Marissa Alexander

[ItsTheSheppy]

Originally Posted by CutterJohn

Dude. She hadn't lived there in months. Her husband had been living there with the kids. It was the husbands home. She left the house, then chose to put herself back into the situation with a gun. Stand your ground does not mean leave and come back with a gun so you can stand your ground.

And she never once called the cops.

Even if she needed her keys, thats no excuse. You do not go looking for a confrontation if you have a gun. That gun is there to protect you. It is not added leverage for you to assert yourself. It is there as an absolute last resort, after you've done everything possible to avoid a confrontation. She had already avoided the confrontation by leaving the house, went and got a gun, and chose to go back inside rather than call the cops to get her keys.

If you want to argue that the punishment is too extreme, by all means, and I may even agree to an extent, but the fact that she's guilty of stupidity and in no way followed the spirit or letter of the law is not in any dispute.

My favorite part about this thread absolutely has to be the fact that by defending this dumbshit law I've wound you up enough to go making my points for me. At least as far as the letter of the law is concerned. Funnily enough, I agree with everything you said there. Pretty much every word of it.

My intention with this thread is to shine a light on something. In the Trayvon Martin case, a man confronted a black youth in the night, with a gun, and created a situation where the young man ended up shot dead. The police didn't arrest the man until the entire country, including the president, lost their shit over it.

Meanwhile, a black woman confronted her husband, with a gun, and created a situation where the weapon was discharged and nobody was hurt, and she's being sent to jail for twenty years.

As far as I'm concerned, this is the 'smoking gun' (pun intended) that is the killer (again) evidence that these laws are freaking stupid and are being enforced improperly. There was a massive counter-movement in support for Zimmerman, even going so far as to sell targets stenciled to look like Trayvon Martin for people to shoot, but where is the support for this woman? Where is the groundswell of pro-gun rights advocates riding heroically to her defense? Where are the people on this board who came out in force to support Zimmeman and his right to defend himself, however lethally, against a perceived threat?

Nowhere. Silent. Why?

She's black, she's a woman, and they do not get equal standing in this country, no matter how much some of us would like to pretend otherwise and a case such as this is a perfect barometer. Zimmerman's story and Trayvon's murder was no less murky, no less strange, no less controversial. But he was white(ish). White enough. Close enough to the fantasy of all the paranoid gun-nuts who always dreamed about being Killer Batman.

But they can't empathize with a woman trying to defend herself against a man she is afraid of, whatever you or me or anyone else may think of that justification. It doesn't mesh with their worldview. They can't fantasize about being in the same spot, so they don't care.

The Emperor has no clothes, and I don't care who shouts me down for saying it. He's fucking naked.