The Last Gun (21 page)

Newspapers and other observers outside the daisy chain of “gun rights” lobbyists and compliant legislators were disgusted. The
Bradenton Herald
, for example, raked those who caved in to Hammer and supported the new law. It was “another case of overreach by the National Rifle Association, and another example of cowardice by lawmakers who put political ambition ahead of public safety,” the paper editorialized. “Afraid of being labeled soft on guns, most legislators gave the NRA a pass in ramrodding the bill through the Republican-controlled Legislature. Most law enforcement agencies remained neutral, also aware of the power of the gun lobby.”
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One of the bills' Republican sponsors piously denied that the matter had anything to do with gun sales, claiming that he didn't even own a gun himself. “But what I want is for the criminal to know that every single door he breaks in, those people may have a firearm and they absolutely have the right to protect themselves,” he said. “I'm not trying to sell guns, I'm trying to empower the freedom of our people.”
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Two months later,
Shooting Industry
had a more sanguine view of the impact of the new law on the gun industry's prospects.

Self-defense is an important segment of the industry's market—and it continues to grow. . . . Most recently, Florida grabbed the attention of the nation when Gov. Jeb Bush signed into law a measure that allows citizens to use deadly force outside of their homes “if he or she reasonably believes it is necessary to do so to prevent death or great bodily harm.” There also has been an upsurge in self-defense related sales in recent years as more citizens throughout the nation “take more responsibility for their own safety.” That has translated into increased
development and production of self-defense firearms and related products—and increased sales for gun dealers.
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The NRA took its new present for the gun industry on the road. Executive Vice President Wayne LaPierre told the
Washington Post
that the new Florida law was merely the “first step of a multi-state strategy.” Giving Hammer credit for conceiving the new law, LaPierre promised to use the model of the concealed-carry wave to push the new shoot-first-anywhere wave. “There's a big tail-wind we have, moving from state legislature to state legislature,” he said. “The South, the Midwest, everything they call ‘flyover land,'. . . we can pass this law in that state.”
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He told the
New York Times
that the NRA planned to introduce the new law in every state. “We will start with red and move to blue,” he said. “In terms of passing it, it is downhill rather than uphill because of all the public support.”
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What LaPierre did not mention was that “all the public support” was to be generated by the American Legislative Exchange Council (ALEC), a secretive network of conservative state legislators who often overrode public opinion and prosecutorial judgment against the law. “ALEC is essentially a corporate bill factory,” Anna Scholl, executive director of a Virginia advocacy group said in 2012. “ALEC writes model legislation that is designed to increase corporate bottom lines, and then they turn around and hand it off to state legislators to take it home and introduce it.”
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The NRA is one of ALEC's funders, among others including organizations linked to the Koch brothers. At a secret August 2005 meeting in Grapevine, Texas, Hammer asked ALEC's “Criminal Justice Task Force” to adopt the Florida castle-doctrine bill as an ALEC model bill. In September 2005, the bill was adopted by ALEC's National Board of Directors. State legislators linked to ALEC then set about introducing this cookie-cutter bill.
¹⁰⁴

Like the concealed-carry relaxation, Florida's new law swept over other states. State after state fell into line, as sponsoring legislators pretended to find flaws in state laws of self-defense, then
introduced ALEC's legislative cookie as the remedy. In 2006, for example, Arizona governor Janet Napolitano—the very politician who would later oversee the spending of trillions of dollars on “homeland security” and the “war on terror”—signed a bill into law over the objections of state prosecutors. “She believes in the fundamental right of self-defense,” her spokesperson said. “And the law still requires the defendant to be in imminent peril of death or serious physical injury.”
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By 2007,
Shooting Industry
—in an article headlined “Self-Defense Unleashed! No Season on Sales, No Limit on Profits!”—could tell gun dealers, “If you're not cashing in on self-defense sales, it's like running a bait-and-tackle shop—and not selling hooks and sinkers!”
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When ALEC's role became known in 2012, after an estimated thirty-two states had passed some or all of its model law, a number of its corporate sponsors—including Coca-Cola, PepsiCo, and Kraft Foods—bailed out of the organization. The notorious Trayvon Martin case suddenly made being associated with the right-wing legislative string-pullers toxic.
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But the awful damage had already been done, just as had been predicted by the law's critics. “The bill. . . would define self-defense so broadly as to impose few restraints on individual behavior in the heat of an argument,” the
South Florida Sun-Sentinel
warned while the law was being considered in Florida. “It would give Floridians the impression that they have a quick-trigger right to violence in many situations that have not resulted in violence in the past.”
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Florida's law now says a person “has no duty to retreat and has the right to stand his or her ground and meet force with force, including deadly force if he or she reasonably believes it is necessary to do so to prevent death or great bodily harm.” And although Hammer and other advocates claim that the new law was simply a technical expansion of the old common-law castle doctrine, the Association of Prosecuting Attorneys, a national group, says otherwise: that it bars the prosecution of criminals. “It's almost like we now have to prove a negative—that a person
was not acting in self-defense, often on the basis of only one witness, the shooter,” Steven A. Jansen, the group's vice president, told the
Washington Post
in 2012. Justifiable homicides by civilians have tripled in Florida since the new law was passed, from an average of twelve per year to an average of thirty-six per year.
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John F. Timoney, Miami's police chief, warned about specific scenarios at the time the law was passed. “Whether it's trick-or-treaters or kids playing in the yard of someone who doesn't want them there or some drunk guy stumbling into the wrong house,” Chief Timoney said, “you're encouraging people to possibly use deadly physical force where it shouldn't be used.”
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The chief was exactly right about stumbling drunks and deadly force—at least two such instances occurred in 2008. In April, an honor law school student in Alabama was killed, and in October a college student in Florida was seriously wounded when, after a night of drinking, each accidentally entered an apartment that looked “identical” to his own but was in fact the wrong place. In both instances, the new “model” law insulated the shooters from prosecution.
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In a similar incident in 2009, a homeowner stepped outside of his house after a drunken youth twice mistook the house for the one hosting a party he had stumbled away from. The homeowner shot the youth in the chest and seriously wounded him, but he, too, was insulated from accountability by the Florida law.
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The novelist Carl Hiaasen, a columnist for the
Miami Herald
, was also right. “Every gang-banger in the state should write a thank-you note to the NRA,” he wrote in 2005. “For years, street thugs have tried without much luck to use self-defense as an excuse for their bloody shootouts. Now it's right there in the statute books: If you get fired at, dawg, you can fire back. Better yet, the law is so purposefully slack that if you even imagine you're going to be fired at, you can pull out your legally purchased AK-47 and open up.”
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So let it be written, so let it be done. In 2010, a Florida circuit judge ruled that the law insulated two defendants
facing murder charges in the case of man who was shot to death with an AK-47. The incident involved a running street battle between affiliates of rival gangs. “What this means, as illustrated by this case, is that two individuals, or even groups, can square off in a middle of a public street, exchange gunfire, and both be absolved from criminal liability if they were reasonably acting in self defense,” the judge wrote. “It is very much like the Wild West. Maybe that is not what was intended, but that seems to be the effect of the language used.”
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Farther west, in Pasadena, Texas, a sixty-one-year-old retiree named Joe Horn saw two burglars breaking into a neighbor's home in November 2007. The exchange between Horn and a 911 dispatcher, as reported in the
New York Times
, raised a red flag about the troubling prospect of vigilantism under the new laws—one private citizen acting on his own as police officer, prosecutor, judge, jury, and executioner:

