Via Dave Hardy, who notes “Not too surprising, since as I recall Florida never had a retreat requirement in the first place.” If I recall, Florida followed more closely to common law. Someone committing a felony you could shoot dead, which is going to be most cases in which a citizen defends themselves. You were required to retreat if you could do so safely otherwise.
The article is here, and of course, the best part is:
Gun control advocates immediately criticized the report as “disappointing,” saying it did not go far enough to determine the true impact of the Stand Your Ground law.
“If the state wanted to work with a real data analysis, then fund it. It became pretty clear that they are going to fail to do that,” said Ginny Simmons, director of the Second Chance on Shoot First campaign.
That’s Bloomberg’s group, for those of you wondering. The fact is that Stand Your Ground just doesn’t have much impact. The number of cases where duty to retreat would even have come up in Florida before the law are vanishingly small, and despite the fact that gun control groups lied their way into making SYG and issue in the Trayvon Martin case, it never would have been at issue either before or after the law went into effect.
Where this Commission is dropping the Ball is that they haven’t taken into account how many people have been Prosecuted and Jailed for NOT retreating prior to the Law being enacted. Having faced that question during my Shooting Incident, the Judge ruled in my favor when I testified that I had Barricaded myself, was on the Phone to the Police, had given many warnings to “Get the F%*K Out!” (all caught on the Police tape) and the Goblin still was trying to get in. My Lawyer asked “So what was my Client supposed to do? Get Beamed Up to Safety?” So that’s why I’m Free and the Goblin was sent to the Pen.
One of the things about Florida’s SYG law that makes the gun control crord crazy is that a judge decides if a preponderance of evidence supports a claim of self-defense, before a jury gets to hear the case. They want EVERY person who has to defend his/herself with a firearm to face a full trial, no matter if the available evidence not in dispute shows that the person was most likely acting in self defense.
A good analogy to this would be if motorists had to face criminal negligence charges every time they were in a traffic accident, because an overzealous prosecutor didn’t have to prove with a prepobderance of evidence that motorists were in fact negligent.
A good analogy to this would be if motorists had to face criminal negligence charges every time they were in a traffic accident… Which actually is an entirely accurate description of the Mexican legal system … absent notice of the many “fines” paid to various and sundry local Prosecutors and Judges in said system, order to extricate oneself from such a penalty-based system.