Here is my latest Commentator piece about what the Zimmerman case tells us about self-defence laws here in the UK.
Namely nothing at all:
A desperate piece in the New Statesman by Jacob Turner strains every sinew to link the Zimmerman case in the USA with the UK’s self-defence laws:
In the aftermath of the Zimmerman trial, the United States Attorney General Eric Holder called into question “laws that senselessly expand the concept of self-defence and sow dangerous conflict in our neighbourhoods”. The veteran campaigner Reverend Al Sharpton went as far as to describe the stand your ground law, which exists in over 30 States as the “worst violation of civil rights” in America. If the dry words of the legal text books do not provide enough context, perhaps the fact that this law is supported strongly by the National Rifle Association will.
Calm down, Jacob. Please explain to us why notorious swivelly-eyed, foam-fleck’d NRA member Barack Hussein Obama cheerily supported the Stand Your Ground law in Illinois.
More:
These very different cases are all about the way the state tries to control the most basic human right of all, the right to defend oneself. In the United States, citizens can choose for themselves whether they want to carry a gun. Millions do. For most of British history that has been the case too here: common law championed a citizen’s “natural right of resistance and self-preservation”.
But in the past 110 years that British right has been whittled away to the insane if not explicitly evil point where a paraplegic person whose own life has been ruined by a gunman whom the state has failed to catch is himself imprisoned simply for owning a gun for self-protection.
What? Don't believe me on that last one?
Read the whole thing. And some lively comments...
