"A client savagely kills a man to protect a friend. A lawyer with secrets must prove it was justified. Attorney Nate Shepherd left a big firm to go out on his own. He sees nothing but opportunity when an out-of-town lawyer wants to hire him as local counsel on a high-profile murder case. Though his family worries that the case hits too close to home, Nate joins the defense team. When circumstances force him to take on a bigger role, Nate ignores his family’s fears and throws himself into his client’s defense. But as he digs deeper, every aspect of the case raises memories of a terrible event that Nate has tried his best to bury. Battling an aggressive prosecutor in court and a dogged reporter outside it, Nate fights to prove that his client’s brutal, bloody slaying of an evil victim was right. But when Nate’s own story is exposed, it threatens his client’s freedom ... and Nate’s carefully constructed life"--Amazon.com.
A history of America’s Stand Your Ground gun laws, from Reconstruction to Trayvon Martin After a young, white gunman killed twenty-six people at Sandy Hook Elementary School in Newtown, Connecticut, in December 2012, conservative legislators lamented that the tragedy could have been avoided if the schoolteachers had been armed and the classrooms equipped with guns. Similar claims were repeated in the aftermath of other recent shootings—after nine were killed in a church in Charleston, South Carolina, and in the aftermath of the massacre in the Pulse nightclub in Orlando, Florida. Despite inevitable questions about gun control, there is a sharp increase in firearm sales in the wake of every mass shooting. Yet, this kind of DIY-security activism predates the contemporary gun rights movement—and even the stand-your-ground self-defense laws adopted in thirty-three states, or the thirteen million civilians currently licensed to carry concealed firearms. As scholar Caroline Light proves, support for “good guys with guns” relies on the entrenched belief that certain “bad guys with guns” threaten us all. Stand Your Ground explores the development of the American right to self-defense and reveals how the original “duty to retreat” from threat was transformed into a selective right to kill. In her rigorous genealogy, Light traces white America’s attachment to racialized, lethal self-defense by unearthing its complex legal and social histories—from the original “castle laws” of the 1600s, which gave white men the right to protect their homes, to the brutal lynching of “criminal” Black bodies during the Jim Crow era and the radicalization of the NRA as it transitioned from a sporting organization to one of our country’s most powerful lobbying forces. In this convincing treatise on the United States’ unprecedented ascension as the world’s foremost stand-your-ground nation, Light exposes a history hidden in plain sight, showing how violent self-defense has been legalized for the most privileged and used as a weapon against the most vulnerable.
This book provides an up-to-date analysis of the development and deployment of 'non-lethal' weapons by police and military organizations. It reviews the key technologies, issues, and dangers, with particular attention to the development of drugs, lasers, microwaves, and acoustics as incapacitating weapons.
As mankind finds ever more impious ways to kill and maim, some look to non-lethal weapons as a fix. Brian Rappert discusses the technologies involved and the ethics of, for example blinding someone with a laser, leaving them blind forever, versus killing them outright.
Massad Ayoob draws from an additional three decades of experience to educate responsible firearms owners about the legal, ethical, and practical use of firearms in self defense-the armed citizens' rules of engagement. Deadly Force discusses: Understand the legal and ethical issues surrounding use of lethal force by private citizens Learn about the social and psychological issues surrounding use of lethal force in defense of self or others Preparation and mitigation--steps the responsible armed citizen can/should take "After forty years as a practicing criminal defense attorney, I know that what Mas says, teaches, and writes is the best, state-of-the-art knowledge you can get." ~Jeff Weiner, Former President, National Association of Criminal Defense Lawyers.
This devastating book illuminates America's gun culture -- its manufacturers, dealers, buffs, and propagandists -- but also offers concrete solutions to our national epidemic of death by firearm. "Touches on all aspects of the gun issue in this country. Gives great voice to that feeling...that something real must be done." --San Diego Union-Tribune "One of the most readable anti-gun treatises in years." --Washington Post Book World It begins with an account of a crime that is by now almost commonplace: on December 16, 1988, sixteen-year-old Nicholas Elliot walked into his Virginia high school with a Cobray M-11/9 and several hundred rounds of ammunition tucked in his backpack. By day's end, he had killed one teacher and severely wounded another. In Lethal Passage Erik Larson shows us how a disturbed teenager was able to buy a weapon advertised as "the gun that made the eighties roar." The result is a book that can -- and should -- save lives, and that has already become an essential text in the gun-control debate.
In this book, philosopher Seumas Miller analyzes the various moral justifications and moral responsibilities involved in the use of lethal force by police and military, relying on a distinctive normative teleological account of institutional roles. Miller covers a variety of urgent and morally complex topics, including police shootings of armed offenders, police shooting of suicide-bombers, targeted killing, autonomous weapons, humanitarian armed intervention, and civilian immunity. -- Provided by publisher.
These essays explore the increase in interest in non-lethal weapons. Such devices have meant that many armed forces and law enforcement agencies are able to act against undesirables without being accused of acting in an inhumane way. Topics for discussion in this volume include: an overview of the future of non-lethal weapons; emerging non-lethal technologies; military and police operational deployment of non-lethal weapons; a scientific evaluation of the effectiveness of non-lethal weapons; changes in international law needed to take into account non-lethal technologies; developments in genomics leading to new chemical incapacitants; implications for arms control and proliferation; the role of non-lethal weapons in human rights abuses; conceptual, theoretical and analytical perspectives on the nature of non-lethal weapons development.
