Begin forwarded message:

> 
> Why the NRA Pushes `Stand Your Ground'
> 
> By E.J. Dionne Jr.
> April 15, 2012
> http://www.washingtonpost.com/opinions/why-the-nra-pushes-stand-your-ground/2012/04/15/gIQAL458JT_story.html
> 
> It's understandable if unfortunate that the controversy
> surrounding the killing of Trayvon Martin has polarized
> the country along both racial and ideological lines. But
> there is one issue that should not have any racial
> connotations: the urgency of repealing "Stand Your
> Ground" laws.
> 
> And leave it to New York Mayor Michael Bloomberg to
> speak the blunt truth about why these laws are dangerous
> - and why the National Rifle Association keeps pushing
> them anyway.
> 
> "In reality," Bloomberg said in a speech before the
> National Press Club last week, "the NRA's leaders
> weren't interested in public safety. They were
> interested in promoting a culture where people take the
> law into their own hands and face no consequences for
> it. Let's call that by its real name: vigilantism."
> 
> On guns, Bloomberg is strong and everyone else is
> feckless, to paraphrase the late columnist Murray
> Kempton writing about an earlier mayor.
> 
> Okay, not exactly everyone else. Bloomberg's partners in
> the group Mayors Against Illegal Guns - notably Boston's
> Mayor Tom Menino, the organization's co-chair - have
> filled the void left in state legislatures, Congress and
> the White House by moderates, liberals and many
> conservatives who ought to know better but are too
> petrified by the NRA to confront it. Mayors face the
> daily toll taken by gun laws dictated by gun lobbyists
> and are less easily intimidated.
> 
> "Feckless" is a favorite word of columnists. Its first
> meanings, according to Webster's, are "weak" and
> "ineffective," and it is an ineffectiveness spawned by
> weakness that explains why Stand Your Ground laws spread
> through legislatures like a virus. By Bloomberg's count,
> they are now on the books in 25 states. These laws
> didn't arise in response to broad, spontaneous popular
> demand. As both The Washington Post and the New York
> Times reported last week, the idea came from on high,
> courtesy of the NRA, which worked closely with a right-
> wing group called the American Legislative Exchange
> Council.
> 
> "It was the NRA taking a stealthy fight to the states,"
> Mark Glaze, the director of Mayors Against Illegal Guns,
> told me in an interview, "and 25 flowers bloomed."
> 
> Resistance to the gun lobby has grown so feeble and the
> NRA has won so many victories that its legislative
> maestros must find ever more creative ways to prove its
> relevance.
> 
> One way is to pretend that President Obama, a
> disappointment to many who support more rational gun
> laws, is a grave threat to gun rights. He most assuredly
> is not. Yet Mitt Romney, who once supported gun-control
> measures, tried to Etch a Sketch that past away before
> the NRA Friday, pledging to defend rights he claimed the
> president "ignores or minimizes."
> 
> Another way is to come up with increasingly extreme laws
> to extend the reach of guns into American life. You can
> imagine that if the NRA proposed a statute to arm all
> 10-year-olds to make our schools safer, hundreds of
> state legislators and members of Congress would
> robotically vote yes. You can also predict what the NRA
> slogan would be: "An armed child is a safer child."
> 
> What's insidious about Stand Your Ground laws is that in
> every jurisdiction that has them, these statutes tilt
> the balance of power in any street encounter in favor of
> the person who has a gun. That's what happened in the
> Martin case. The law provides a perverse incentive for
> everyone to be armed.
> 
> Equally problematic, these measures complicate law
> enforcement, breeding confusion for both police and
> prosecutors. They weren't even necessary, since courts
> have long recognized the right to self-defense. As Glaze
> noted, "it's not about standing your ground, it's about
> taking authority away from police and ignoring 400 years
> of common law that has always allowed you to defend
> yourself."
> 
> We need to know more about why officials in Florida were
> so slow in investigating and ultimately charging George
> Zimmerman in the Martin killing - and one can hope that
> things will become clearer as the case moves forward.
> But it's very hard not to conclude that the Stand Your
> Ground law threw sand into the wheels of justice. As
> Bloomberg said, "The strongest law of all is one that is
> never on the books, and that is the law of unintended
> consequences. Stand Your Ground laws prove that that's
> true."
> 
> We do not need statutes that encourage citizens to
> assume that feeling threatened is reason enough to shoot
> another human being. And legislatures that just rubber
> stamp laws written by national lobbying groups turn the
> whole idea of "states' rights" into an empty and
> laughable slogan.
> 
> ___________________________________________
> 
> 

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The song that lies silent in the heart of a mother sings upon the lips of her child..
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Rodney D. Coates
Professor and Interim Director of Black World Studies