Stand Your Ground
Texas Senator Ted Cruz has a way of keeping people focused on the issue—much to the chagrin of those who are driven by emotional fantasy. The challengers to good Stand Your Ground law were shown the facts by John Lott and Ilya Shapiro in the Senate hearing held on October 29, 2013.
As Andrew Branca noted in his blog article “Stand Your Ground” opponents mangle law and Trayvon facts at Senate Hearing :
Cruz opened up by noting that if the Federal government was really concerned about violent crime they certainly had a strange way of showing it. Of the many thousands of attempts to illegally purchase firearms and the many thousands of gun crimes that fall under the purview of Federal criminal law, the Department of Justice prosecuted virtually none of them...
My first general observation is that the anti-SYG folks were, as experience would suggest, big on emotion and small on actual facts, law, or data.
One of the anti-SYG witnesses, Professor Sullivan from Harvard Law School, did raise some actual data–but when these were utterly destroyed by the later testimony of Dr. John Lott and Elliot Shapiro of CATA [sic], Professor Sullivan was swift to discount the use of data (which he himself had introduced into the testimony) and instead focus on the “real people” behind the data. In sharp contrast, the testimony of the pro-SYG speakers was focused and direct.
Second, the anti-SYG folks persistently conflated the legal concept of Stand Your Ground with utterly discrete legal concepts, such as presumptions of reasonableness and civil/criminal immunity.
When this is done by people without legal training or experience, such as Sabrina Fulton, one can of course accept it as an unknowing error. When it is persistently done by a Harvard Law Professor and a head of an (allegedly) leading association of State Prosecutors, one can only wonder at either their actual intent or their underlying intelligence.
Indeed, their misstatements of the law were so egregious that at one point Dr. Lott was obliged to read aloud from the actual Florida statute they had badly mischaracterized, to which they naturally had no substantive response. In that case they were claiming that even criminal aggressors could claim Stand Your Ground privilege under Florida law, a claim that the plain language of the statute read by Dr. Lott clearly destroys.
In any case, it is clear that their effort is intended to be a broad attack on all three fronts — likely with immunity being the true target, as it represents the largest pot of gold for their supporters — rather than any focused concern on Stand Your Ground, per se.
Ah yes, that pesky immunity clause... Why do the "anti's" look so uncomfortable when that is mentioned?
The webcast of the 2 hour Senate hearing can be seen here.
-fl