As usual, I am not a lawyer, jus somebody who reads law and might have an interpretation of it. Grain of Salt recommended.

From its earliest times, the law of self-defense has included an important exception. When one under attack knows he can escape from danger by retreating, without risking further danger to herself, he must retreat. Like the law against homicide, the rule of retreat attempts to avoid unnecessary death – even the death of an unlawful attacker – unless the circumstances present no alternative. The rule of retreat is itself subject to an exception: the rule has almways applied everywhere except in the home of the person under attack. This exception to the rule of retreat, known as the castle doctrine, makes sense: the home is the last and final place to which one could retreat. Thus a victim never had to retreat from an attacker in her own home; she could stand and fight back.

SYG laws change this ancient legal landscape in a fundamental way. SYG laws abolish the rule of retreat in any place the person defending herself has a right to be. Put another way, SYG laws take the rule of retreat from the home and extend it into public places. A person under unjustified attack in a public place need not retreat, even if she knows she can get away in complete safety; she can stand her ground, and even use deadly force if she faces deadly force

via JURIST – EXTRA: Stand Your Ground Laws and Implicit Bias.

These are the words of David A. Harris, Distinguished Faculty Scholar and Professor of Law University of Pittsburgh during the United States Commission on Civil Rights on this past October 17. By now the readers of this blog are well aware that Stand Your Ground is not something that the NRA cooked up in last decade and poured over Florida but a well established principle with Supreme Court decisions over 100 years old ( Beard v. United States – 158 U.S. 550 (1895) and Brown v. United States, 256 U.S. 335 (1921) )

But there is more:

This “no retreat in public” idea is the central feature of Florida’s SYG law. The Florida law also gives criminal and civil immunity to one claiming an SYG defense. When the killer makes an SYG claim, police cannot immediately arrest, detain, charge or prosecute, as they usually would. Police and prosecutors may investigate, utilizing “standard procedures,” but they cannot arrest unless the agency “determines that there is probable cause that the force that was used was unlawful.”

He makes it sound like you can stand, knife in hand on top of a mound of dead babies, shout “Stand Your Ground!” and you cannot be touched. Nothing farther from the truth. Immunity from prosecution is not a legal olly olly oxen free that let’s you walk out of a crime scene without any worry in the world. In order to claim immunity from prosecution, the four tenets for Self-Defense still must be present: Innocence, Immediacy, Reasonableness and Proportionality. f these conditions are not present, you can claim SYG/Immunity till your face turn green and you will still be riding in the back of a cruiser wearing steel bracelets.

What many confuse with a Free Pass is actually Florida Statutes 776.032 (2) which states: A law enforcement agency may use standard procedures for investigating the use or threatened use of force as described in subsection (1), but the agency may not arrest the person for using or threatening to use force unless it determines that there is probable cause that the force that was used or threatened was unlawful.  What we have is that if you used deadly force/Homicide to defend yourself, you cannot automatically be arrested for the use of such force when the evidence says otherwise even if Use of Deadly Force/Homicide is against the law because there is enough information to initially support an extenuating circumstance: Justifiable Homicide. The law does not say that the police should stop investigating altogether and let the person investigated go home and collect $200 but that they continue to do so till they can find evidence contrary to the initial findings or they are satisfied that the initial assessment of self-defense is confirmed.

So why are we still having these silly arguments about SYG and Immunity from prosecution? In my opinion it is mostly a political narrative based on prosecutors disliking the fact that power has been taken away from them (mostly because a history or prosecutorial misconduct) and they resent that. Those interested in the elimination of SYG, added a few shakes of implied racism by claiming that SYG unfairly targets minorities, specially blacks (but they forget to add that the biggest recipient of SYG benefits have been blacks) and we have us a faux uproar based on nothing.

But that a supposed scholar like Professor Harris repeats the same old stupidity that we expect from our local news rags and political hacks, makes you think he is not a worthy recipient of the position at his school. That he does it by sheer ignorance or conscious choice is to be determined.

Via Concealed Nation.

D.C. Police Chief Cathy Lanier says taxi drivers should be banned from carrying concealed handguns.
Lanier  made the recommendation during a hearing on a bill that would allow District of Columbia residents and visitors to get concealed handgun permits for the first time in nearly 40 years.

via Cab Drivers Shouldn’t Carry Concealed Weapons, D.C. Police Chief Says | NBC4 Washington.

After 25 years or more of country-wide Concealed Carry, it is sad to see that D.C. still treats their Cab drivers like some sort of second-class citizens.

Those who follow Massad Ayoob have his best-selling book The Ayoob Files. In the book we find the Mark Yuhr Incident in which Mr. Yuhr, a can driver saved his life because of the still new Florida Concealed Weapons Permit law.