In a low, calm and steady voice, he [Horn] said he saw the men breaking in and asked: “I've got a shotgun; do you want me to stop them?”

  
The Pasadena emergency operator responded: “Nope. Don't do that. Ain't no property worth shooting somebody over, O.K.?”

  
Mr. Horn said: “But hurry up, man. Catch these guys will you? Cause, I ain't going to let them go.”

  
Mr. Horn then said he would get his shotgun.

  
The operator said, “No, no.” But Mr. Horn said: “I can't take a chance of getting killed over this, O.K.? I'm going to shoot.”

  
The operator told him not to go out with a gun because officers would be arriving.

  
“O.K.,” Mr. Horn said. “But I have a right to protect myself too, sir,” adding, “The laws have been changed in this country since September the first, and you know it.”

  
The operator said, “You're going to get yourself shot.”
But Mr. Horn replied, “You want to make a bet? I'm going to kill them.”

  
Moments later he said, “Well here it goes, buddy. You hear the shotgun clicking and I'm going.”

  
Then he said: “Move, you're dead.”

  
There were two quick explosions, then a third, and the 911 call ended.

  
“I had no choice,” Mr. Horn said when he called 911 back. “They came in the front yard with me, man.”

The two men, both undocumented aliens, were found in neighboring yards, both shot dead.
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A grand jury later declined to indict Horn.

Joe Horn's chilling dialogue with the 911 operator was echoed less than five years later, this time in Florida. And this time, the body lying on the grass was not an undocumented alien or burglar. It was an innocent teenager.

On the evening of Sunday, February 26, 2012, Trayvon Martin, a seventeen-year-old high school junior, walked to a nearby 7-Eleven store from the home where he was staying with his father. The home was in a racially mixed gated community in Sanford, Florida. The young man bought some iced tea and candy and started walking back in the rain.

At 7:11
P
.
M
., George Zimmerman, a resident of the neighborhood and the “neighborhood watch volunteer,” spotted Martin. Zimmerman, armed with a Kel-Tec 9mm pistol, called the police, as he had often done in the past. “Hey, we've had some break-ins in my neighborhood, and there's a real suspicious guy,” he told the 911 operator. “This guy looks like he's up to no good, or he's on drugs or something. It's raining, and he's just walking around looking about.”

At about the same time, Martin noticed that he was being followed. It happened that he was talking on the phone with his girlfriend, who advised him to run. He did. At 7:13, Zimmerman told the police operator, “S—, he's running.”

A beeping sound is heard at this point on the 911 tape. Zimmerman had opened the door of his vehicle. He went after Trayvon Martin on foot.

“Are you following him?” the operator asked Zimmerman.

“Yeah,” he replied.

“OK, we don't need you to do that,” the operator said, an eerie echo of the admonition given to Joe Horn in Texas.

Zimmerman spent a few more minutes on the phone. First he gave the operator directions about where he would meet a police officer. Then he seemed to change his mind.

“Actually, could you have him call me, and I'll tell him where I'm at?” he said.

At 7:15, four minutes after the call began, he hung up.

What happened next is a classic case of the only survivor to a shooting death claiming self-defense. What is known for sure is that within a few more minutes, George Zimmerman shot Trayvon Martin to death. Zimmerman claimed that he had acted in self-defense.
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The Sanford Police Department agreed. Sanford police chief Bill Lee claimed that his detectives did not have enough evidence to arrest Zimmerman in the face of his claim that he acted in self-defense. “Until we can establish probable cause to dispute that, we don't have the grounds to arrest him,” the chief said.
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