the courts will be somewhat crowded.
Even if it is your home it is not self defence if you choose to NOT take yourself out of harms way when you have the chance. But Florida law says you can call it self defence nevertheless.
If you are in immidiate peril that suggest to me that you don’t have an opportunity to quietly leave and this law change doesn’t matter. Any act self defence must be proportionate and limited. The proportionate part is not altered here – lethal force is only justified to prevent a death. What is changed is the limited part. Normally you’d have to try any other steps to remove yourself from danger before resorting to force. that’s just common sense.
With this law you don’t have to try to resolve the encounter by simply leaving – which is usually the easiest way to prevent harm.
This is most likely to be dangerous when both people can plausibly claim self-defence because “things just got out of hand”. If they both have the “right” to not back down and still claim self defence then you basically have legalised gun fighting.
In a gun fight both particpants can claim self defence despite the fact that either could have simply walked away – backed down.
This makes a mockery of the concept of self defence but then so does the same law for inside your home or car. If you want to pass a law saying you can kill someone for breaking into your house then say it that way – don’t pretend it’s “self defence” when you could have just walked away. You’re not defending self, you’re defending property at that point, and this law says you can gun someone down when defending nothing bigger than your ego.
I think some even narrow it down to inside or outside the doorway, but I did not stay at a Holiday Inn last night, so I cannot quote the relevant statutes for all 50 states.
It is common sense that if you are in your home eating biryani and watching Iron Chef in your underpants, and I break your door open, you do not have any sort of retreating option. You have the choice of waiting to see if I will tie you up and kill you after I obtain your ATM card number and stuff your wife’s wedding jewelry into my backpack, or if I will kill you immediately and find the jewelry unaided and forego your ATM card, or you can shoot me.
If we are in a public place, however, I have the option not only of retreating, but of obtaining immediate aid from anyone to our fellow bar patrons, the management, the security guard, or a policeman passing by the door.
This is also common sense. If I sincerely believe that you are armed and intent on violence, why would I want to take you on myself when there is so much help at hand, possibly from professionals?
That is my problem with this law. It relieves people from the responsibility of using common sense, and virtually assures turning the area of its jurisdiction into a free-fire zone.
This is not about situations where you have no option to remove yourself from the area as a means of self defence.
Let’s take another example. There’s a guy in a tractor or some big construction vehicle heading towards you and he hasn’t seen you and can’t hear you. To avoid being run down do you (1) draw your gun and shoot him or (2) step out of his way.
What difference should it make if you are sitting in your car or in your house at the time?
I submit that if you draw a gun and shoot him then you are commiting a crime because self defence is a limited right — you must try to get out of the situation by any other reasonable means available if that is possible.
As I understand it the Florida law says go ahead and shoot the guy. Don’t feel the need to step aside.
You don’t have to be in your own space, house, yard, car. You can be on the street, in a restaurant, a park, at the zoo, the supermarket – and there is no obligation on your part to yell help, call security, much less retreat behind a large display of melons.
Zipping in just to say THANK YOU for doing this diary and doing it SO well. I’d seen the story and was shocked. Can’t think of anyone better to cover this than you.
thing on Fox yesterday, they had a judge going on about how perfectly normal and unremarkable this law is – he went on and on about people in their homes, and never once addressed the public place aspect.
Anyone who didn’t know would think it was the same old law that many states have.
And soon, I imagine many states will have this law, as events unfold.
I very cynically think this gives license to shoot minorities(modern day equivalent of lynching to a certain extent)without being responsible for killing someone.
I can’t begin to imagine all the ways that this would become a rather unholy mess.
I agree with you that I don’t believe it’s really about self defense.
This is insanity. Absolute and total madness. But I fear there is method in it. Why do I have the feeling that white people will find themselves fully backed up by the powers that be when they insist they felt threatened by, well, anyone not exactly like themselves while minorities and those scruffy dissident types will be doing hard time for defending themselves from serious bodily harm? Oh, that’s right, it’s been that way for ages….damn, now I’m depressed.
With a exacerbated gap between rich and poor, there will be many more people with nothing to eat and nowhere to stay, and property laws mean little when you and your children are hungry and cold.
When so few have so much and so many have so little, those so few are going to have to take more and more extreme measure to protect their glut of property. Spending on personal security and defense is and will continue to skyrocket. It will be like many countries in South America that have the same rich/poor problem: the rich won’t even be able to travel without armed guards.
I think we’ll be seeing more of these beefed-up “personal defense” laws as the Bush gov’t goes along trying to enforce feudalism in America.
This sort of thing has been debated in Britain.
http://news.bbc.co.uk/1/hi/uk_politics/3672701.stm
In South Florida, particularly, road rage is significant and violent. Headlines appear in the papers and on the local “if it bleeds, it leads” TV stations about someone being assassinated by an impatient prick with a gun who didn’t think another driver pulled away quickly enough to suit him when the light turned green.
Under this law presumably. . .
If someone tailgates — you shoot to kill.
If you get cut off and have to swerve to avoid an accident — you shoot to kill.
If someone rounds the corner with a baseball bat in his hands — you shoot to kill.
If someone taps you on the shoulder at the ATM machine — you shoot to kill.
If someone runs after you shouting and waving something you can’t quite identify in his hand — you shoot to kill.
Ooops. Those were only your sunglasses that you forgot in the grocery store.
This seems to go along with what Arizona state legislature last month were working on: bill HB2666..witch(I see from spellcheck I spelled ‘which’ wrong-maybe it was the 666 on this rather evilly stupid bill that subliminally made me do that) would have allowed being able to carry any kind of a weapon at anytime, anywhere. This included grenades, sawed-off shotguns, rockets, etc…into bars(yeah good idea fuckwit), churches, schools.
This bill actually passed in the legislature. Then I believe because of the negative publicity the sponsor for this bill Rep.Quelland(R) pulled his support for the bill and killed(ha ha). Saying something along the lines that he didn’t really know what all had been in the bill-his own bill, yeah right.
Arizona has been working on these kinds of gun bills for awhile now…and yeah that is where those looney minutemen have set up camp. (a bloodbath waiting to happen if you ask me)
http://www.dailystar.com/dailystar/dailystar/63738.php
right wingers are always quoting Hobbes at me, saying that is the true view of the world…
“”[In a state of nature] No arts; no letters; no society; and which is worst of all, continual fear and danger of violent death; and the life of man, solitary, poor, nasty, brutish, and short.”
Seems they are working double time to make sure that that is borne out.
on how this goes down there in jebbie country ok.