Shoot First makes another appearance in Minnesota
Every time the Minnesota GOP gets anywhere near running one of the houses in the Minnesota Legislature, you can be sure that pro-gunfire bills are not far behind. One of the current session’s example of that is H.F. 13, a bill that was just defeated on the floor of the House. The purpose of the bill was to turn every use of a firearm in public into a case of self-defense.
The description of the bill: Duty to retreat before using reasonable force in defense of self or others eliminated. Detractors – like me – call it the “Shoot First” bill. Here are the 34 pearl clutchers who claim authorship of Shoot First:
The pearl clutching authors of H.F. 13
When Wally Hudson signs on, you know it must be good!
But make no mistake, what the bill really does is sanction a whiney-ass titty baby (or criminal) to pump several rounds into the chest of somebody who accidentally bumps into them at the train station.
House Republican caucus leader Harry Niska changed his vote on the bill, according to the linked Star Tribune article, apparently to give him standing to make a motion for reconsideration of the bill later. Since Harry was probably in junior high when this issue first came up in Minnesota, let’s bring Harry up to speed.
After the election in 2010, Minnesota voters, in their inscrutable wisdom, elected DFLer Mark Dayton governor and gave control of both houses of the legislature to the Republicans. So naturally, they brought up Shoot First at their first opportunity in 2011. It passed the spittle-flecked House but inexplicably died at the end of the session in the Senate. (Not so inexplicably, really; the Deputy, Geoff Michel, kept it off the Senate floor.) The bill came back in the next year’s session, 2012, and it passed. Mark Dayton vetoed it. You can read my story about it here. In the November ’12 elections, the voters said, Enough of this, and turned both houses of the legislature over to the DFL. I am not entirely sure, but I don’t think Shoot First ever made it to a floor vote since, until this session. But in their continuing quest to make everybody suspicious and afraid of each other — for example, I’m afraid of paranoid fools like Rep. Krista Knudsen, quoted in the Strib article — for political purposes, it’s back.
You must never doubt that Stand your Ground is a get out of jail free card. As evidence, I offer the LeftMN story, I was really skeerd, about a Florida man, Kenneth Roop, who shot an unarmed frozen steak salesman in the shoulder, and then while the salesman was writhing around on the ground and shouting – in a threatening manner, according to the perp – “You shot me,” Kenny fired another round into the base of the salesman’s skull.
“I was in fear,” reported the shooter to the police when he was arrested. They probably teach you to say in gun class, after you shoot somebody, “I was in fear. I want a lawyer.” It IS your Get out of Jail Free card.
It worked for Kenny Roop, who was acquitted. It works a lot of the time. It worked for George Zimmerman, who followed an innocent and unarmed Black kid in a residential Florida neighborhood, confronted and picked a fight with him, and then shot him.
The mechanics of Shoot First cases is the removal of a question for the jury: Could the defendant have retreated, which just means: Could he have avoided the conflict? In the case of George Zimmerman for example, the answer is obviously yes, since he hunted the kid down (and who was told by a police dispatcher NOT to follow the kid). It is Kafkaesque to paint the aggressor Zimmerman as a victim in need of a self-defense plea, but that’s your future Minnesota, if Harry Niska’s motion to reconsider is, er, considered.
The people making use of Stand your Ground in court are not the timorous women that Rep. Krista Knudsen refers to in her quote in the Strib article; they are people with a sheet. Don’t believe me? Look at the stats here. In state after state, murder rates and the number of “justifiable” homicides have risen materially after adoption of Stand your Ground.
Don’t give the puerile, callow ingenues like Krista Knudsen and Harry Niska a pass on this. Really, they know exactly what they are doing.
N.B. – I’ll have more to says about some of the lightweight thinking in, um, defense of Shoot First in coming days.
(Here it is: An invitation to an escalation.)
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