The jails are just filling up with innocent Americans who gun down intruders in their own home then get stuck with a liberally biased jury and end up spending their lives rotting away in Jail. A bunch of people put their heads together and came up with the “Stand your ground laws” to save the day. We live in such an amazing country that now 21 different states or 2/5 of our more perfect Union now have laws protecting people who shoot other people as long as it is in ‘self-defense’.

In Texas you can shoot a Prostitute if you pay her for sex and she doesn’t deliver ‘the goods’. Walk away scott-free thanks to Stand Your Ground Laws, but don’t try to steal ribs from a supermarket with a knife in your pocket or you could end up with a 50 year prison sentence.

http://www.cnn.com/2013/06/10/opinion/moore-texas-craziness

I knocked on my neighbor’s door one day with my 12-year-old son by my side. He answered the door with a shotgun and a gruff  ‘get the hell off my porch’. I stood my ground and told him how inappropriate his constant speeding down our road was threatening the lives of every living creature around. If only NY had a stand your ground law, he would have been able to shoot me and my son in self defense for not ‘getting the hell off his porch’ when he told us to. Or maybe I would have been able to take his gun from him and shoot him because I felt that my life was being threatened. Who knows?

It took them 44 days to press charges against Zimmerman, after the Jury trial he walked. Members of the jury were left feeling like they should have charged him with SOMETHING. There is no doubt in anyone’s mind that George Zimmerman went out looking for trouble. If he hadn’t been packing heat and then whatever altercation he had with Travan would have ended in a scuffle with some bruises and hurt egos. Instead Travan died. Why did he die?

Because guns don’t solve problems.

That’s right, despite what most American’s think, Guns only cause more violence, they never prevent it. Writing in a set of laws to make people feel more comfortable about shooting someone when they feel threatened by is not the way to create order and prevent crime. Its been shown time and time again throughout history that violence just creates more violence.

We humans love violence. Our culture revolves around violence. We can’t get enough of it. Zimmerman, the deluded neighborhood watch hero, fought crime by hunting it down and stamping it out at the source. Except he didn’t count on the prey becoming the hunter. He never expected that an unarmed 17-year-old kid would stand up for himself to protect himself against a creepy stalker. Assuming that is even what happened, no one really knows except Zimmerman, and he’s not gonna talk.

So who is to blame? If it was a black man stalking and shooting another unarmed black man it would be classified as just another victim of gang violence in a country that sees the bodies pile up year after year. Instead it was a Hispanic racially profiling and pursuing a black teenager in Suburban America. Suddenly it becomes a crime that affects all of us. People move to the suburbs because they want to stay out of the cities, they want to escape the pointless violence, but when something like this happens in ‘our own backyards’ it has a lasting and profound effect on our psyche and our illusions of safety.

The NRA would have you believe that Stand Your Ground Laws are crucial and necessary to maintaining peace. The reality could not be father from the truth. In this country when you shoot someone you are breaking the law. Even if you are defending yourself in your own home you MUST get processed through the criminal justice system and not just have the police department decide that you are innocent and walk away with a get-out-of-jail-free card.

Zimmerman was finally processed through the Criminal Justice system and that system failed us. It failed because it supported Zimmerman’s actions, his delusions of himself as a hero, and justified his unjustifiable actions. Who knows if the outcome would have been different if the police hadn’t taken 44 days to press charges, or if the media  hadn’t turned the trial into a 3-ringed circus. Almost everyone in America feels that George is guilty of SOMETHING, at the very least of exceedingly poor judgement. Exceedingly poor judgement is not a crime in and of itself, but when it ends up taking someone else’s life then often people are left feeling like some kind of justice must be served. That is the condition of America today. Half of America wanting Zimmerman’s head on a spike, the other half is just not seeing what the big deal is about accidentally shooting a teenage black kid and not having to go to jail for it. I mean it was an accident right?

The tragedy of the situation is that if George Zimmerman didn’t have a gun in the first place then they would probably both be alive today.

Gandhi would never approve of “Stand Your Ground Laws”. Violence is a brutal monster that feeds on itself and consumes everything in its path, including that which it holds most dear. A hall pass for more violence under the guise of self-defense will divide this nation even further and create an even deeper rift.

Stand Your Ground Laws need to be found to be unconstitutional by the US Supreme Court and Zimmerman should be retried on the federal level. I can’t see any other outcome that doesn’t end with more misery, suffering and death.