Chris Lane is the Australian college student and baseball player who was murdered while jogging along a street in Duncan, Oklahoma. The perpetrators were three teenagers who were bored and decided to murder someone just for fun. They saw Lane running by, got in a car, drove behind him and shot him in the back. Two of the bored teenagers, Chancey Luna and James Edwards, have been charged with first degree murder:

Their confederate Michael Jones is charged with being an accessory after the fact. Apparently Jones was driving the car, while Luna pulled the trigger on a .22 caliber revolver.

Chris Lane was in Duncan visiting his girlfriend. He went to college nearby:

Local police say that the murderers were on a spree and planned on killing someone else later the same afternoon. They readily confessed to committing the murder “just for fun.” It’s not as though they were hard to spot. On their Facebook pages, they went out of their way to advertise that they were criminals:

It may not be surprising that a 15-year-old and 16-year-old would have a shotgun and a revolver, but where in the world did they get all that cash? These appear to be $100 bills, again from Facebook. Evidently there was more criminality going on than has yet been reported:

I don’t suppose Barack Obama will be commenting on the case, nor will Eric Holder’s Department of Justice send employees to help organize marches on behalf of the deceased Mr. Lane. There is no political payoff for them. As everyone knows, black-on-white violent crime is eight times as frequent as white-on-black, so murders like this one are relatively common. Ho hum, as far as the Department of Justice and the liberal media are concerned. The smaller the problem, the more you need to focus on it, right?

Speaking of race, it is worth noting that the “N-word” figures in this case, too. If George Zimmerman had used it, he would have been convicted of murder. In this instance, it was James Edwards, in a tweet. It is ironic that, while the grisly details of the murder are related in full, the “N-word” is ostensibly so shocking that it must be blacked out:

This kind of thing helps to explain why so many people no longer take “N-word” hysteria seriously. And oh, by the way–shouldn’t a tweet like this one (there were others, too) be considered a clue, along with Facebook postings with illegally possessed firearms and wads of cash?

Some observers, trying to make political hay one way or another, are blaming the gun. If the goons had decided to run Mr. Lane down, would they have blamed the car? Probably not. An Australian politician is calling for a boycott of the United States until we “tighten up” on our gun laws. Of course, the murderers possessed their firearms illegally: they were all under the age of 18. This didn’t prevent them from repeatedly posing with the guns on Facebook. It would seem that the issue is one of enforcement, not legality. In that connection, it deserves to be more widely reported that under the Obama/Holder administration, federal firearms-related prosecutions are down by 40% compared with the George W. Bush administration. Actual crime has never been a priority for Obama’s politicized Justice Department.

The Chris Lane murder is not, of course, a “stand your ground” case, but it comes closer to that status than does the Zimmerman/Martin case. Chris Lane is a good example of an innocent person who is attacked while in a place where he has a right to be. Unfortunately, he was unarmed, and, in any event, he was shot in the back before he could have been aware of danger. But imagine a slightly different scenario: imagine that Lane had a permit to carry a handgun and jogged with a pocket pistol in his possession. Maybe a SIG Sauer P938, like mine. Imagine further that instead of shooting Lane in the back, the three teenagers had piled out of their car and approached him, armed with a revolver and also a knife or two. Imagine that one of the would-be murderers shot Lane and wounded him, or lunged at Lane and cut him with a knife.

What do you think the law should be? Should Lane be required to flee from the three cold-blooded would-be killers, hoping he can out-distance them before they shoot him again, or run him down with their car? Or should he be allowed to draw his P938 and defend himself?

If you chose the latter option, you are in favor of “stand your ground” laws.

UPDATE: Earlier today, a White House spokesman was asked whether President Obama has anything to say about Chris Lane’s murder, given the active interest he took in the Trayvon Martin case. His answer: “I’m not familiar with it, actually.”

No, of course not.

FURTHER UPDATE: It appears that race may have had something to do with this murder, unlike the Trayvon Martin case. These are tweets from the Twitter account of James Edwards, one of the murderers. “Woods” is a derogatory reference to white people:

These people are too evil to be a barometer of anything, but it is undeniably true that race relations have deteriorated during the Obama administration–in part, I think, because of the administration’s deliberately divisive actions and policies.