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BamaD -> RE: CDC and Firearms (12/29/2015 6:37:36 PM)
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ORIGINAL: ifmaz
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ORIGINAL: joether
You have some flaws with your thinking here....
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Massad Ayoob, a very well respected self-defense expert, sees things differently.
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ORIGINAL: http://backwoodshome.com/blogs/MassadAyoob/2013/07/16/zimmerman-verdict-part-2-the-unarmed-teen/
It seems that the verdict of a sworn jury in our criminal justice system means little to the haters, who are still screaming that George Zimmerman killed “an unarmed seventeen-year-old.” Given that seventeen is old enough to enlist in the Marine Corps and to be tried as an adult – the Gainesville Sun recently headlined that a “sixteen-year-old man” was to be charged with murder in the selfsame Florida criminal justice system – the age issue doesn’t hold a lot of water when seen through a clear glass.
“Unarmed?” Actually, NO. The history of adjudicating deadly force actions shows that Trayvon Martin was “armed” two or three times over.
First, the haters (like the prosecution) assiduously ignored George Zimmerman’s statement that while Martin was “ground-and-pounding” him, Martin saw Zimmerman’s gun in its now exposed holster, told Zimmerman that he was going to die tonight, and reached for his victim’s pistol.
If I’m your criminal attacker, you don’t have to wait for me to shoot you before you can shoot me to defend your life, and you don’t even need to wait until the gun is in my hand. If I announce my intent to murder you and reach for a gun, I’m bought and paid for right there. And it doesn’t matter whether the gun I’m reaching for is in my holster, or yours. That’s why every year in America, when thugs try to grab a policeman’s gun and are shot, the shootings are ruled justifiable.
Even before Martin’s reach for Zimmerman’s still-holstered pistol, the circumstances that were proven to the satisfaction of the jury showed that Zimmerman was justified in shooting his attacker. Remember when defense attorney Don West said in the defense’s opening statement that Martin was armed with the sidewalk? That sounded ludicrous to lay people, and I would have phrased it differently myself, but professionals understood exactly what he was talking about.
The operative principle at law is called “disparity of force.” It means that while your opponent(s) may not be armed with a deadly weapon per se, their physical advantage over you is so great that if their ostensibly unarmed assault continues, you are likely to die or suffer grave bodily harm. That disparity of force may take the form of a much larger and stronger assailant, a male attacking a female, force of numbers, able-bodied attacking the handicapped, skilled fighter attacking the unskilled, or – in this case – position of disadvantage.
Position of disadvantage means that the opponent has full range and freedom of movement, and you don’t. You’re seat-belted behind your steering wheel while he rains punches onto your skull through the open window…or you are down and helpless in a martial arts “mount” while your opponent pounds you at will.
Finally, we have the clearly proven element of Martin smashing Zimmerman’s head into the sidewalk. If I picked up a chunk of concrete or cement and tried to smash your skull with it, you would certainly realize that you were about to die or be horribly brain-damaged if you didn’t stop me. It would be what the statutes call “a deadly weapon, to wit a bludgeon.” There just isn’t a whole hell of a lot of difference between cement being smashed into head, and head being smashed into cement.
Clearly, Trayvon Martin possessed the power to kill or cripple Zimmerman. That is why, under law, Zimmerman was justified in defending himself with a per se deadly weapon.
The jury got it. Too bad the haters didn’t understand…or didn’t want to understand.
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ORIGINAL: http://backwoodshome.com/blogs/MassadAyoob/2013/07/17/zimmerman-verdict-part-3-who-started-it/
Welcome to the new commentators here, many of whom seem to feel that Zimmerman started the encounter, a concept that concerns many of our regulars as well. Whenever there’s a fight, no matter the degree of consequences, the first question is always “who started it?”
Zimmerman took the first action, calling police when he observed Martin. He said that he was concerned because the man in the hoodie appeared to be wandering slowly and aimlessly in heavy rain. This is more consistent with what might be called “casing the joint” than with someone in a hurry to get somewhere dry. He didn’t mention Martin’s skin color until expressly asked about it by the call center operator.
