George Zimmerman Explodes the NRA Fantasy of the Armed Citizen [View all]

[BainsBane]

An interesting column on what the Zimmerman cases says about NRA propaganda about the armed citizen defending himself from criminals. It's worth reading the whole thing.

It can be hard to tell how much of it is driven by cynicism and how much is honest paranoia, but there's no denying the commitment with which the NRA promotes the fantasy that an armed America is a safer America.
After all, the newsletter of the NRA's lobbying arm is called Armed Citizen. It promises that "While the anti-gun media doesn't want to report the truth about Americans using guns for self-defense as often as 2.5 million times a year, you can read breaking stories of everyday citizens fending off violent criminals." . . .

As Zimmerman's killing of 17-year-old Trayvon Martin so horribly demonstrates, far from making people safer, all too often a gun makes a bad situation much, much worse. Accept for the moment Zimmerman's own account of the night of February 26, 2012: after he had followed Martin, Martin attacked and got the better of him, and, in fear for his life, he shot Martin in self-defense.

Zimmerman says that Martin reached for Zimmerman's gun. Since no one is claiming Martin set out that evening for anything other than Skittles and an iced tea -- certainly not to kill someone he'd never met before -- even if we believe Zimmerman's story, that story tells us that the presence of a gun helped turn a fist fight into a killing. Without the gun, the encounter might never have happened, since Zimmerman would have been a pistol's-worth less confident about getting out of his car and following Martin.

. . .

Now let's take a step back and consider the crime Zimmerman thought was involved here. If Zimmerman's suspicion about Martin had been right, instead of wildly wrong, Martin would have been guilty of burglary.

Burglary is not punishable by death.
And yet Armed Citizen regularly celebrates the killing of burglars and other non-violent offenders."

The article goes on to show that gun ownership has declined and with in violent crime. If the NRA propaganda were true, one would expect crime to rise with declining gun ownership. Moreover the areas with the highest density of guns have the highest incidence of violent crime.

http://www.huffingtonpost.com/spencer-critchley/george-zimmerman-nra-armed-citizen_b_3559082.html