The Detroit Free Press, in the great liberal tradition of turning every tragedy into an ultimatum to enact their agenda, has adopted the shooting of Renisha McBride by Theodore Wafer as an excuse to attack Michigan’s Stand Your Ground law.
“This is the first step toward justice,” writes the Freep about the charges brought against Wafer in its Sunday editorial, “Charges in Renisha McBride case show the system working.” The next step, a classic liberal non sequitur, needs to be a blanket repeal of self-defense protections: “No matter the outcome of Wafer’s trial, it’s time to take a serious look at Michigan’s stand-your-ground law.”
Let me re-phrase that sentence. “No matter if Wafer is convicted or not, [and the Freep believes he’s going to be] we should all agree that it should be illegal for a person to defend himself using deadly force, even if he’s defending his own home.”
I’m aware that Wafer has been charged based on prosecutors’ opinion he had insufficient justification to claim self-defense; those facts remain to be tried. Regardless, the Freep says it doesn’t matter whether Wafer is or isn’t found guilty, we still need to repeal self-defense laws. That means that even if a homeowner has a crew of villains invading dead to rights, he’ll have no legal right to fight back.
By way of taking a “serious look” at stand your ground, the Freep promptly resorts to the same childish sort of caricature of such laws that has been discredited over and over again. “The ability to fire at will, on the flimsiest of perceived threats, is a destructive empowerment that benefits no one.” (Besides, America’s already got a perfectly good destructive empowerment that enables homicide on the flimsiest of perceived threats – we call it “abortion on demand”!)
Only a few days back the Miami Herald used the more traditional, but equally stupid, caricature of stand your ground: “a self-defense law that gives immunity to someone who shoots first and asks questions later.” Well, that does sound crazy. Everyone knows that when confronting a desperate felon capable of anything it’s better to hold your fire and ask questions first. And if you’re too rattled (or what liberals call being “allegedly in fear for your life”) to think of any questions on the spot you could use some of these favorites that, actually, never had the chance to be asked:
1) Why did you guys kick my door in and shoot my dog? followed up by, why are you pointing that gun at me?
2) Can we take a time-out so I can make a call?
3) Haven’t you got fellas something better to do than rape my wife?, or
4) How long do you think you’ll be banging my brains into the concrete before you kill me as you promised to do?
Besides, the Free Press is just wrong that the McBride case is about stand your ground, when it’s actually about a homeowner who says he was afraid that someone was trying to break into his house.
Even Deadline Detroit’s Darrell Dawsey, not someone you’d think of for a “serious talk” about stand your ground, (or anything else?) takes issue with the Freep that the McBride case has anything to do with “SYG.” It’s not as if D.D. (Dee-Dee?) approves of stand your ground. He can draw as funny a Crayola cartoon of stand your ground as anybody -- just watch! “[A]ny law that would allow someone to target another innocent person and then kill him/her for nothing”,
and
“basically . . . a license to hunt human beings.”
If Dawsey’s rendition of stand your ground isn’t proof enough of his fair-mindedness, how about his courage in pointing out there are even some differences between the cases of Trayvon Martin and Renisha McBride, differences he discusses in a brief timeout from his endless comparisons of Trayvon and Renisha. Like when Dawsey says we shouldn’t turn Renisha McBride into “Detroit’s Trayvon,” but instead deal with “her death and her killer on their own merits.”
Dealing with things on their merits doesn’t seem to be something Dee-Dee has much flair for. For example, like the Free Press, Dee-Dee shows no competence for dealing with the Trayvon case on its merits, if by “dealing with the case on its merits” means acknowledging evidence and well-tried facts revealed after a thorough public trial. As far as I can tell, Dawsey, and every one of his co-belligerents for all that, continue to ignore the actual Zimmerman trial, the evidence, and the verdict as if they never happened – allowing them all to continue repeating outdated fairy tales about Martin’s death – more or less a legal Flat Earth Society.
For a better source on that subject I highly recommend Jack Cashill’s book, “'If I had a Son': Race, Guns, and the Railroading of George Zimmerman”.
The big brains at the Free Press easily conflate stand your ground laws with simple self-defense because they hate both and would happily take them both away. In a just world, liberals would be allowed to proactively destroy the coal and oil industry, the auto industry, the world economy, the standard of living of future generations, and American freedom, in unreasonable response to the inchoate predictions of documented liars about global climate change 200 years from now, but a homeowner who can hear thugs kicking his door in THIS MINUTE should have no legal right to do anything but call 911, and maybe roll himself and his family into roly-poly bugs to wait for the end. (Legal language permitting self-defensive prayers to God asking Him to help are invariably cut from proposed legislation as grossly unconstitutional, and as union-busting tricks meant to starve the children of first responders).
Between sobs the Free Press blubbers that Michigan’s law on self-defense is “a destructive empowerment that benefits no one.”
The only problem with that statement is that it’s insane.
Detroit has one of the highest rates of justifiable (self-defense) homicides in the country, reporting 411 homicides in 2012, 25 of which were justifiable. That’s only justifiable homicides in Detroit, not all of Michigan. Not only does that number reflect the number of violent crime attacks on innocent people that needed to be answered with deadly force, but it also gives the lie to the ludicrous after-the-fact rationalizing that only calling 911 equals instant delivery from a potential life-and-death situation.
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Excellent article.
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