Shoot first, ask questions never.
Some folks down in Florida have decided that their Stand Your Ground law isn't working out after all. That would be the law that allows you (generally presuming "you" are a white male with anger management issues) to kill anyone you want so long as you can make a good case that they were threatening you. As it turns out, that may have been a bad idea—you shouldn't have to
make a case they were threatening you,
that's an outrageous infringement of your personal say-so.
An appeal before the Florida Supreme Court on Tuesday could shift the burden of proof for the state’s “Stand Your Ground” law, relieving gun owners of a legal duty to prove self-defense when they brandish weapons in violent confrontations.
If the high court sides with Jared Bretherick, who was charged with aggravated assault for pointing a pistol at a man in a road-rage incident, the burden of proof would be shifted to prosecutors to show that a defendant claiming the law’s protection did not act in self-defense.
Within the context of the law, you have to admit this argument makes sense. The law was intended to better allow citizens to kill other citizens in self-defense, something they could always do but which was deemed too larded-up with restrictions and future court dates and the like. But if you have to
prove it was self-defense, that hardly streamlines the process, and the whole damn point of the law was to streamline the process. No, you should just have to
say it was self-defense. I'm sorry, officer, but grandma was coming right for me, tall as a grizzly bear, and with a demon look in her eye.
Also, the NRA has filed a brief supporting this new interpretation of the law because of course they did. It seems like after every highly publicized shooting, America responds to the problem by further weakening whatever laws might be seen as getting in the way of allowing those shootings in the future. There's not going to be many of those laws left if Americans keep shooting each other and we have to keep coming up with new reasons why the dead people probably all had it coming.