Weekend Gun Report: February 7-9, 2014

"In light of the start of the Florida trial of Michael Dunn, who is accused of shooting an unarmed 17-year-old to death at a gas station, ThinkProgress reported last week that at least 26 children and teens have died in Stand Your Ground cases across the state. Dunn reportedly plans to invoke Stand Your Ground, which states that a person who feels he is in danger may be justified in the use of deadly force, and some are asking whether laws such as these, which have proliferated in at least 20 states, empower people to shoot first and ask questions later.

The Tampa Bay Times operates a database tracking Stand Your Ground cases, and out of 134 fatal cases in the state, 19 percent were children or teens. Another 14 victims were 20 or 21. In 2011, Carlos Mustelier, 18, was killed after he and a 16-year-old friend punched a jogger following a verbal altercation, and the man fired eight shots. A prosecutor refused to charge him, and he was released. In 2006, Christopher Cote, 19, was shot and killed after a dispute over walking his dog on his new neighbor’s property.

The youngest case the paper analyzed was 9-year-old Sherdavia Jenkins, who was killed in the crossfire of a dispute in which the defendant unsuccessfully raised the Stand Your Ground defense. Even the cases in which Stand Your Ground is unsuccessfully applied are significant, because law enforcement officers sometimes use the law as a basis for not charging the shooter to begin with. And despite the fact that George Zimmerman did not invoke the law in his defense of the shooting of Trayvon Martin, the language of the law was written into the jury instructions."

Here is today’s report:

http://nocera.blogs.nytimes.com/2014/02/10/weekend-gun-report-february-7-9-2014/#more-7884

And the gun culture casualties just keep on piling up as the Second Amendment absolutists cheer our "freedom" to kill each other.