A recent case in the national headlines has revived the debate over “stand your ground” laws, which in essence rescind any retreat requirement and allow innocent crime victims to repel force with appropriate force if attacked in any place where they have a right to be. There has been much confusion with the Stand Your Ground (SYG) principle and other legal rules, such as Castle Doctrine and Presumption of Reasonableness.
This past Monday, I had the privilege of participating in a forum at the headquarters of the libertarian Cato Institute in Washington, DC, addressing this matter. It can be found here: http://www.cato.org/event.php?eventid=9141
It opens with moderator Tim Lynch of Cato Institute giving an overview of the matter. Next, for twenty minutes each, we have historian Clayton Cramer explaining the origin and development of the laws and principles involved in the debate…me explaining why I consider the objections to SYG to each be somewhere between weak and bogus…and Steven Jansen, vice president of a prosecutors’ association, advocating that SYG laws be eliminated.
It’s all very civil, and very much worth an hour of your time, particularly if you keep or carry a firearm for defensive purposes.
(Early on, you’ll also get a reminder why it’s important to turn off your cell phone before people start recording…)
With a Florida shooting this past February having become a cause célèbre that has triggered strident demands for more restrictive laws on guns and self-defense, it is a good time to review the history of the “gun control movement.” The following comes to you from Ann Coulter. As you read it, you might want to remember that Martin Luther King – a Republican gun owner – was denied the concealed carry permit he requested.
For more on this topic, read “Black Man With A Gun” by my old friend Kenn Blanchard.
Kenn Blanchard, left, with Mas (center) and Steve Denney (right) at SHOT Show. Kenn’s book “Black Man With A Gun” details the racist beginnings of “gun control” in the US.
It has been a week in which national news has been dominated by a couple of issues that impact directly on gun owners’ civil rights. One of those issues is the fait accompli that Mitt Romney will almost certainly be the Republican candidate for President in the next election.
Romney does not have a good record on gun owners’ issues from my perspective, though he has shown signs of coming more to our side in recent years. Some see it as strictly a political move on his part, some are more hopeful.
One skeptic on the issue is my old friend Frank James. There are lots of gun bloggers out there, and Frank’s is one of the few I have on my RSS feed. Frank has little respect for politicians who are soft on this issue – he refers to Mitt Romney as “Mittens” – and he had this to say in his blog recently:
Like Frank, I’ll be watching and listening with interest when Romney joins several other political powerhouses to address the NRA gathering in St. Louis this coming Friday. Hopefully, it will be on C-Span or some other venue where the nation can watch, listen, and use their life experience and their own BS detectors to gauge the sincerity of the speakers.
Feel free to comment. I’m particularly interested to hear from Massachusetts readers who lived under Mitt Romney’s governorship from 2003 to 2007.
When he first ran for President, Barack Obama was the most anti-gun candidate for that office in history. His advocacy of “assault weapons bans” that would have covered many semiautomatic weapons your grandparents and great grandparents hunted with and used to fight for our country, was on his website during the early days of his campaign. He had made it clear that he was opposed to the right of law-abiding citizens to carry guns in public to protect themselves and their loved ones.
Since the election, the President and his apologists have noted that he has done nothing to hurt gun owners. Advocates of firearms owners’ civil rights have repeatedly warned that this would indeed be his strategy during his first term, and that both the mask and the gloves would come off once he was re-elected to his second and final term of office in 2012. The apologists said in essence, “No, a man as sincere as President Obama would never ‘turn’ like that.”
Well, consider this, which slipped into the mainstream news media as an amusing “gaffe.”
Hmmm. He can’t show his real intentions now, but after his next and last election, he’ll be more “flexible”?
If President Obama is re-elected, I predict that we will see the strongest attack on gun owners’ rights that has ever come out of the White House. And forget about the strategy of “we’ll just endure four years until the next election.” The constituency of the Supreme Court, in four more years of an Obama administration, will have changed considerably from the one that barely gave us the Second Amendment-affirming decisions in Heller and McDonald. It will set the stage for the man most likely to get the Democratic nomination for President in 2016, Rahm Emanuel. In many ways, Emanuel is Obama’s familiar, and much less inclined than his mentor to keep his anti-gun leanings even temporarily in the closet. As mayor of Chicago, Rahm Emanuel has already proposed a draconian, impossibly expensive gun registration and ownership scheme for the entire state of Illinois. And don’t be surprised if President Obama announces that Rahm Emanuel will be his Vice-Presidential running mate in the 2012 election.
We still have a few months before the election. Get involved. Do what you can to put someone in the White House who won’t appoint Supreme Court justices who vote against the obvious intent of the Bill of Rights.
Someone who hasn’t blatantly and clearly expressed their intent to “be more flexible” after they’ve won the last election they think they’ll need to win.
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