Especially if you are in a state with an ALEC-sponsored "stand your ground" law.
Especially if you are in Florida.
Especially if you are in a gated community in Sanford, Florida.
Especially if you are white and drive an SUV and you stalk and gun down a black kid.
"Stand your ground" means RIGHT TO KILL.
"Stand your ground" means that all rights are suspended for everyone but the man (in rare instances a woman -- unless she's black) with a gun.
In the months leading up to the trial of the Florida man who sparked national controversy over state Stand Your Ground laws when he shot dead 17-year-old Trayvon Martin, several defendants have escaped criminal liability for deadly shootings under the law. Just last week, a Florida jury acquitted a man who killed his wife’s lover in his home after firing three shots into his head and back. But just months after Trayvon’s death, Florida’s notorious Stand Your Ground law did not spare Marissa Alexander, who fired a mere warning shot into the wall during a violent incident with her husband.
Alexander was sentenced to 20 years in prison last year, after a judge rejected her Stand Your Ground defense and a jury convicted her on three counts of aggravated assault. Alexander’s husband was arrested twice before on misdemeanor battery charges against other women. But authorities said Alexander initiated the 2010 incident and pointed the gun at her husband and two step-sons before firing the warning shot into the ceiling.
But then, it boils down to the so-called "rights" some claim are guaranteed in the Second Amendment to the American Constitution, it boils down to the issue of Black and White, to that old plague of our nation, slavery, and keeping slaves (black) in line and subservient to whites..
For those who accept the NRA fiction that the Second Amendment is a God-given right that cannot be infringed or abridged, interpreted or altered, here's a little history that should disrupt that ill considered belief.
It tells us the Second Amendment was added to the Constitution, not to uphold the citizen's right to own and keep his guns but to uphold his right to own and keep his slaves.
You can read about it at length in a richly detailed and heavily footnoted 1995 University of California Law Review article, "The Hidden History of the Second Amendment" by Carl T. Bogus, a professor of law at Roger Williams University. He is also the author of a "a generally admiring biography" of the conservative icon William F. Buckley that has won critical praise from both The New York Times and Buckley's own National Review.
His law review study, sent to me by a reader, maintains that a well regulated militia may or may not have been considered necessary to the security of all the new states but for the slave-owning states, it was a matter of life and death.
You see, God Almighty did not see fit to ensure that babies in the womb (especially white male babies) held a gun in their tiny hands. It was up to the NRA to take care of that little issue, with help from millions of dollars from ALEC and gun and ammo manufacturers. And they had to make damn sure that men especially had guns in their hands and had the idea imprinted on their brains -- only when my gun is pried from my cold dead hands -- I have had men say that to me, with their hands and lips quivering with cold terror, right to my face -- and I hated those men ever after for being so damned stupid.