[DuffMan]

Interesting

There’s no doubt that the Florida jurors who cleared George Zimmerman of all charges in the shooting death of Trayvon Martin came to the correct decision last week. But sometimes there is a vast difference between justice and what is just.

Under the state’s controversial “Stand Your Ground” law it doesn’t matter that the 17-year-old victim was unarmed, or how—or even why—the fatal confrontation started. The only salient issue was whether his 29-year-old killer, the self-appointed captain of the neighbourhood watch, had a “reasonable belief” that he himself might be killed or suffer “great bodily harm.” In Florida, and the more than 30 other U.S. states that have bowed to pressure from the National Rifle Association and remade the definition of self-defence, it’s now basically shoot first and answer one simple question later: Were you scared?

Putting aside the break-ins at Retreat at Twin Lakes, crime has been falling for years in Florida—just like practically everywhere else in North America. Violent crime in particular, with 67,000 fewer offenses in 2012 than in 1992, despite the state’s population having grown by more than 5.5 million. But that’s not the public perception, either statewide or nationally. Opinion polls consistently show people believe the problem is getting worse with each passing year.

It’s that seemingly unshakable sense of dread that the NRA and its ally, the American Legislative Exchange Council, capitalized on when they picked Florida as the beta test for their bid to expand gun rights via Stand Your Ground. Latching on to the case of James Workman, a 77-year-old pensioner who had spent months in legal limbo after shooting an intruder in his trailer, they managed to engage public sympathy and push the statute through the legislature virtually unopposed.

A recent Tampa Bay Times analysis of more than 130 incidents where the statute was invoked found that a majority of the cases never went to trial. Sometimes it even works after the fact, like the 2010 confrontation in Town N’ Country, a Tampa suburb, where a late-night jogger pulled his gun on a teen who reportedly tried to rob him, and shot him four times in the back as he ran away. No charges were ever filed

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http://www2.macleans.ca/2013/07/17/w...lives-in-fear/