The Republican’s longtime Queen of GQP voter suppression bills, Sen. Michelle Ugenti-Rita, is now branching out into spearheading an expansion of self-defense laws to include a “license to kill” some punk who sprays graffiti on your wall, or shoplifts from your store.
Just to be clear, self-defense laws are about personal safety, the defense of human life. It is not a “license to kill” anyone who pisses you off with their stupid acts of shoplifiting or property damage. We already have criminal laws for shoplifting and property damage. This is about acting out of anger and agression at the culprit responsible, and getting a free pass for taking a human life to satisfy your id. This is not self-defense, this is murder.
An aside: When I was young I worked in retail, and shoplifting was a problem back then too. Corporate policy was to identify the shoplifter and get a license plate number if they left in a vehicle for the police, but never to engage them to avoid anyone suffering bodily injury. This was part of the liability insurance policy. I’m pretty sure that liability insurance underwriters still include this in liability insurance policies. Your insurer sure as hell is not going to cover you for killing someone on your property, especially when your nervous ass goes all Barney Fife and you shoot wildly, killing an innocent bystander in the line of fire.
The AP reports, Arizona Senate bill allows deadly force for property damage:
A bill sponsored by a Republican state senator set for a vote at any time would allow business owners or their employees to use deadly force to defend their property against smash-and-grab robbers if the robber possessed a dangerous weapon.
Ah, so this is what this is really all about. The hyperventilating Fox News coverage about smash-and-grab robberies (always by Black youths on Fox). See for example, Smash-and-grab robberies plague cities with liberal district attorneys. This has been continuous since the coverage following George Floyd’s murder in May 2020, and is related to Fox News’s attacks on Black Lives Lives Matter protests. Fox is all about “scaring the white people.” This is just another GQP culture war bill from a longtime GQP cuture warrior taking her cues from Fox News. This woman is truly pathetic.
But critics of the proposal from Scottsdale Sen. Michelle Ugenti-Rita say the legislation is so broadly written that it would allow someone to shoot and kill someone just for scrawling graffiti on a wall while having something that might be deemed a weapon.
Ugenti-Rita acknowledged during a recent committee hearing that that was possible, but pointed to limits in her proposal that said the person had to possess a “deadly instrument” at the time they were “knowingly” damaging or defacing someone else’s property.
“Sadly we have become all too familiar with the looting and smash and grab thefts that have occurred across the country as a result, and has resulted in violence and property damage,” Ugenti-Rita said during a committee hearing last month. “I believe we need to strengthen our laws so that business owners will have a legal justification for using physical force or deadly force when defending their property.”
They had better check with their liability insurer first.
She said the reality is that businesses are the livelihoods of business owners and their employees and they should be able to defend them like they can their own home, although she said killing someone to stop the crime should be a last resort.
But Democrats on the Senate Judiciary Committee and K.M. Bell of the American Civil Liberties Union of Arizona worried that the shield given to a property owner who uses deadly force is overly broad. And they noted that it applies to any property, not just a business that is being robbed.
“This would in effect allow members of the public to impose the death penalty for the spraying of graffiti,” Bell told the panel.
The Senate advanced the measure through floor debate Thursday with no comment. It was scheduled for a vote Monday afternoon but was one of several bills that were passed over during floor action.
UPDATE: Vote postponed. Now we wait and see if there are the votes to allow business owners and employees to kill those who damage or deface their property. https://t.co/EJB8GklXTi
— Capitol Media Services 📢 Telling it like it is (@azcapmedia) March 8, 2022
Arizona already allows the use of deadly force to stop many crimes, including residential [castle doctrine] burglary, rape, kidnapping, arson and manslaughter. But Ugenti-Rita’s proposal allows the use of force to prevent any criminal property damage, including amounts so small that they would only lead to a four-month jail sentence.
Dana Allmond, a retired Army officer and mother of four who lives in Marana, told the committee she’s worried the proposal would embolden people to be “vigilantes” and lead to needless death. She said the bill creates an unfair and unjust reason to use deadly force for minor crimes like defacing property with graffiti.
