Stand Your Ground Laws at Odds with Run-and-Hide Mentality Encouraged by the Obama Administration

Our government just can’t let a tragedy go to waste.

The Obama administration is continuing to exploit the Zimmerman-Martin case and its (nearly non-existent) relationship to Stand Your Ground laws to push the government’s anti-gun agenda.

On Tuesday, Attorney General Eric Holder spoke at the annual NAACP convention in Florida.  He used this opportunity to further fan the public’s grief over the Trayvon Martin case.  During his speech, Holder strongly condemned “stand your ground” laws, saying they “senselessly expand the concept of self-defense” and may encourage “violent situations to escalate”.  Holder declared, “These laws try to fix something that was never broken. The list of resulting tragedies is long and, unfortunately, has victimized too many who are innocent.”

On Friday, Obama expressed his agreement that the laws need to be examined to see whether they “encourage” violence.

Further, members of the Congressional Black Caucus are working on a series of bills in response to Zimmerman’s acquittal, including offering financial incentives to states that repeal stand your ground laws.

Guns are used by law-abiding citizens an estimated 2.5 million times a year in self-defense. That’s about 6,850 times a day.  This means that each year, firearms are used more than 80 times more often to protect the lives of honest citizens than to take lives.

As many as 2.5 million times a year.  I’m not sure how many of those incidents involve the “innocent people who are victimized by self-defense laws like Stand Your Ground” that Holder referenced – because I can’t find any statistics that support his claim at all.

In an article titled The Right to Self-Defense, Judge Andrew P. Napolitano, a former judge of the Superior Court of New Jersey, eloquently stated: “The right to self-defense is a natural individual right that pre-exists the government. It cannot morally or constitutionally be taken away absent individual consent or due process.”

Yet, it seems that the Obama administration doesn’t want to allow Americans that natural-born right.  Even in extreme situations like those involving mass shootings, the government wants us to remain defenseless, as evidenced by this video that was funded by the Department of Homeland Security.

In that video, citizens are advised to run away or to find a place to hide, and are told that fighting an attacker should be a last resort.   How likely is it that an unarmed person would be able to outrun or hide from an armed gunman?  If you recall, the students who tried to hide from the Virginia Tech shooter in 2007 were all shot and killed.  And if we do decide to confront the attacker, we are advised to do so with…a pair of scissors?

The Obama administration is actively working toward making us passive victims who run, hide, or attempt to deflect a gunman with an office supply that was designed to trim paper.

Thomas Jefferson, himself a liberal in the truest sense of the definition, stated, “The strongest reason for people to retain the right to keep and bear arms is, as a last resort, to protect themselves against tyranny in government.”

Could this be the real reason the government wants us to run and hide?