Stand Your Ground – Watch this video, and learn yourself something
Andrew Branca on German TV explaining Stand Your Ground laws.
As our readers know, Andrew Branca is THE expert on self-defense and Stand Your Ground law. He also has a great deal of knowledge about 2nd Amendment and gun control issues.
What you might not recall, is that Andrew originally was a commenter at Legal Insurrection. In the run up to the George Zimmerman Trial in June 2013, Andrew’s comments were so outstanding that I asked him to cover the trial.
Andrew’s daily, live trial coverage was outstanding, and he has been covering self-defense and 2nd Amendment issues for us since.
John Ekdahl, who writes at Ace of Spades HQ, tweeted about a video he just saw of Andrew being interviewed on German TV on February 28, 2014.
Hadn’t seen this. Why @LawSelfDefense is awesome and deserves a follow. https://t.co/L5FnmN5nGm
— John Ekdahl (@JohnEkdahl) June 21, 2015
We have posted the video before, but here it is again. A brilliant discussion of what Stand Your Ground is and is not, the Dunn and Zimmerman cases, and questionable statistics used to delegitimize SYG.
Andrew’s own website is The Law of Self Defense, where you can sign up for his seminars.
[Featured Image: Defense attorney Mark O’Mara at George Zimmerman trial demonstrating how Zimmerman’s head was slammed against the concrete sidewalk immediately prior to shooting Trayvon Martin.]
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Comments
Hey, that guy’s pretty good looking, as well as smart.
Wait, what?
Oh, shucks. 🙂
–Andrew, @LawSelfDefense
I thought you did a superlative job, Andrew.
It was patience, yet not condesending.
Tough to pull off, but you did it. Not bad at all, cowboy 😉
Happy Fathers day Andrew. And my the Lord have mercy on your sleep patterns in a few weeks. 🙂
Please let us know when the new member of the family arrives so we can congratulate you.
I’d never seen the video and it really is impressive.
Who’s that old, short guy in the blue shirt though…???
(Kidding, kidding…!!! Don’t shoot, hands up…!!!)
Yea, I seem to remember listening to him go on for a couple of hours once myself. Heck, I even paid him to preach at me, lol.
Great video. I really admire how you remain cool and rational in the face of the interviewer’s obvious unwillingness to hear or accept what you were saying.
Andrew,
If your fire extinguisher is 30 years old, it’s time for a replacement!
Branca is an awesome addition to Legal Insurrection. His Zimmerman coverage is the reason I started visiting the site.
Ditto. I had been an on-and-off casual lurker for a couple of years, but Branca’s coverage of the Zimmerman trial was when LI went on my regular daily rotation of “must-read blogs”.
Europeans (Euro-peons?) have no heritage of rugged individualism. That accounts for the bewilderment of the interviewer.
We need European collectivism like the Colonists needed it in the 1700s needed it.
It seems like the rocket-shot out of Europe that was the founding of the U.S. is well on its arc back.
The interviewer was very gracious, and even bought me a wonderful lunch.
Of course, he’s born of Europe, and is burdened with that fundamental lack of understanding of the dynamic of American demographics.
I’d happily be interviewed by him again. 🙂
–Andrew, @LawSelfDefense
Good work Andrew. Not only do you know the subject cold, but you ‘splain it very well. Not a common combination.
Andrew, you magnificent bastard: I read your book!
https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=AJXKVOxqkWM
“Of course, he’s born of Europe…”
Yeah, that came out several times, like when he mentioned “the law that give you the right to self-defense.” But there are many Americans who don’t understand that our right to self-defense doesn’t come from a law (as do none of our natural rights), the law merely recognizes the right.
The interviewer had that European smugness in his questioning — it is so very typical here in Europe for the know-it-alls to brandish their limited knowledge of America (gleaned from their own leftist media over the decades) as a weapon. Germans take a trip to New York and Las Vegas and then claim they know everything about the US. I call that kind of pervasive thinking their “DisneyWorld Degree”. Ha! Well done. Learned a lot in a short time.
Having worked in a number of countries for years in the high tech industry, I heartily concur with your observations and conclusions on Europeans’ general lack of self-awareness regarding their faulted understanding of Americans and America.
I almost always come away seeing an undercurrent of envy and jealousy in their projection of superiority.
America is envied by the rest of the planet.
Same thing in Japan.
I was living in Japan during the 1989 earthquake which cause a small section of the double-decker freeway to collapse near Oakland.
Japanese commentary on TV was often of the “American engineering is shoddy and not on a par with Japanese engineering these days.”
I was also living in Japan when the Kobe earthquake struck.
We had moved from Kobe to Fukuoka just a couple of years previously.
