A big problem I became aware of when reading about it today, is the obvious inconsistency, or better the mutual contradiction between certain US laws, namely in Florida.
There they have the stand your ground law. And also the 10-20-life rule, meaning that any situation where subjects draw a firearm, automatically must get 10 years, and must get 20 years automatically when not only drawing a weapon but also firing it - where it does not matter whether the subject shot into the air as a warning or aimed at a person. When during the firing the person fired at gets killed or even just wounded by the shot, the subject must get 25 years or life.
This led to a series of bizarre rulings in recent years. Where you have the right to shoot and kill somebody under circumstances where stand your ground applies, but using your weapon for a warning shot can earn you 20 years or life. And actually, that is not just a theoretical possibility, but common practice:
http://www.bostonglobe.com/opinion/e...PjN/story.html
Quote:
How could Marissa Alexander, a 31-year-old mother of three, receive a 20-year prison sentence for firing a bullet into a wall near her abusive ex-husband, even though no one was harmed?
(...)
Ronald Thompson, 62, a disabled veteran, fired two shots into the ground to protect an elderly woman from her violent 17-year-old grandson. State Attorney Angela Corey — the same prosecutor in the Zimmerman case — charged him with four counts of aggravated assault. Thompson was sentenced to 20 years in prison, a punishment that the judge in the case called a “crime in itself.” (He is currently awaiting a new trial.)
Orville Lee Wollard, a former auxiliary police force member, shot a bullet into the wall to scare away his daughter’s abusive boyfriend. Prosecutors offered him probation. But he wanted to be exonerated at trial. Now he’s serving 20 years.
Erik Weyant, 22, fired shots in the air to disperse a group of drunk men who accosted him in a parking lot outside a bar and blocked his car. No one was hurt. But he’s in for 20 years.
In many cases, the fact that they chose to fire a warning shot, instead of aiming to kill, was used as evidence against them at trial, said Greg Newburn of Families Against Mandatory Minimums. If you were truly in fear of your life, the logic goes, you would aim at the chest, not the wall.
Florida lawmakers, in their infinite wisdom, began to notice that a lot of people were getting severely punished simply for defending themselves. But instead of repealing the Draconian measure, they passed another one: the “stand your ground” law.
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Fan-tas-tic. Those people get their lives messed up and stolen from them for scaring away attackers without harming anyone, but George Zimmerman kills an unarmed one and walks away freely without even formally being held responisble for an act of misjudgement of the situation, not to mention the possibility that it simply was slaughter caused by subliminal racism, as some people claim.
Rally, those Florida laws are fan-tas-tic.