House Dems try to overturn Stand Your Ground laws

[ezkl2230]

House Democrats said Tuesday they will offer an amendment to push to overturn stand-your-ground self-defense laws in states like Florida.

The amendment, which would withhold some grants from states that have such laws, will come as part of the House's debate on the Commerce Department spending bill.

http://www.washingtontimes.com/blog/inside-politics/2012/may/8/house-vote-trayvon-amendment/

First, the two representatives quoted in the article state that deaths due to self-defense have tripled since the law was enacted in Florida; they failed to specify how many of these shootings turned out to be mis-identified innocents. I'm betting that number is a fraction of total self-defense shootings.

Second, a Newsweek article (which is typically virulently anti-gun) stated that law-abiding American citizens using guns in self-defense during 2003 shot and killed two and one-half times as many criminals as police did, and with fewer than one-fifth as many incidents as police where an innocent person was mistakenly identified as a criminal (2% versus 11%). So police - the guys that have supposedly been trained to avoid such things - are more than five times more likely to shoot and kill an innocent person than a civilian.

The funding bill that this would amend is being debated now - there is no time to lose.

Call your representative NOW and urge them to vote against the Trayvon Amendment. If you don't have your representative's contact information, you can find it here: http://www.usa.gov/Contact/Elected.shtml

 

[alsaqr]

The funding bill that this would amend is being debated now - there is no time to lose.

The proposed amendment has been withdrawn.

 

[mr.scott]

It was all in hopes of passing under the radar.

 

[ezkl2230]

Withdrawn for now.

"Rep. Keith Ellison, Minnesota Democrat, said he will still try to force a debate at a more "appropriate" time in the future, saying action is demanded by the case of Trayvon Martin, the Florida teenager who police said was shot dead in a street encounter with a neighborhood watch volunteer."

One case that hasn't even been decided yet demands that the entire country change its laws?

Now is the time to work on educating our representatives - that is to say, to increase the pressure on them to keep this from coming to a vote in the first place.

 

[hso]

That was an absurd fight to try to pick since the fed doesn't have authority to do it anyway and would get removed before final.

 

[IDescribe]

LOL -- Of course the number of self-defense deaths has tripled -- that's because two thirds of them weren't categorized as self-defense deaths previously.

 

[robhof]

That's like the statistics for gun violence, which also includes the figures of Legal police shootings of criminals to boost the total number as well as justified shootings; all shootings are bad according to the anti-gun crowd. One can only hope that some of the anti's could experience some of the criminal violence first hand and maybe learn to appreciate proper self defense.

 

[Frank Ettin]

The bill is dead at this point - no reason to keep this up.