Oh, please.

[kpete]

But the lawmakers who crafted the legislation in 2005 - former Sen. Durell Peaden and current state Rep. Dennis Baxley - said the law doesn't need to be changed. They believe it has been misapplied in the shooting death of Trayvon by a Sanford crime-watch captain, George Zimmerman.

Their argument is that Zimmerman doesn't qualify for the protection because he wasn't confronted by Martin. Zimmerman was the one doing the confronting, and did so even after the police department explicitly told him to back off when he called to report a suspicious Black man wandering around the gated neighborhood.

Oh, please.

Anyone with two working brain cells could have foreseen that some nutter cop-wannabe with a racist view of the world would use the law to go hunting down strangers of the wrong color who wandered into their neighborhood. It was precisely this kind of foreseeable consequence that so worried police officials in Minnesota. Such a law moves the impulse to shoot-to-kill from last to first place in self-defense options.

And the result of such a law is the death of a young man guilty only of walking while Black.

http://cabdrollery.blogspot.com/2012/03/be-careful-what-you-wish-for.html

[RKP5637]

1. K&R !!! n/t

[SamG]

2. "Anyone with two working brain cells",..

in which case, most Republicans could not have foreseen this!

[EC]

3. They know that.

I'm beginning to think this is a way of legally getting rid of some of us liberals, since it's mainly repubs that would be so scared shitless to carry a gun everywhere and be afraid of everyone. They are the ones that shoot first and ask questions later. And we know these laws end up being a free for all on minorities, usually Dems.

[gratuitous]

4. And . . . (in my opinion)

This isn't the first time this has happened in Florida. The Sanford police are getting a lot of static over their handling of this matter, but my take is that they did what police departments all over the state do in these situations. As soon as the shooter says the magic words prescribed by the law, and after a cursory check of the victim to be sure he or she is of the proper race or social stratum, then everyone goes their separate ways and no further inquiry is needed.

The problem in this particular instance is that there were apparently several folks in the area observing the events as they unfolded, and young Mr. Martin's girlfriend was on the phone with him at the crucial moment. If those little bits and pieces of evidence hadn't surfaced, we wouldn't have heard a word about this.