In this city, it was once impossible to get a concealed carry permit unless you were influential, and even then it was only good in the county of issue. Florida’s recent pistol permit reform has changed this. Yuhr is one of the many citizens who took advantage of their right to get a statewide concealed carry permit after paying
$145 for the application and taking a 4-hour firearms safety course.

….”I’ ve given you all the money I have!”
“Get out of the car!”
The man in the back seat gestures savagely with the muzzle of the 9mm, and Yuhr opens hi s door, slides out of the bucket seat, and steps into the roadway. He watches as the man climbs between the two front buckets from the back seat. As he starts to emerge from the driver ‘s door, the gunman’s head swivels both directions, as if scanning for witnesses. His finger is tight on the trigger of the Smith & Wesson automatic...

If you wanna read the rest, go buy the book. This is a one must-have book in your library.

But I can advance that we had a happy ending with Mr. Yuhr or at least not so bad. But it was because he was given the chance to defend himself with the proper tools and not be 100% victim.

In D.C.? Well, Police Chief Cathy Lanier wants you to have a good chance to become a crime statistic.

I found myself revisiting the original cyber-battleground of the Gun Rights War: Usenet and in particular talk.politics.guns and it is nothing short of amazing where were we and where are we now.

Time Warp Again will be a recurring post every Saturday. It will bring a small piece of the battles and the challenges Gun Owners faced back then.  Now that we are fully into Gun Culture 2,0, we need to make sure that the new blood knows what happened, where we failed and where we were victorious.

In a Facebook post earlier this week, Brad Torgersen posted an article from Slate.com about the meanness of Twitter. Somebody, I forget who replied that Usenet was bad, heck it was worse! It would be like pitting Thermopylae against dancing with the Stars.

What I’ll do is post a bit from Usenet about gun rights, leave the link and my comments in the hope that the new generation gets curious enough to do some archaeological work and find where we came from. Let’s begin:

Parents of slain youth continue signature drive in U.S.
Copyright 1992 by <UPI>
TOKYO (UPI) — The parents of a Japanese exchange student shot dead in October presented U.S. Ambassador Michael Armacost Tuesday with a petition calling for tighter gun control laws in the United States. Yoshihiro Hattori, 16, of Nagoya, was guned down in a suburb of Baton Rouge, La., on Oct. 17 after knocking on the wrong door while looking for a Halloween party.
His father, Masaichi, and mother, Mieko, collected 800,000 signatures for the petition with the help of Yoshihiro’s high school classmates and the American Field Service Japan Association Inc., which arranged for the youth’s stay in the United States.

This case was famous back then. Yoshihiro Hattori a 16 year old Japanese student was shot by a homeowner in October 17, 1992. For reasons unknown, Hattori in full Halloween regalia attempted to enter the residence of Rodney Peairs who shot him inside his garage. Even though police initially refused to press charges, the White House, the governor of Louisiana, the Japanese Government and the media in general put so much pressure that they charged Peairs with Manslaughter. He was tried and acquitted of the charge shocking the hell out of everybody who “just knew” there was no way this guy was not going to jail. The Jurors simply figured out that your home is your castle and delivered the verdict accordingly.

This was a slap in the face to a gun control movement that was riding high at the time. The Brady bill was months away, the NRA could not get the light of day in the news unless it was to be blamed for every single killing in the US and even President Clinton was suggesting that a Federal Lawsuit against gun manufactures could be an option to bring Gun Control.

There was a civil suit against Rodney Peairs for over half a million dollars IIRC. It was never paid in full and I think he declared bankruptcy after that.

So here you go, a bit of history on Castle Doctrine and a reason why having immunity from Civil Lawsuits on Self-Defense situations is a good thing to have in the books.

“I don’t care if you want to hunt, I don’t care if you think it’s your right. I say ‘Sorry.’ it’s 1999. We have had enough as a nation. You are not allowed to own a gun, and if you do own a gun I think you should go to prison.”
– Rosie O’Donnell, 1999

She explains that even though an increasing number of women are deciding to get their gun permits, it isn’t about killing people. Women give life, and they are obtaining guns to protect life, whether it is her own or someone else’s, she said. Through helping other women learn these important skills and seeing their self-confidence grow, Sutton feels like she is able to serve again.

via Former Florida Physician Teaches Women How To Shoot | Concealed Nation.

Have you noticed that the opposition remains silent when they face strong women that do not need some whiny movement of clucking hens for support?

They must hate them so much.

From Gun Nets Media via Sharp as a Marble.

I spent 15 years coming in and out of a recording studio. This one struck home hard. James Broadnax is now in Death Row.