A license to kill
Posted by AzBlueMeanie:
No, I am not referring to James Bond, 007. Any American living in a state that has lax gun laws and stand your ground laws, and which permits its citizens to engage in vigilante justice (like Arizona) has the tacit approval of the state for a license to kill. It is a sickness in our culture.
There are two good opinions on this topic that I have read. The first is Ed Kilgore at the Political Animal Blog, who writes, Licenses to Kill:
[T]he more I think about it, the real aberration in law and society
that’s been exposed by this case involves the incentives offered to
Zimmerman and people like him—not just in Sanford, Florida, but in much
of the country. At TAP, Scott Lemieux nails it:
Carrying a deadly weapon in public should carry unique
responsibilities. In most cases someone with a gun should not be able to
escape culpability if he initiates a conflict with someone unarmed and
the other party ends up getting shot and killed. Under the current law
in many states, people threatened by armed people have few good options,
because fighting back might create a license to kill. As the New Yorker’s
Amy Davidson puts it, “I still don’t understand what Trayvon was
supposed to do.” Unless the law is changed to deal with the large number
of people carrying concealed guns, there will be more tragic and
unnecessary deaths of innocent people like Trayvon Martin for which
nobody is legally culpable. And to make claims of self-defense easier to
bring, as Florida and more than 20 other states have done, is moving in
precisely the wrong direction. And, even more importantly, no matter
how self-defense laws are structured the extremely unusual American
practice of allowing large number of citizens to carry concealed weapons
leads to many unecessary deaths. (All 50 states, it’s worth noting,
permit concealed carry.)