No Ground to Stand On

Many years back, I lived in Tampa, Florida, one of the few white guys in a predominantly black neighborhood, not far from the USF campus.  I started playing pickup basketball games in that neighborhood's local park, the only white guy that played there regularly.  I never minded this - I'm a Miami boy.  Thanks to public schools and sports, I had been friends with most of the black kids I knew.  I made friends pretty quickly at this park in Tampa, aided by the fact that I'm a pretty good basketball player.  I acquired the nickname "Bird" - the white boy who doesn't miss, as my friends teased.  Being THE white guy, meant a lot of "white boy" and "cracker" jokes.  I didn't mind much because, despite the teasing, they included me in everything.  And it did become a running joke to rag on the team that gets beat by the slow white boy.  So my first six months in Tampa were thoroughly enjoyable, if uneventful.

One day, we were playing a full court game, where my team was about to lose, down a couple of points.  One of my teammates had his pass intercepted by this guy - not a particularly good player, but he was 6'-6", good for rebounding - who turned and ran down the court.  As we would lose if he made a basket, I tore down the court after him as fast as I could run.  As he went up in the air for a layup, I jumped and smacked the ball as hard as I could, smashing his hand against the backboard in the process.  I fell to the ground as I landed, laughing - let's just say I was impressed with myself for jumping so high - at the fact that I even caught up to him, let alone made such a great play.  I don't think he appreciated my laughing, because when I got up off the ground, he punched me square in the chest - hard.  So hard, I went right back down.  He looks down at me and says, "You fouled me, motherf---er!"  I jumped up and shoved him.  "Just call the foul then!  Quit acting like a b--ch, just cause your hand got hurt!"  I didn't foul him, but I wasn't about to argue about it either.  Everybody starts laughing, presumably at my willingness to go toe to toe with a guy that had 6 inches and at least 50 pounds on me.  Hindsight being 20/20, it wasn't exactly the brightest of ideas.  

My buddy Jermaine runs over laughing, playfully head locks me, calls time out, and we all go to the bench for a minute.  I grab a Gatorade, pull a wet towel from the cooler to wrap around my neck and try to relax.  As my head is resting in my hands, I feel something hard pushed against the left side of my head.  "Say something funny now, motherf---er..."  I look up and turn my head, to see this guy pointing a gun at me.. Everyone around me froze.  I gasped for a breath and, God save me, I started laughing.  I could not stop.  The guy looked pissed, saying "You think you're funny, b--ch?"  And that made me laugh even harder.  "No dude, you're funny.  You're going to shoot me head and go to prison for the rest of your life - cause you got fouled.  That's the dumbest sh-t I ever heard of!"  Behind the laughter, I felt like I was about to have a heart attack, but I think the logic started to sink in with him.  The guy started to lower the gun, upon which 3 or 4 others jumped him and got the gun away from him.  One of the guys in the bleachers said he called the cops, so pretty much everyone cleared out of the courts and went home.  To this day, I still don't know who took the gun home.  The police showed up, the few remaining stragglers gave them the guy's name, I told them what happened, and the rest of us then filed out of the park for the night.  I later found out that the guy had a criminal record for armed robbery and had been in prison all of a few months earlier.  And he knew where I lived, right near the entrance to the park.  And this was just the first of two times in my life I've had a gun pointed at me...

That summer, I went back to Miami.  I had decided to buy a handgun to keep at my apartment in Tampa.  My best friend Josh went with me to look around, and I left the shop with a Makarov .380, a hyper-accurate Russian gun made primarily for the KGB.  We would go to an outdoor range on Tamiami Trail so I could learn to shoot.  And I was really good at it, really accurate to about fifty yards.  I took a class to get my concealed weapons permit.  It was here that I learned some odd rules about guns.  The one that jumped out at me the most was the rights of criminals in your home:

• You have to announce that you are armed, to allow the intruder a moment to leave your house peacefully and quickly.
• If you decide to shoot, you must announce that you are in fear for your life.
• If the intruder tries to run, you MUST shoot him from the front.
• If he has his back to you, you can not legally shoot him.
• If he is exiting a window or door, he is no longer legally a threat, you can not shoot him.
• If he is in your yard, and not advancing in your direction, you can not legally shoot him.
• If at any point you determine he is not armed, you can not legally shoot him unless you can demonstrate imminent threat.

To say these rules dismayed me a bit would be an understatement.  How can someone invading your home be afforded such protections?  If you violate any of these rules, YOU could go to jail.  I never thought I could be more flabbergasted  at a nonsensical set of rules, that seemed to be against the ones being threatened and protecting the criminals, to an extent.  And then I read the Stand Your Ground law.  It seems that, only in America, would we go from one extreme to the other, ignoring moderation entirely.

I've never been a fan of the NRA.  Don't get me wrong, I support people's rights.  But the NRA has taken their argument to extremes over the years, and has absolutely no credibility.  There's no argument you can make that will convince me that a hunter requires an arsenal of various weaponry to shoot a duck.  Or a deer.  Or a moose.  Or a quail.  And making that argument in vain, with a straight look on your face, makes me no longer want to hear anything you have to say.

So we went from not being able to engage a criminal in your home unless certain parameters are met, to being able to shoot anyone, anywhere, at any time, for any reason - so long as the official "reason" is that you were in fear for  your life.  How could we allow such a blanket rule to ever become law?  How could politicians that proposed the law really make a sound argument that would convince enough people to pass such a law?  Obviously, the NRA was behind it, but how did anyone wanting to be taken seriously allow it to even reach committee, let alone the floor for debate?  Once again I point to US.  We allow these idiot politicians, with absolutely no scruples or values, to take over our legislatures.  As bad as it is in Washington D.C., it is often worse in the state legislatures.  These are our states, and we need to wrest back control of the people who politic in it.  This recent case about Michael Dunn shooting a black teenager in an SUV is just the latest example of a law that has run amok.  Everyone needs to start leaning on their representatives to overturn this ridiculous law.  It needs to be loud, so that political hopefuls in the future will include it in their campaign platforms.  We need enough people in place to overturn such laws.  And for Heaven's sake, we have GOT to get lobbyists out of our capital buildings, and their money out of campaign coffers.  Because this will not be the last killing like this, and it will take a James Brady - type incident for any eyes to be opened otherwise.