Free Republic

#1 Over the past 20 years, gun sales have absolutely exploded, but homicides with firearms are down 39 percent during that time and “other crimes with firearms” are down 69 percent. #2 A study published in the Harvard Journal of Law & Public Policy discovered that nations that have more guns tend to have less crime. #3 The nine European nations with the lowest rate of gun ownership rate ...

The Florida Sheriffs Association is no longer neutral on the state's controversial "stand your ground" law. Polk County Sheriff Grady Judd, the new president of the association, announced Friday that members agreed earlier this week without opposition to support the law "as currently written." "Our current judicial system is comprised of multiple checks and balances to ensure fair and equitable application of all laws, including ‘stand your ground,'" Judd said in a prepared statement. When the National Rifle Association-backed law was approved in 2005, the association remained neutral on the issue. Rep. Matt Gaetz, a Fort Walton Beach Republican who...

In preparation for a previously announced hearing on controversial “stand your ground” laws announced after the acquittal of George Zimmerman in the shooting death of Trayvon Martin, Sen. Richard J. Durbin, D-Ill., sent letters to more than 300 possible corporate backers of the American Legislative Exchange Council, requesting their position of such policies in states across the country.

Last Wednesday, rock star/rapper Kid Rock’s security system photographed a man on crutches who was trying to break into his Michigan home. Friday night, Rock (whose real name is Robert Ritchie) posted a message to his webpage, along with images of the intruder and his van. Let’s just say the guy’s lucky that Kid Rock wasn’t home at the time.

Police are investigating three possibly related attacks on people by teens on bikes in and around Edgewood Park. The Independent reported Thursday on one such incident, which occurred around 5: 30 p.m. on Friday July 26 along the asphalt road that connects the park’s duck pond to the skateboard rink. A 63-year-old jogger was partway along that road when, he said, four teens on bikes rode passed. One turned around, rolled a bike at him to knock him over, then knocked him down again when he got up. The teens proceeded to punch and kick him, breaking an arm and...

Florida House Speaker Will Weatherford announced Friday that he will order hearings this fall on the state’s “stand your ground” law, a victory for the young protesters known as the Dream Defenders who have spent the past two weeks protesting at the Capitol. . . They shouldn’t celebrate too hard. Weatherford assigned the task of chairing the hearings to a staunch supporter of the law, Rep. Matt Gaetz, R-Fort Walton Beach. “I don’t support changing one damn comma of the stand your ground law,” Gaetz said Friday. “It would be reactionary and dangerous to make Floridians less safe to pacify...

Physicians have no business interrogating patients about their gunsIn the wake of the George Zimmerman verdict, President Obama and other anti-gun advocates have called for changing Florida’s pro-Second Amendment laws. Their chances of getting the “stand your ground” statute overturned are slim, but the anti-gun groups are making significant progress in the Sunshine State in allowing activist doctors to push their agenda to disarm families. A federal appeals court heard oral arguments on July 18 in the case that has become known as “Docs vs. Glocks.” The issue before the court is whether a patient’s right to privacy and protection...

Executive Director of Mayors Against Illegal Guns Mark Glaze had some interesting advice for people who were being attacked by someone with a weapon other than a gun during an interview with Chris Matthews. MARK GLAZE: Very often somebody will come at you. They might want to have a fistfight. They might come at you with an axe handle. MATTHEWS: Would you consider the guy with the axe handle armed or not? GLAZE: Not with a gun. MATTHEWS: I would consider him armed. GLAZE: I have a word for him. I grew up in Colorado where my dad was a...

A man who was brutally stabbed by Brooklyn subway slasher Maksim Gelman two years ago had his negligence case against the city dismissed in court yesterday, despite the fact that two transit officers had locked themselves in a motorman's car only a few feet from him at the time of the attack. Gelman stabbed Joseph Lozito in the face, neck, hands and head on an uptown 3 train in February 2011, after fatally stabbing four people and injuring three others in a 28-hour period. Lozito, a father of two and an avid martial arts fan, was able to tackle Gelman...

Feels like a surprise after so much media angst over the role of “Stand Your Ground” in Zimmerman’s acquittal — which was close to zero, by the way — but this isn’t a surprise really. Thirty-one states have SYG laws or a limited variation on them, the “Castle Doctrine” that limits SYG to your own home. Go figure that a majority of voters would endorse them when asked. White voters support “Stand Your Ground” laws 57 – 37 percent while black voters are opposed 57 – 37 percent. Men support these laws 62 – 34 percent while women are divided...

The 2012 killing of Florida teenager Trayvon Martin has led to various rallies, boycotts, and even songs. Now, the NAACP is leading the way in an effort to force legal changes across the United States in an attempt to prevent another similar situation. The NAACP created "Trayvon's Law," a series of legislative policies that aims to "end racial profiling, repeal stand your ground laws, form effective civil complaint review boards to provide oversight of police misconduct, improve training for community watch groups, mandate law enforcement to collect data on homicide cases involving non-whites, and address the “school to prison pipeline,...

