Bill Clinton: Time For Gun Control After Trayvon

Following hot on the heels of Vice President Joe Biden’s statements on NBC yesterday regarding Trayvon Martin, in which Biden called for a re-examination of gun laws, former President Clinton is seconding the motion. On ABC this morning, he explained:

to me, beyond the incredible personal tragedy- this young man was not armed, he clearly presented no threat to anybody’s life — is, the most important thing I’ve read was from the former police chief in Florida in the community, he was one of many law enforcement officers testifying against that Stand Your Ground law. And he said, you know this is going to create all kinds of problems. And it’s going to be almost impossible to prove what was in someone’s mind when a certain thing happened.

This is absolutely incorrect – if the facts are not out, how would Clinton know that Martin “clearly presented no threat to anybody’s life”? If George Zimmerman testifies truthfully that Martin was banging his head against the ground, that’s a relatively solid case of somebody presenting a threat to somebody else’s life. But Clinton wasn’t done:

[P]eople have always had a right to have a handgun in their home — to protect their homes — then we’ve seen this breathtaking expansion of the concealed weapons laws in America moving from the late 90′s into this decade, far — if you will — to the extreme that America had ever been on these.

And now the Stand Your Ground law. I think the law is going to create real problems because anyone can — anyone who doesn’t have a criminal background, anyone not prohibited by the Brady Bill and caught by the checks — can basically be a part of a neighborhood watch where they have a concealed weapon whether they had proper law enforcement training or not. And whether they’ve had any experience in conflict situations with people or not.

So I hope this will lead to a reappraisal of the Stand Your Ground laws, and I hope that the truth will come out and that the tragedy of this young man’s loss will not be in vain- it’s just terrible. Whatever the facts were — all these people trying to jump on him and talking about some mistake he made in his life — that’s irrelevant because unarmed person who was killed on the street by a gun. And so I hope justice will be done in this case but I hope that the larger justice that would somehow redeem a portion of this terrible loss.

The politicization of Trayvon Martin’s death comes to a sickening apex with these comments. If Zimmerman was protecting his life, then conceal and carry worked perfectly, as did the “Stand Your Ground” law; if not, then Zimmerman violated the law and will end up in prison. The law isn’t the issue. The behavior is. But the Democrats know when to sink their teeth into an anti-gun issue, and they’ve certainly done so here, without even waiting to hear all the evidence.