Blue grass and blood stains
In March 14, the Kentucky Senate Judiciary Committee voted to approve HB 5, the “Safer Kentucky Act.” The legislation will now head to the Senate floor for a vote, and it will almost certainly pass. The 78-page bill criminalizes homelessness—and decriminalizes the use of deadly force against individuals engaging in “unlawful camping.” Under this law, if a property owner believes an unhoused trespasser is attempting to commit a felony or attempting to “dispossess” them, they can shoot the homeless person.
Notably, The Bluegrass State found it necessary to make the language of existing related statutes more inclusive by changing his to his or her, and he to he or she. But shoot to kill. It’s fine.
The dispossess language is subsection a.
“[W]e are entering a time of vast restratification,” Chip Elliot wrote in Esquire in September 1981. “The United States is becoming more European…but it is a Europe of a different century. We are moving toward a culture in which we’ll have cooks, chauffeurs, maids, carpenters, brewmasters, vintners, industrialists, bankers, machinists, hat makers, shopkeepers, and kings and queens of a sort. And, of course, we’ll also have highwaymen, cutthroats, and thieves.” A time when people “wore swords and pistols whenever they went anywhere.”
1981. In response to a commentary on the shooting of John Lennon. What was “the social structure in America of the past three or four decades … has collapsed,” Elliot wrote over 40 years ago. It’s gotten worse since then, and since the widespread access to semiauto versions of military assault rifles. Oh, and the election of the nation’s first black president.
Ironic that these medieval “stand your ground” laws and their variants are a product of the ALEC-promoted “Castle Doctrine.”
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