TALLAHASSEE -- Gov. Rick Scott on Wednesday accused Rev. Jesse Jackson of insulting Floridians with a series of reckless and divisive statements about the state and its “stand your ground” self-defense law.While visiting the state Capitol Tuesday, Jackson talked about efforts to repeal the law and used the phrase “Selma of our time” — a reference to civil rights marches in Alabama that helped prompt change in the 1960s.In a July 18 exchange on CNN, Jackson talked about an economic boycott to “isolate Florida as a kind of apartheid state given this whole stand your ground laws.” Scott denounced both...

Civil rights activist Jesse Jackson isn't backing down from comments he made comparing Florida's struggle with the Trayvon Martin case to the civil rights clashes with police during the 1960s in Selma, Ala. Florida Gov. Rick Scott on Wednesday demanded that Jackson apologize for his comments calling the state the "Selma of our time." He also said Florida has been an "apartheid" state. But Jackson, in an interview with The Associated Press, defended his remarks. He cited the state's voter laws and incarceration rates of blacks versus the general population as examples of "apartheid like conditions."

TALLAHASSEE - The Rev. Jesse Jackson's surprise appearance Tuesday at the Capitol sit-in was enough to take some protesters' breath away. "Whoa," said Kaylee Rodall, who will be a senior at Sandalwood High School in Jacksonville. "I mean, he is the civil-rights movement." ..Jackson planned to be the first dignitary to spend the night with the group: "Wherever they're sleeping is where I'm sleeping," he said. Organizers also said they now have the votes of enough lawmakers to bypass Gov. Rick Scott and petition Secretary of State Ken Detzner - a Scott appointee - for a special session. ..Protesters...

Sybrina Fulton repeated her assertion that neighborhood watch volunteer George Zimmerman "got away with murder" in the 2012 killing of her son largely because of Florida's self-defense law, which generally removed a person's duty to retreat if possible in the face of danger. It was the first of its kind in the nation when passed in 2005. Now, about two dozen states have similar laws, but the focus of repeal efforts is squarely on Florida. "We have to change the law so that this doesn't happen to someone else's child," Fulton told reporters . . Although he was not...

Six black Hillsborough County elected officials are asking Gov. Rick Scott, Senate President Don Gaetz and House Speaker Will Weatherford for a special session to repeal or change the 2005 “stand your ground” law they blame for a looming economic crisis caused by a boycott of Florida. “Since the outcome of the Zimmerman verdict in the shooting death of Trayvon Martin, Florida has become a lightning rod for criticism over our state’s ‘stand your ground’ law,” states the July 29 letter. “Now, in the weeks since the ‘not guilty’ verdict was rendered, the cries for boycotting Florida from some of...

Rep. Sheila Jackson Lee (D-olt) filing a bill to legislate mandatory cowardness by cutting federal funding to any state supporting a “Stand Your Ground” law and to increase or maintain funding to states that implement a “runaway and show weakness” law—or as Sheila Jackson Lee calls it—”Duty to Retreat” law.(VIDEO-AT-LINK)Lee also wants to regulate any individuals who dare to take on the individual responsibility of participating in a neighborhood watch program. Guess the Black Panthers would become the guards in Sheila Jackson Lee’s vision of America. Here’s an inconvenient truth for Liberals like Sheila Jackson Lee—blacks benefit the most (more...

In our discussions of the Stand Your Ground principle, bogeymen and shadows predominate. We hear much of the National Rifle Association, of the conservative nonprofit “ALEC,” of “the South,” and, particularly ludicrously, of “white supremacy.” Disinformation and hyperbole, too, are rife. To take the more extravagant of the rule’s critics at face value would be to conclude that permissive self-defense regimes are recent inventions — a hijacking of the justice system by would-be vigilantes and their enablers. But all of this is rather silly. In truth, the Stand Your Ground principle, which holds only that one may fight back...

Hungry for another claimed example of a deadly Stand-Your-Ground defensive encounter, the mainstream media has seized upon the gas-station shooting death of a black man by a rifle-armed woman, also black, this past Sunday in Houston. Video of the encounter was captured by the gas station’s security cameras, both inside the enclosed portion of the station, where it seems the encounter began, and out by the pumps where the encounter turned deadly. Much of the information available to date is from “news” sources, so the “facts” as described must be considered malleable. It appears, however, that the man made some...

MONTGOMERY, Alabama – A Jefferson County lawmaker wants to change Alabama’s Stand Your Ground law so the defense can not be invoked by someone who followed or pursued a person before a confrontation. The legislation is directly inspired by the shooting of unarmed black teenager Trayvon Martin in Florida. “I’m calling this the Trayvon Martin amendment,” Rep. Merika Coleman-Evans, D-Pleasant Grove.