KILLING: The taking of a life.
HOMICIDE: The taking of a human life.
JUSTIFIABLE HOMICIDE: The killing without evil or criminal intent, for which there can be no blame.
MURDER: The crime of unlawfully killing a person especially with malice aforethough.
I was reviewing my mail alerts that I had abandoned pretty much this week while engaged in other endeavors, when I bumped into an article by the San Francisco Chronicle announcing that Stand Your Ground Laws actually increase murders rates.
I was actually shocked. I mean just this week the FBI Unified Crime report came out for 2011 indicating that violent crime including murder has dropped for the fifth consecutive year. So, what the hell is going on here? The article is based on a study made by Texas A&M University titled : Does Strengthening Self-Defense Law Deter Crime Or Escalate Violence? Evidence From Castle Doctrine. The first problem right off the bat is the assumption that Stand Your ground was created to deter crime, nothing farther than the truth. SYG laws was conceived to allow law abiding citizens to defend themselves without having to attempt to engage in the dangerous practice of Duty to Retreat which is the stupid concept that you can outrun a bullet fired by a criminal.
Next I get to read that Stand Your Ground is a creation of the State of Florida in 2005 which tells me that the “researchers” somehow missed the cases of Beard v. United States – 158 U.S. 550 (1895) and Brown v. United States, 256 U.S. 335 (1921) and which I previously posted in this post.
If you keep on reading the study, even though they make the distinction between justifiable homicide and murder, soon enough they either willfully or by stupidity, start mixing the first definition with the second. I gave up reading the rest of the “study” after that and I am laying my bets on the side of willful application of BS. I know that the quality of education in our universities has decreased, but this smells more like a political hatchet job than an “oopsie.”
I lived in San Francisco and it was the longest four years of my life. Mega-Ugh!
The San Francisco Chronicle rag is only suitable for use in house-training pets.
They also had a sad panda moment- the biased noobs actually said they hoped to prove that passing SYG would cause the criminals to also use guns more- but their random number generator didn’t spit that result out. Also- did they control for time to reelection of prosecutors, or media saturation (local vs national)?
That’s been an anti-rights trick for a while now. Killing = Murder.
You shoot a deer or a turkey and harvest the meat? MURDER!
You shoot a meth head in your home at 2am? MURDER!
A woman prevents a rape by putting a precise hole in her attacker? MURDER!
My Father-in-Law was a defense lawyer for some time before he found a more scrupulous profession. I once asked him if he ever defended a murder case where he knew his client did it.
He said “Sure. But I knew they were a KILLER. There are lots of killers that are fine in the law. Murder can only exist in a court of law, and I was there to make sure if he was a murderer the other guy made a good case of it.
He then pointed out the child molesters that he defended and knew they had done THAT were what drove him out of the business.