“I feel like we may be encouraging those with malice intent to end our lives and the lives of our precious loved ones,” Allmond said. “And I can’t sleep at night worried about my kids.”
In an interview Friday, Ugenti-Rita said concerns about the law were misplaced. She said the origins of the law included the May 2020 riot at the Scottsdale Fashion Square where hundreds of people looted stores following the death of George Floyd and a series of smash and grab robberies in California and across the nation where gangs of people descended on retail stories.
What I said above.
The most recent occurred Sunday in Roseville, California, when a gang of 10 men stormed a jewelry store and used sledgehammers to break display cases and grab merchandise. The men escaped.
“You need to focus on the fact that you have to have a weapon,” Ugenti-Rita said. “And I don’t know if the victim in that situation would characterize the situation as a minor offense when their property is being vandalized by someone with a dangerous weapon.”
“You should be able to defend your business like you defend your home,” she said.
NO, you should not. This is a dramatic expansion of the Castle Doctrine (The castle exception states that if a defendant is in his home, he is not required to retreat prior to using deadly force in self defense). This is not self-defense, this is murder.
Property damage and vandalism is what insurance coverage is for. You do not need a “license to kill” anyone who pisses you off with their stupid acts of shoplifiting or property damage.
The extreme bill should be defeated and its sponsor, Michelle Ugenti-Rita, should have her head examined.
UPDATE: “Arizona lawmakers reject bill allowing deadly force for property damage”, https://tucson.com/news/state-and-regional/govt-and-politics/arizona-lawmakers-reject-bill-allowing-deadly-force-for-property-damage/article_2d2c02aa-a3cc-11ec-a85c-9f4bfa11f543.html
Arizona lawmakers are not going to give business owners the right to kill vandals who damage or deface their property.
But the reason for that decision is less than clear.
Only 13 of the 16 Senate Republicans voted in support Monday for SB 1650.
The proposal by Sen. Michelle Ugenti-Rita sought to expand the ability of not just business owners but their employees to use deadly force beyond saving lives or stopping rapes to criminal damage if the perpetrator also was armed with a deadly weapon or “dangerous instrument.”
And that latter category, it was pointed out, could include anything that, depending on how it is used, is “readily capable of causing death or serious injury,” something that lawmakers debated in committee could include a block of wood or even a pen.
Monday’s vote was a surprise as it reflected what appears to have been a change of heart by [QAnon insurrectionist] Sen. Sonny Borrelli, R-Lake Havasu City.
[B Monday, Borrelli was telling a different story.
“I can understand you use force to save your life, of your friends, your family or another person,” he said. “Any kind of reasonable force I will stand for, will stand with.”
But this, Borrelli said, is different.
He noted that the crime of committing criminal damage is a Class 3 felony. It carries a presumptive prison term of 3.5 years.
“You can replace property,” Borrelli said.
“You can’t replace life,” he continued. “This bill is a little on the extreme side.”
Borrelli said he had hoped that Ugenti-Rita would have “watered down” the measure. She did not.
But Ugenti-Rita told Capitol Media Services after the defeat that she sees something quite different in his vote.
“I think he was retaliating because I voted against his bill,” she said.
That refers to SB 1457 which dealt with security issues for voting machines. It came up two votes short on Monday as Ugenti-Rita and Sen. Paul Boyer, R-Glendale, joined with Democrats to vote against it.
Borrelli, for his part, said that has nothing to do with it. [Of course it did. He is a liar.]
“It’s not spite,” he told Capitol Media Services. But he declined to answer other questions including why his views reversed in the six weeks between the time he supported it in the Senate Judiciary Committee and when it came for a final vote Monday.
Ugenti-Rita also lashed out at Senate President Karen Fann, R-Prescott. [Is this princess like the biggest whiner, ever?] She said Fann knew that she was two votes shy of the majority 16 she needed, but chose to schedule a vote anyway.
Fann, however, said there was nothing sinister about that, pointing out that she had delayed a final vote before. And the Senate president said she was trying to get final votes on all Senate measures by Monday so they could go to the House.
“We needed to keep moving,” Fann said.