The evidence indicates that Zimmerman didn’t get out of his car until the operator asked where the suspicious person was, and where the police should meet Zimmerman, the complainant. Taking that as a request for information, Zimmerman obligingly got out of the car to gather the intelligence that seemed to have been implicitly requested of him. He was, after all, the elected (not self-appointed) captain of Neighborhood Watch, and his function as Eyes and Ears of the Police had been drilled into him and the other Watch members through the Police Department itself. When the call-taker asked if he was following the man, Zimmerman replied in the affirmative. He was then told, “You don’t have to do that.”
The evidence indicates that he stopped following Martin at that moment. His former rapid breathing returned to normal and wind noise from his phone stopped, consistent with his testimony that he stopped following and had lost sight of Martin. The dispatcher did not “order” him to stop following, and later admitted in court that he had no authority to do so. Nonetheless, it was clear that Zimmerman was simply following Martin to keep him in sight and report his whereabouts, not “pursuing” with any intent to “confront.”
Putting together the timelines of the calls – hard evidence – and the testimony of the prosecution’s “star witness” Rachel Jeantel. When Zimmerman lost sight of Martin, the latter was a very short distance from home. Yet in the four minutes thereafter, he had to have left that location and gone toward Zimmerman’s. Even Jeantel admits that the first words of the confrontation she heard were from Martin, before the phone went dead.
Keeping an eye on someone from a distance is not against the law. Leaving the safety and mobility of your vehicle when suspicious unknown people are around may not be the best tactical move, but is no evidence of wrongdoing or intent to confront.
Who struck the first blow? Virtually all the evidence supports Zimmerman’s account; no evidence contradicts it, and no evidence supports the theory that Zimmerman assaulted Martin first, in any way. If as some conjecture Zimmerman had drawn the gun at the first, why did he wait until his scalp had been split open on the sidewalk and his nose smashed before he pulled the trigger? And if Martin really believed he was in danger from the man watching him, why didn’t he simply call the police from the phone he was already speaking on?
Within the totality of the circumstances presented in court by the prosecution itself, it would seem that saying “Zimmerman started it” is like saying that a woman was raped “because she asked for it.”
It’s about evidence, not about “what-ifs.” The simple fact is, no matter what some want to believe and no matter how much the brainwashers of the media have twisted the facts, there is no solid evidence to support any theory other than that Martin didn’t like being watched, attacked Zimmerman violently, and was shot in self-defense by the man whose head he had been smashing against the sidewalk with potentially lethal effect.
There are more issues, of course, and we’ll explore them here shortly.
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ORIGINAL: http://backwoodshome.com/blogs/MassadAyoob/2013/07/19/zimmerman-verdict-the-stand-your-ground-element/
Few elements of this case have been more widely misunderstood than the “stand your ground” (SYG) element. Quite simply, Florida’s SYG law, statute 776.012, simply rescinded a previous requirement that one had to retreat if possible before using deadly force in self-defense. This did not particularly change the rules of engagement. The previous law had demanded retreat only if it could be accomplished in complete safety to oneself and other innocent people present. It is hard to imagine a situation in which one WOULD kill another person if they could have simply walked away unscathed.
The evidence showed incontrovertibly that Zimmerman, straddled by his attacker in the MMA mount and being savagely beaten while supine, could not possibly have retreated or otherwise escaped at the time he pulled the trigger. His wise lawyers knew that from the beginning, Craig Sonner when I spoke with him in March of 2012, and Mark O’Mara and Don West when I discussed it with them a couple of months later.
The media is largely either confused or deceptive about this, and so I’m afraid are many lawyers, including the Attorney General of the United States, who has called for an end to SYG laws. Florida Governor Rick Scott empanelled a blue-ribbon committee to study the law last year, which included some vociferous anti-gunners. Nonetheless, their collective recommendation was to leave SYG in place. The Governor now stands up in defense of it as well, as seen here: Protesters stand up to ‘stand your ground,’ but laws likely here to stay.
Stevie Wonder has announced that he won’t perform in Florida until SYG is done away with. Stevie Wonder, through no fault of his own, is blind. He has my sympathy for that.
But the other opponents of SYG seem to be willfully blind, and for that, there is no excuse.
