There are few laws on the books more important for the average citizen than Stand Your Ground statutes. These laws remove even the hint that someone faced with an armed attacker should have to risk their life further to try and get away from the scumbag and can instead respond with lethal force. It makes it possible for people to act in defense of themselves or others without having to delay and worry about whether they’ll be prosecuted or not.

Now, a South Florida lawmaker has introduced a bill to repeal the law and at least one so-called journalist is ecstatic about it.

Florida’s “Stand Your Ground” law, which lets you shoot anyone who threatens your life, even if you provoked the encounter, is so sh*tty it’s been clearly tied to a huge uptick in murders since it was passed in 2005. It sucks so bad it let George Zimmerman kill 17-year-old Trayvon Martin in Sanford, Florida, in 2012. It sucks so bad that the incident basically created the modern Black Lives Matter movement. Yet Florida legislators last year voted to strengthen the law and make it easier for people to kill others and invoke Stand Your Ground protections. But today, Hollywood, Florida Rep. Shevrin Jones formally introduced a bill to repeal the state’s Stand Your Ground law. In the state’s Republican-dominated, National Rifle Association-worshipping Legislature, the bill faces a steep uphill battle. Regardless, Jones has filed HB 6073 in an attempt to right what he says is a law that encourages Floridians to murder one another.

Well, now. That’s not a gross misrepresentation of anything, now is it?

I mean, let’s completely not absolve Zimmerman of his sins such as being an idiot who decided to ignore the police dispatcher and follow Martin, nothing he did was illegal nor did it justify Martin trying to turn a concrete sidewalk into dust with Zimmerman’s head. The law wasn’t actually invoked during Zimmerman’s trial because even had their been a duty to retreat, that’s kind of hard to do when your attacker is right on top of you, bashing your skull into the sidewalk.

Yet anti-gun zealots like this don’t care about the facts or the reality involved here. They ignore that the new law seems designed to purposefully prevent the railroad job George Zimmerman experienced. Had they not pushed for prosecutors to put him on trial despite mountains of evidence that Zimmerman shouldn’t have been tried, such a law would likely never have been considered.

None of that matters, because they don’t think people should have a right to defend themselves. Not really.

If they did, they wouldn’t expect there to be a duty to retreat from an attack. There wouldn’t be any push to create an environment that would instill fear of repercussions into those who may be able to respond to an attack, thus making it more likely they would get hurt.

Trayvon Martin was a thug. He might have been so much more than that, but he was still a thug. Only a thug would respond to someone following them with a violent assault that, had it not been for Zimmerman being armed, a man dead with his skull bashed in.

Quit trying to lionize him as some kind of martyr, and stop trying to create laws that would have kept him alive. All you’re going to do is create more dead bodies.