Readers' Comments

The Koch's or Duke brothers from the movie "Trading Places" stack the deck where ever they need. They are getting all this wealth from price gouging gasoline. Wake up America, your being screwed, blued, and tattoed and the GOP is the cause! Ditch Mitch and vote out these mouth pieces of the rich. They've all beeen bought. There are 14 Democrats that need replaced starting in La.

Please cite documented examples from other than an NRA cite. Names, dates, news report, links, etc.

Hi?

I doubt that most of you (above) have a clue as to what Ayn Rand's philosophy is all about. It would help the debate if your did. Hearsay doesn't do the job.

Jim Wright

"The Tampa Bay Times found that people who killed a black person walked free 73 percent of the time, while those who killed a white person went free 59 percent of the time."

This is an idiotic claim. What's to say the case surrounding those white people were legitimate and per the law and the others weren't.. you can't say well they've let more white people off and disregard the fact that we have no history of what exactly the other cases were about and why they weren't let off. You could easily say 59% of the time the people had blue eyes.. :| See how dumb that sounds? It's a ridiculous and misleading quote. But of course that is the job of the media.

Although I don't agree with the case involving Marissa Alexander she discharged a weapon which is against the law. If you knew anything about the Stand Your Ground law then you'd know that if you had time to shoot at a wall you had time to make another choose. That law is for people that have no time to think about another choice.

Did you know that according to the Bureau of Justice stats, that between 1976 and 2011, 269,000 black youths were murdered. And of those deaths, 262,000 were killed by other blacks. So who exactly is killing and getting away with things? Why isn't anyone rioting and civil suing people for this?? No but try to find a connection with a white person and even if it's a stretch and it's on right???

"Reporting on Spin and Disinformation" .. really? or do you mean spinning disinformation to confuse the masses?

This incredibly sad story played out largely because GZ did NOT listen to the dispatcher in the first place. When GZ called 911 and requested advice as to what to do, i.e., whether (TM) should be "followed," the dispatcher said "No, we don't need you to do that." That should have been the end of it; instead GZ got out of his truck to pursue/confront TM. Why would you do that, unless perhaps a 'suspected perp' was imminently going to attack another person and you saw it about to happen, in which case you might have an immediate reason to get out of vehicle? That, I could understand, but what GZ did instead, which was to charge ahead on foot after TM, AGAINST police advice, was simply wrong. What kind of example is GZ setting for young people if he as an ADULT (and wannabe police officer) does not listen to police?
So what if TM had a hoodie on? Plenty of kids in my old neighborhood wore hoodies. I shudder to think that if you're a young black guy in the US, good luck, 'cause your days may be numbered. I worry about the kids my daughter grew up with: will they make it without running afoul of some reality-skewed armed vigilante? If you're going to arm yourself, a whole lot of responsibility goes along with that, and you want to work WITH the cops, not against them, by not endangering yourself or others. (By the way, my city's at least 55% African American. Many of the cops are, too.)

thank's for your information

The article states El Salvadorian paramilitary troops. U.S. money and weapons supported the death squads, not our troops. Not to say American's are immune to doing bad things. People who are put in the situation of accepting killing as their job become easily morally corrupted, such is the nature of war. We destroyed villages of people in vietnam, so I don't see how any troops would be hard to imagine doing wrong. Just some food for thought, us American's aren't the chosen people. Not even "the chosen people" are the chosen people. But our government knew exactly who it was backing up. Our government has an ugly history of corrupting central and south America. Read about operation condor. Big Business counts in cash, not body bags. The fear of communism helped United Fruit (turned chiquita) to fight to monopolize other peoples/countries land. Just some history that is as factual as slavery being a right for big plantations. Why is now a special time where corruption goes away? hmm.

So with you on this....

Wong wrong stand your ground was in the jury instructions even though zimmerman did not use it as his defense. Please do your research before you post false hoods.

The defense shrewdly avoided the stand you ground law in the Zimmerman case. Otherwise they very well might have lost because pursuit and stand you ground are hard to justify under the same law. Instead the defense chose a self defense strategy which effectively nullified everything that happened before the physical confrontation; the last 20 sec. So unfortunately from a legal standpoint, the Zimmerman case will never have much to do with this law unless the focus turns to why he wasn't arrested and charged at the scene instead of 6 months later.

Self-defense has always been around but never involved stalking an unarmed guy you didn't know down the street and murdering him even after the police told you to not do exactly what you then decided to do and ignore them and do anyway.

Just think I bet Trevor didn't even know about that Law, but if he had been the one still standing with a gun Zimmerman brought to the fight I don't think he would have had a hard time proving was self-defense even with old traditional laws since the police foresaw Zimmerman's intent to confront and arrest Martin and they told him not to do that..

Most people didn't know these stupid, dangerous laws had been passed till the Martin case exposed them. I certainly would not have understood if some regular guy that wasn't a policemen followed me down the road and attempted to arrest me for no reason.... I would think he was a crazy guy planning to kill or harm me..... if Trevor thought that too and fought back ..He was right...... He just needed a gun and the ability to out shoot Zimmerman that night.