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ORIGINAL: http://backwoodshome.com/blogs/MassadAyoob/2013/07/21/zimmerman-verdict-part-5-the-gun-stuff/
The firearms and ballistics evidence in this case was very important, one reason why the Kel-Tec PF9 9mm death weapon was first and foremost in the minds of journalists reporting on Eric Holder’s recent decision to have all evidence in this case held pending Federal investigation (again). One of the area newspapers reported in March that the death weapon was found with a spent casing still in the chamber. This would have been consistent with someone’s hand grabbing the gun and retarding the slide mechanism at the moment of the shot, and I surmised as much in the one blog entry I made on it at that time, prior to being contacted by the then-defense team and confidentiality issues kicking in from then on.
It turned out that this was not the case. The officers who recovered the evidence unloaded the death weapon. The spent casing from the one shot fired in the incident was recovered from the ground on which it had ejected, and another live round was ejected from the firing chamber after the officer removed the magazine. All eight cartridges, the gun’s full capacity, were accounted for. The pistol had functioned normally, as designed.
Prosecutor John Guy, in his dramatic opening statement, made a big deal out of the fact that Zimmerman carried the Kel-Tec with a live round in the chamber, as if this implied malice and a man looking to kill someone. Over in CNN Headline News Land, Nancy Grace took up the same cry. Zimmerman’s after-the-assault attackers even made a big deal out of the fact that he had a pistol with no dedicated manual safety. Ms. Grace claimed that he carried it with the safety off, and when a friend of Zimmerman’s was on her show and told her the gun HAD NO safety catch per se, she yelled at him that he was wrong, she knew all about Kel-Tec PF9s, and implied that Zimmerman must have flicked the safety off beforehand. (Premeditation, don’t cha know?)
Of course, the PF9 pistol DOESN’T have a safety catch. Ms. Grace apparently Googled “Kel-Tec PF9” and mistook the slide lock lever for a safety lever. Did any of you folks ever hear her apologize to Zimmerman’s friend, who was right when she was wrong? Let me know, ‘cause I must have missed it if she did.
For perspective, very few American police officers carry guns with manual safety levers. The most popular police pistols don’t have them, including the Glock and the SIG, the two most widely used. The Smith & Wesson Military & Police has an optional ambidextrous thumb safety, but most police departments order those guns without that feature, and the same is true for the majority of defensive pistols bought these days by America’s armed citizens. The old style service revolver didn’t come with a safety either.
Like those revolvers, semiautomatics such as the Kel-Tec are normally carried ready to fire with a simple pull of the trigger, i.e., with a round chambered.
Another element I warned O’Mara and West about back in second quarter 2012 was that they could expect the prosecution to attribute malice to Zimmerman for loading with hollow points. Such ammunition is standard in virtually every police department in our nation, and is the overwhelming (and logical) choice of armed citizens. The expanding bullet is less likely to ricochet, and it is more likely to stop inside the body of the offender instead of passing through to strike an unseen bystander. It also, historically, stops gunfights faster, saving the lives endangered by the attacker who had to be shot. Finally, for that latter reason, it reduces the number of wounds the offender must suffer before he stops forcing good people to shoot him. Except for the ricochet factor, all of those elements were present in the Zimmerman>Martin shooting. The prosecution didn’t harp on this as much as I expected, but prosecutor Richard Mantei did bring it up: http://statelymcdanielmanor.wordpress.com/2013/07/09/george-zimmerman-hollow-points-and-reality/ .
Fortunately, the defense covered this superbly. They did so with the testimony of material witness Mark Osterman, the Federal Air Marshal who trained Zimmerman, told him to get a double action only pistol with no manual safety and carry it with a round in the chamber. His personal knowledge carried more weight than any outside expert could ever have brought to the game, but defense expert Dennis Root did a good job of batting clean-up and filling in other points. Together, they tanked the bogus allegations of the prosecution in this case insofar as guns, ammunition, and malice or premeditation that could be ascribed to either.
The take-away is not to avoid such unmeritorious courtroom attacks by carrying a .25 auto with an empty chamber. The take-away is, be able to logically explain your choice of gun and method of carry. The defense did exactly this, to their credit.
This case, of course, was about much more than guns, and we’ll continue with that in the next entry.
There's more in his series.
I'm sure you'll read it all before responding.
Great post!!!!!
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