I used to ride my bicycle under the raised freeway that toppled over. The area we had lived in was devastated.
Unsurprisingly, there was no talk about shoddy Japanese engineering even though the freeway structural failures had been massive and many times worse than what occurred in California.
I was over there in the 1980s as well, during the Bubble economy years and would often have to endure drunken businessmen lecturing me on why American business and ingenuity was increasingly second rate.
So Florida is “kinda crazy, lots of tattoos and old people driving around” …
Well, sure, but that’s not the real crazy stuff; I vote for those coconuts carved to look like monkeys.
Bravo, Andrew! I find no fault in your take-down of this obviously biased “journalist” who continuously argued his biases instead of asking straightforward questions. You might give some thought as to how exactly to point out his bias in the course of similar interviews. Good job!
“They” will never get it. Cultist liberals are lemmings, bent on suicide, anxious to take everyone else with them.
To them, truth means nothing, facts mean nothing, reason means nothing. The only effort worth any energy is to keep them from polluting yet another generation.
Perhaps we should keep them out of teaching positions. You think?
#TheFineReport. England DOES have a great tradition of individualism which we passed on to the USA. English yeomen broke the feudal schackles 500 years before the rest of Europe. One tiny tiny remnant is Morris Dancing with Staves & Beer & the stroppy yokel. I’m surprised Blair didn’t try & ban that too. I would also remind you of Thomas Paine who came from Norfolk, England and his whole life was to my mind the ultimate expression of individualism. A real pain the backside to everyone who he came in contact with but he shaped history – including YOUR history. Just imagine if he had been able to write a blog……….
Yes … but unfortunately, ancient history. Olde England made a deliberate decision to go Socialist ’round about WW2, a process which has been documented by modern historians—Correlli Barnett comes to mind. And of course Blake’s “Green and Pleasant Land” has never really recovered, despite a bit of a “reset” courtesy of Margaret Thatcher.
Oswald Spengler’s somewhat flawed but nevertheless intensely interesting Decline of the West made a related conceptual error, one still being repeated today—the nexus of Western civilization is no longer Europe. It has moved elsewhere—as Spengler himself, of all people, should have recognized. As he argued, Europe was indeed well on its way to hell in a handbasket when he was writing in 1917, but the decline of Europe is not the same thing as the decline of the West. We can perhaps forgive Spengler for the error, as it wasn’t entirely obvious in his day. But a century later, there’s little excuse for Europe’s smug belief that it’s on some road which leads to anything but terminal decline, cultural senility, and ultimate disaster.
Somewhat gun related:
If you want to see some really lame journalistic jujitsu, look how this “journalist” twists a story ostensibly about a biased AP photo of a gun image pointed at Ted Cruz’s head into an attack on Cruz and Republicans.
Shameless.
Professor Reynolds at Instapundit wisely echoes Breitbart that politics is downstream from popular culture.
He says rich Republicans, e.g., Sheldon Adelson, should be buying up women’s magazines and the like to influence our culture.
I agree, but I think more importantly than women’s magazines, sites like Yahoo!, where millions go to check their email a number of times daily and are met with a deluge of progressive news outlet stories linked at Yahoo’s homepage, is a much bigger problem. The headlines are almost always biased leftward, owing to the fact that Yahoo! chooses almost exclusively liberal sources for their news feed.
Vox, Salon, and Huffington Post are ubiquitous (Yes, even the brand-spanking-new and almost universally derided Vox) on Yahoo, but nowhere to be seen is the decades old National Review.
Read it and weep:
https://www.yahoo.com/politics/ap-photo-of-gun-pointing-at-ted-cruzs-head-stirs-122164890756.html
https://www.yahoo.com/politics/ap-photo-of-gun-pointing-at-ted-cruzs-head-stirs-122164890756.html
Outstanding. Well done, sir, well done.
Great composure and very clear points with a determined adversarial interviewer. A clear win for the good guy. The interviewer will most likely bury this because he could not obscure the facts. Then again as is often the case they could edit his responses to put words in his mouth.
I thought the interviewer did an excellent job. He came at it from his point of view, necessarily, but he seemed to try to be fair and as objective as possible, asked intelligent questions and listened attentively to the answers. He showed an odd, to Americans, disregard for the the concept of self defense, but that apparently is common among Europeans (I think. Citation needed). He also has a European’s understandable perplexity at the high rate of murder and violent crime in the USA, but maybe he’ll have some understanding now that it isn’t attributable to law-abiding gun owners and justifiable self defense.
But… but… but… why do you have so many different laws concerning self defense? Could it be because we are a constitutional republic in which each state is allowed to arrive at its own solution to that which is not a federal matter? It is a concept so crazy that it just might work.